Interview with Skye McAlpine | A Table for Friends

Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She’s just a home cook in New York city, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Skye McAlpine: Hi, I’m Skye McAlpine and I’m a cookery writer. My latest cookbook is A Table for Friends.

Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book. You can join me over on Instagram. And if you like this podcast, please be sure to tell a friend I’m always looking for new people to enjoy cookery by the book. Now on with the show, Katie Amour Taylor of the Katie Considers blog wrote “You are the most perfect person to turn to if you’re looking for inspiration in the kitchen or setting our dining room table.” I could not agree more. So when you were six, you and your family moved from London where you were born to Venice. One special thing about this cookbook is it’s your take on Italian food combined with your husband’s Australian Italian heritage. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Skye McAlpine: Yes. Um, well, so for me these are all recipes that I make often, you know, that are really part of our family life. And, it’s called A Table for Friends because for me a huge part of that is our friends who come and join us for Sunday lunch or supper on a Tuesday, whatever it is, are an extension of that family. So it really is kind of food to share with the people that you love. I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently, and I think food…We kind of all tend to speak in a language of food. There are kind of certain dishes and ingredients and ways of cooking, things that we grow up with and that I guess our families give us as children. As teenagers, as young adults become part of our language. And then as we make our connections and our own life choices and maybe go on our own travels or our own experience as we add to that language and it becomes richer for it. And it evolves a bit like kind of actual language. So for me, it’s a lot of Italian influences. A lot of, in many ways, Venetian influences a lot of the food that I kind of grew up eating or that I might have kind of tweaked the recipes a little bit or acquired this recipe. Maybe I was on a holiday somewhere and had a dish that was particularly amazing and came home and recreated it. And then that became part of a repertoire of the language of food that I use regularly and a big influence of course has been my husband. We first met first met at University so we were both 18. So we’d been together a long time and he is of Italian heritage, his Grandparents immigrated from Sicily to Australia after the second world war, like a lot of Italians and then left in Australia, which is where his Father was born and where he was born. So a lot of the dishes like favorites of his, like there are a couple of recipes for meringue cakes, which are sort of halfway between a pavlova, which is like his favorite thing in the world to eat and a kind of cake. Cause I kind of make like these tiers, like circles of meringue and piled them up one, two, three on top of each other and layer whipped cream and maybe fresh fruit or lemon card or sugared chestnuts or something like that between each layer. So the kind of influences from my own family and from my new family. If that makes sense,

Suzy Chase: I love that you don’t call yourself a chef. You call yourself a self-taught cook. Tell me about your obsession with cookbooks.

Skye McAlpine: Oh my god, my favorite thing. It’s borderline unhealthy for me that almost like children’s books, but for adults, I know that seems mad, but nothing bad ever happens in a cookbook, only good things are in cookbooks, Apple pie and ice cream and all sorts of amazing happy things happen, But I’m hugely fascinated by food. I’m a very, very greedy person. I love eating. I love the rituals that surround the meal and the food, but I’ve also endlessly fascinated by the stories behind food. And I think people so many authors and cooks tell those stories so beautifully in cookbooks. Literally my dream afternoon is to kind of snuggle up in bed with a mug of hot chocolate or tea and a pile of cookbooks and just kind of leaf through them and dip in and out and read the stories and plan what we’re going to eat tomorrow. And literally that would be the dream for me.

Suzy Chase: You wrote A Table for Friends just as you cook. How should we be using this cookbook?

