18 November 2021

Vanessa Bolosier’s food memories – from her sister’s cornmeal porridge, to her nemesis, pineapple upside-down cake

18 November 2021

Vanessa Bolosier’s chat and recipes are equally fun, enthusiastic and bold – and her cookbook Sunshine Kitchen captures all of that, as well as a lot of heart and a lot of rum.

These are just some of her most defining food memories…

Her earliest memory of food is…

“My sister making me cornmeal porridge – so weird. My sister is six years older than me. At night she’s always had a bit of insomnia, so she would wake me up to come down to the kitchen, and she’d make cornmeal porridge and put loads of condensed milk in it and would share a bowl with me.”

TODO: define component type factbox

Bolosier’s worst kitchen disaster has to be…

“Upside-down pineapple cake is a very, very easy recipe but somehow, if I mess up the caramel, the whole cake goes pear-shaped. I don’t know, if I’m not in a caramel making mood, it goes pear-shaped – like big cakes with massive holes in it. Or my coconut flan just being completely runny and lumpy – a flan is not supposed to be lumpy.

“I’ve had loads! I think it’s a mood. I personally need to be in a specific mood when I make these dishes. The food that I have grown up with and the food that I’m so passionate about, sometimes it can go really well. Because you need to be in the spirit for it.”

Her culinary highlight…

“I went to a restaurant in Guadeloupe – I think it’s closed now – and they made a starter. It was a plantain and foie gras millefeuille. Oh, my goodness, that was like wow, and I’ve never had it again because the restaurant closed. I tried to do it at home and it was never the same. Like, shout out to whoever did that; it was delicious. I mean, I love plantain but again, you know, people only know plantain when they’re fried, but in Martinique and Guadeloupe we’ve got so many ways of using them. And this guy made a really sophisticated starter.”

Sunshine Kitchen: Delicious Creole Recipes From The Heart Of The Caribbean by Vanessa Bolosier is published by Pavilion Books, priced £12.99. Photography by Clare Winfield. Available now.

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