Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S5 Ep13: Bookshelfie: Noor Murad - live from Wilderness Festival

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

For another very special bookshelfie episode, Noor Murad chats to Vick live from Wilderness Festival. The unbelievably talented Bahraini-British chef discusses the contradictions between private and public life in a Muslim country. After gaining work experience in Germany and New York, plus studying at the Culinary Institute of America for three years, Noor Murad eventually met Israeli chef Yottam Ottolenghi while working at the Spitalfields deli. She’s now the Head of the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen, and has co-written two books with Yottam and the Test Kitchen team – Shelf Love and the upcoming Extra Good Things. Noors book choices are:  ** Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi ** Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood ** The Outsiders by S E Hinton ** The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak ** Three Women by Lisa Taddeo Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season five of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Podcast. Every week, Vick will be joined by another inspirational woman to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and they continue to champion the very best books written by women. Don’t want to miss the rest of Season Five? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

At Harrison Healthcare, we know that lasting health starts with personalized care. We're not just a clinic. We're your partner in prevention, helping you achieve your health and longevity goals. Our expert team combines evidence-based medicine with the compassionate, unhurried care you and your family deserve. Today and for many years to come. When it comes to your health, you shouldn't settle for anything less than exceptional. Visit harrisonhealthcare.ca.ca.com. Tomorrow's Feast. Talk me through it. What we're saying? Bahrain's really unique because it has a mixture of three different cultures. It's Persian and Arabic and Indian flavors all kind of combined. And then the dessert I'm very proud of. It's a take on an eaten mess, but I called it the Arab mess. And there's like dates and rice and everything in there. An eaten mess. Otherwise known as our current government. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Or is this not the audience for that? I don't know.

With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Vic Hope and I'm your host for Season 5 of the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast. The podcast that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction to share the five books by women that have shaped them. We have a phenomenal lineup of guests for 2022, and I guarantee you'll be taking away plenty of reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to today's very special bookshelfy episode, live from Wilderness Festival. Wilderness, can I hear you? You sound great, you look great. I'm sitting on a chaise long. Thank you Tucker over there. This is very nice. I'm Vic Hope and I am joined by the insanely talented Bahraini British chef, Noir Murad. Neur is head of the Otolengi Test Kitchen and co-author of Otolengi Test Kitchen.

kitchen shelf love, as well as a second test kitchen book coming out this September. No, we're not just here to talk about food, although that sounds amazing. We're going to talk about books, and you were described just before as a storyteller, and in so many ways that is true, because you tell stories about food and through food. Yeah, completely. I think every kind of dish that comes to you has the story behind it. If you've ever cooked an an ocelengi meal, know that there's a chef behind that dish that probably tested it a thousand sometimes to get the recipe right and to land onto your tables. And it comes with their own influences and their own cultures and their own personalities

that is put into that dish. And when it comes to books of all genres, have you always been a big reader? What kind of novels do you gravitate towards? Yeah, I do. I love, I mean, I'm kind of a mixed bag, whatever, kind of, I'll read the back and think, oh, that sounds like a really cool story. I do like crime fiction and stuff, but I haven't put that in the list. No, there's no crime.

There's also actually, weirdly, there's no food writing. There's no food writing in there. Yeah, I never, outside of work, I don't want to think about food. Sorry. I'm just like, I'm done. I just want to go home and have a soup or a cheese sandwich or something very, very simple. So, yeah, my food life is within my working hours. I used to work in a kitchen and the chefs, they made these incredible dishes.

And yet, when they got home, they were always like, yeah, it's just Cheerios for me, to be honest. You need something outside of work, you need to kind of escape. And that's what reading is. It's escapism. Absolutely. And everyone deserves that escape. I think over the last few years, especially, when we've been confined to our four walls, to be able to escape to so many other worlds is a privilege, and it's something everyone deserves.