Skye McAlpine: I kind of divided each chapter by where you cook the food. So recipes that you just throw together where there’s no actual cooking in a traditional sense of what’s involved. It’s more about assembling ingredients and tossing them together and bringing them together to make something delicious recipes that you could cook the hob and recipes that you cook in the oven. And then I also found that when I plan a menu, I basically have like a one star dish and that could be like a really scrumptious frittata. Or it could be like a macaroni pie, you know, like puff pastry, filled with pasta or something, but it’s like one big central star dish. And then I do a couple of like sides to go with that, which is usually a salad. If a main dish is meat or fish, I might do some potatoes or couscous or something like that, go with it or roasted fruit or what have you. And then I’ll always do a pudding because I just kind of like love a pudding. So the other kind of division and the book or the other theme in the book is instead of doing kind of starters and then main courses, et cetera, I just got stars, sides, sweets. And at the end I’ve got a little chapter called extras, which are sort of for when you want to go that extra mile, you know, you feel like making your own mayonnaise which is so good and so easy to do, but so unbelievably delicious to eat, or you might want to bake your own loaf of bread to go with lunch. They’re not essential to the meal, but it’s that little extra special touch.

Suzy Chase: So speaking of pudding, you don’t do starters or the kind of fiddly dishes you might find in a restaurant, but you do do pudding on an extravagant scale. As an American I have a different pudding experience from you. Can you describe the pudding that you make?

Skye McAlpine: Well pudding is… I think it’s like an English colloquialism pudding for me is basically like the sweet or the dessert. So it could be anything from ice cream to a meringue and whipped cream cake to apple pie. I do this one that I absolutely love that’s in the book. It’s like one of my absolute favorite recipes. It’s kind of like really custardy apple filling, and then it’s got like buttery sugar crumble on top. So pudding for me is that, but I think in the U.S. pudding is more like a sort of creamy dessert isn’t it like a sort of set jelly.

Suzy Chase: Yeah.

Skye McAlpine: Which I also am a big fan of.

Suzy Chase: So I watched your Vogue video with Hamish Bowles and he asked you, how do you chop garlic? I laughed so hard. He is just so darling

Skye McAlpine: He’s wonderful. But he, it was quite fun because we filmed that video at the very, very start of lockdown and kind of within weeks, he turned into this kind of Cordon Bleu chef. I mean, he was texting me photos of what he was cooking and it looked amazing. It was kind of like Duck à l’orange homemade bread and I basically wants to move in and live with him so that I could eat his food.

Suzy Chase: You know, he lives a few blocks from me and I’m always looking to run into him to be like, Hey Hamish, it’s Suzy! He doesn’t know me, but I would love to know him. Um, so your first step in planning a lunch, dinner or party is planning the menu. What goes into that?

Skye McAlpine: You know, I’m all about making your life easier and simpler. I think the simpler, you can make the business of cooking for more likely you are to do it. So when I’m planning the menu, I obviously thinking about factors like how many people have I got coming over? This is less relevant today, but you know, am I cooking for 20 people? In which case, I want to go for a dish that is very low maintenance, not something that involves a lot of like fine chopping or complicated timings or cooking in batches or anything like that. I just go for something really simple that I can pop in the oven or prepare in advance and leave as is. how much time have I got. If I don’t have much time, then really paring everything back and thinking, you know what, let’s just do really good shop-bought ice cream for pudding from the gelateria with cones. That’s like, everyone’s favorite thing to eat or something really, really quick and simple. Like one of my other favorite recipes in the book, is frozen berries, which just like a melted white chocolate and saffron sauce. And you literally just melt white chocolate and some cream together in a pan with a little bit of saffron. So it goes as kind of gorgeous, like sunny, yellow. And then after dinner, you sort of put a bowl of frozen berries in the middle of the table and pour the hot sauce over it. And it kind of goes like sticky and fudgy. It’s completely delicious, but literally probably take 10 minutes to make if that, so that’s the kind of dish that I will really do if it’s a busy day. If I’ve got a lot of work, if I just, for whatever reason don’t have the time or the inclination to cook, I kind of choose dishes like that. Again, it goes back to this thing of like thinking about my kitchen. So again, if I’m cooking for a lot of people, I’ll think about things like oven space. And if I am doing something that involves roasting in the oven, I might just quickly try and put the roasting trays that I’m going to use and try and fit them all in the oven as I’m planning my menu, just check that it will all fit rather than kind of going out, doing all the shopping, setting my heart on that menu and then just as I’m starting to realizing that I can’t squeeze it all in the oven, that’s when it becomes stressful. When you have moments like that.

