LEFT: Phoebe Anderson didn't grow up preserving lemons, she's taught herself. RIGHT: Kate Littlejohn loves the sense of family tradition. Photo: Eddie Jim
Annie Rigg, the English food writer and former tour chef for the Rolling Stones and Tom Jones, reckons she can whip up a tray of brownies to take to a dinner party faster than she can nip down to the bottle shop for a drop of vino. I want to ask if this means she lives a long way from civilisation or perhaps prefers drinking other people's wine, but I digress.
Rigg routinely presents edible gifts to family and friends to celebrate almost anything: birthdays, housewarmings, Easter, Mother's and Father's days, weddings, Christmas, hens' nights and Chinese New Year.
Not surprisingly for a woman who's just written a book titled Gifts From the Kitchen: 100 Irresistible Homemade Presents for Every Occasion, her to-do list for Christmas is formidable. She's already working on large quantities of chutney, sloe vodka (a small, plum-like berry that grows wild in English hedgerows), Seville orange marmalade, biscotti and panettone.
That's all well and good. I understand the joys of making and giving as well as the next person. Like many children of the '70s I grew up helping Mum and Nanna sterilise jars and label countless batches of jam and chutney on the old Laminex kitchen table. I've recently introduced my children to the joys of raw pastry and uncooked plum pudding mixture. But with the commercial palaver of Christmas already descending, the diary uncomfortably full and the knowledge that it's only a matter of time before insufferable show-offs start asking how the Christmas shopping's going, so they can casually mention how they've already finished — why would any sane person take on edible Christmas gift-giving before reaching retirement age? And is it wise to seek advice on the topic from a woman who makes her own fortune cookies?
Fortunately, Rigg turns out to be a mere mortal who happens to love cooking for others. She recalls a childhood spent in the kitchen and says she received her first cookbook at the age of eight: Fay Maschler's Cooking is a Game You Can Eat. She's been baking and making sweets since. Unlike some kids, for whom scoffing as much of their handiwork as possible is the whole point of cooking, Rigg enjoyed giving away her fare right from the start.
"I used to make peppermint creams at Christmas — a not particularly delicious [combination of] icing sugar, egg white and peppermint extract," she says with a laugh. "I actually used to make them as gifts for people and I'd sit down and watch them try to eat them." She's still at it, though in the interim has squeezed in a stint at London's prestigious cooking school Leiths and a career spent cooking for top-notch catering companies, delis and bands, food styling, freelance writing for Sain-sbury's Magazine, Delicious and Country Living, among others, and writing a series of cookbooks.
For Rigg, giving food as presents throughout the year comes naturally. But, she says, in the post-GFC world, in Britain and elsewhere, it's an idea whose time has come. "It seems like the right time — everyone's a bit more thrifty now days, more homespun, if that's the right word, wanting to do things that are more heartfelt," she says. "It's a nostalgic thing as well, going back to the kitchen and making sweets and preserving, and baking's absolutely huge at the moment."
With a resurgence of interest in beautiful objects that are handcrafted and customised, maybe there's also a reaction against one-size-fits-all mass consumerism at play?
"I think people have got bored with going to the shops and buying the same old thing," she says. "Gifts are slightly more creative than general cooking and it gives you the opportunity to make packaging beautiful, make pretty labels, handwrite the label — get the pen out for a change!"
Those who don't relish spending the days before Christmas churning out fresh batches of Turkish delight or stollen will be pleased to note Rigg's new book is full of recipes that can be made weeks or even months in advance.