Suzy Chase: Oh I hate that.

Skye McAlpine: Yeah, me too. I’ve definitely been there. Many times.

Suzy Chase: You’re also a huge fan of dishes that can be made well in advance.

Skye McAlpine: Yes, that for me is the absolute dream. I love that because I really enjoy cooking. I’m really happy, like puttering around in the kitchen with an audiobook, listening to a podcast or just kind of lost in my own thoughts. And you know, I’m happy cooking. What’s not fun is when you’re cooking and you’ve got other things that you need to be doing or you’re racing against the clock or there’s this added element of stress. So I think if you can prepare in advance, it just makes any party or any meal that you’re cooking so much more relaxing because you know, that that bit is done. If you’ve made your frittata ahead of time, like I do this, it’s in the book like four or five different kinds of cheese and spinach frittata , but I might assemble all those ingredients two, three days before actually cooking it. And then I can cover it with some clingfilm, keep it in the fridge or if I freeze it. And then when the evening comes, all I need to do is just pop it in the oven. And that just makes it also much more relaxing.

Suzy Chase: So your father, Lord McAlpine had a cupboard of curiosities as a child. Did you take after him with your love of objects and art?

Skye McAlpine: I guess so, I mean, both of my parents are very, you know, my father was and my mother still as very visual people, they both have a very strong sense of style and definitely growing up in Venice, which has got to be one of the prettiest cities in the world I’m always very aware of aesthetics in a way, and of the fact that a few small beautiful touches in your world, even if that’s something as simple as a bowl of sunny looking lemons or, you know, at this time of year, like a lovely big bowl of pomegranates or something like that sitting on your kitchen table, these small beautiful elements can transform your day and your mood. And over time it makes your life better to be surrounded by beautiful things. So that’s definitely been, I think, a big influence for me since childhood. I feel very lucky to have grown up with parents who kind of taught me to value beauty around you and value sort of taking the time to create it, but also the ability to sort of see it in smaller, more unusual things, whether that’s a bowl of huge red onions or a beautiful painting.

Suzy Chase: So talk a little bit about setting the scene where the foundation of a good meal is the table.

Skye McAlpine: I love a table that feels really welcoming, and I think it’s such a fabulous thing. If you feels almost like you’re having a party or it’s a special occasion and actually it’s just supper on a Tuesday night, but that just makes that Tuesday, that makes that whole week more memorable and more special. You know, I love decorating the table. I, I use a lot of candles, everyone and everything, I think looks more glamorous by candle light. So lots of candles and flowers when they’re in season, I think obviously so beautiful, but also even just using fruit, you know, grapes and plums and cherries and peaches in the summer months and apples and pears and the autumnal months just sort of big bowls of them on the table. It looks so beautiful and so inviting. And it does create this sense of relaxedness. What I love about that is like, you’ll all have dinner and then you’ll find that sort of after dinner that bit where you’re kind of lingering on around the table, relaxing, maybe having a coffee or a tea chatting people kind of help themselves to the decorations and eat a little bit of a plum and have a cherry or two. And it’s just really relaxed and fun. And I also find kind of bluntly put decorating with fruit is not so wasteful or expensive. Like I love flowers, but can often be quite extravagant, whereas fruit is more affordable. And also once I’ve used it as decoration, I will, we eat it either in cooking, I might make a pie or apple crumble or whatever it is. I’m a big fan of that for the table. And, you know, small touches like actual cotton or linen napkins, I think is a small touch that can feel so luxurious. It sort of sets the tone for the meal to be a special meal, even actually you’ve just ordered take out putting a few candles on the table, maybe a jug of flowers. What have you, laying the table nicely just makes the difference and elevates the food.

Suzy Chase: I adore how you mix and match China. Are they all family pieces?

Skye McAlpine: No, I mean, some are bits and bobs that I’ve inherited from my parents or that they kind of had lost interest in and I scooped up like a magpie, but many a pieces that I find in charity shops or on eBay. Second hand, some are new pieces. I just worked recently on a tableware collection with Anthropologie. So I’ve got a few of these pieces dotted and that it’s a mix of old and new. A lot of old and like you said, completely mix matched. I kind of love that I think it makes the table feel more colorful. It makes it feel a bit more relaxed because I think you want beautiful plates. You want it to feel like a special occasion again, but you never want to set as a table where everything is completely perfect and precious and so perfect and precious you’re kind of sitting there thinking, Oh God, I don’t want to drink from my water glass in case I break it. So I think that by mixing and matching things, you do kind of add a feeling of relaxedness and casualness to the meal otherwise it can be a little sad to buy a beautiful plate and then never get to use it because it’s too precious.

Suzy Chase: So I bought your teal and white splatter serving bowl from your Anthropologie collection. And I cannot wait for it to be delivered either today or tomorrow. I’m so excited.

Speaker 2: I hope you enjoy it. Yeah, that was a really fun collaboration to work on because you know, I love, china and plates and all things table top. But also part of what I feel is my experience pragmatically, as someone who sort of taught themselves to cook, is that in terms of making the table look beautiful is it’s a lot about the plates. Cause a lot of really good foods, if we’re being really honest, it’s quite brown. It often tastes delicious, but it maybe it doesn’t look so appetizing. But I think if you put it on a colorful, beautiful plate that transforms everything. So it was really fun to kind of create some of my dream pieces.

Suzy Chase: So over the weekend, I made your recipes for Burrata with Preserved Lemons, Mint and Chili on page 24 and Strawberries in Lemony Syrup on page one 92, these are two quick and very, very easy showstoppers. Can you describe them?

Skye McAlpine: Yes You’ve chosen two of my favorites, the burrata is basically you just buy burrata, which is, as you know, it’s an Italian cheese, a bit like mozzarella, but the middle is kind of buttery so it’s sort of creamier even than mozzarella and you can buy it definitely in England, you can buy at most supermarkets now definitely in Italian delicatessens, if not, if you can’t find burrata just a really good mozzarella is delicious as well. And then I just get preserved lemons and just slice them up thinly and sprinkle on top maybe have some chili flakes, a bit of mint, or you could use thyme, whatever you like. A drizzle of olive oil and literally that is it, but it’s so yummy and fresh and creamy. And this is kind of what I love about it is it’s again, this notion of throwing things together, this style of cooking, but it doesn’t involve pots and pans. If you’re working from a galley kitchen or a student kitchen or your oven is broken or whatever it is, you can still create something that you really want to eat. That you’re really proud to serve to the people that you love, but that doesn’t actually involve any cooking. And similarly, the strawberries and lemon syrup, what I find is you just slice them in half and then squeeze over them a little bit of lemon juice and sprinkle over a bit of sugar and let it sit for maybe half an hour. So you might do that. And then you go and have your lunch or dinner. And then by the time you come around to eating, then they’ve kind of macerated and these almost pastel pink syrupy juices have formed and it’s just so delicious

Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night’s Dinner where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.

Skye McAlpine: Oh it’s so delicious. Again, it was one of these things that didn’t look very appetizing, but it was a really cold day yesterday here and I was really craving like comforting warming, nourishing food. So I made the soup with lentils and lemon and spinach. It was just what I felt like heating last night. It was really, really good.

Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Skye McAlpine: SkyeMcAlpine.com will soon becoming to the internet hopefully when I get my act together and mostly I’m on Instagram, which is @SkyeMcAlpine, and that’s where I share most of my things that I have to share recipes and snapshots from daily life and points of inspiration.

Suzy Chase: Well this has been so lovely. Thanks Skye for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Skye McAlpine: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been such a joy chatting with you.

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