So let's start with your first bookshelfy book, which is Persepolis by Marjan Satrappy. This is both a graphic novel and an incredibly personal artistic statement. Persepolis is a visual memoir of the author's experiences growing up as a spirited young girl in revolutionary and wartime Iran. It's a beautiful story full of tragedy and humor which mixes the intimate with the political to shattering effect. What did you love about this book? In what way did you identify with it? I love that the whole book is actually written in the style of a comic book, which is really cool. But what I really gravitate towards is that Marjan is an Iranian Middle Eastern lady who kind of comes from quite a liberal leftist family and grew up in the Islamic Revolution.

It's kind of her struggles grappling with that. It was in 1970s Iran, so it's really when the Islamic extremists took over and Iran changed into what it was, from what it was, into what it is today. So I grew up in Bahrain, and my grandma especially, she loves Iran and everything about it. And the culture, Bahrain's food is so much on from Iran, so that's also something that relates us to them. I always heard, like, my grandma and my grandma's sisters be like, Iran used to be a completely different world before. Everybody used to wear mini skirts. And I was like, what the hell is that? You know, and it really is like that.

So they kind of went there when it was a different culture. and I kind of understand how everything Margie writes about I completely relate to because she's a Middle Eastern woman who grew up in Iran but she's quite liberal. Just like me, I came from quite a middle class liberal family but also my mom is English. So it's kind of having these Western ideals in an Eastern country and as like the coming of age of a woman,

it can be really quite hard. When we first got into talk about, with you about doing this podcast and we talked to a little bit about this book. You picked it and said that it explores the contradictions between private and public life in a Muslim country. Can you tell us a little bit more about this from your perspective, from your experience growing up? Yeah, I think from Bahrain, I'll say you from Bahrain's perspective. I think a lot of the ideals that are placed on society are not really so linked to Islam.

It's more like societal expectations of how you should be and how you should act. And, you know, as a woman, you know, you can't have a boyfriend, you can't like see someone before marriage and all these things that still exist today. Whereas behind closed walls, you might come from a family that drinks or, you know, my mom used to go to the supermarket and she used to like waltz into the non-Muslim section of the supermarket. She'd be like, I am buying pork sausages today. And we would have that. But like, I would be horrified as a kid because I was like, I cannot go to school and let anyone know that I had bangers and mouse

for dinner last night. Like, it cannot happen. So it was like these two completely different contradictory life, like the one that I was at school and then the home that I was living in. So your mum is British. Yeah, my mom's. And happy to eat pork sausages.

Yeah, yeah. My dad too. He loves it. He's Arab. Right. And so when you were going to school, you were embarrassed about the British. side of your identity and cuisine. I completely was. I felt like, you know, I went to like quite a more modern school, but like still like it was

all Arabs and still like Islam is part of school, the curriculum, right? So we done fast, we ate pork and my dad drank. And I remember thinking like, why can't we just be like everyone else? Why do we have to be like you, like this family? Why do we have to eat the pork sausage? I know. I have to drink the drinks. And then also when there was forks sausages, my willpower was like so not strong.

I was like, oh my gosh, this is too good. Like I need to eat it. Yeah. We're going to move on now to your next bookshelfy book, which is Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. This book sees Atwood at her best, let's face it. It's witty, it's dark, it's gloriously inventive. It's set in a world of ecological devastation where the results of horrific scientific experiments threaten any survivors. In this world, a man once named Jimmy lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, and now calls himself snowman.

The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, haunts him. And the green-eyed children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility. Tell us about this book. When did you first read it? So this was a book that we read in high school, actually, and I was a bit of a nerd at school, so I always wanted to be, you know, just learning and reading as much as I could. And it was my first kind of discovery of science fiction books, which usually I don't gravitate towards. And I really loved Margaret Atwood's book

because she's quite dark. Like some of the things she writes about are just, yeah, very dark and dystopian. And I just really love this book because Snowman, who, you know, he wakes up in this apocalyptic world where there was a huge pandemic that wiped out the population. And then he went back, And then the book keeps going back to his previous life as Jimmy

and how he existed before the apocalypse. And it just kind of, it's like very wild, imaginative ways of describing the world by Margaret Atwood. But like a lot of the things kind of, you're like, oh, actually, you know, and it talks about scientific advancement and how it just went beyond, just beyond humanity almost. Like they have a Bliss Plus pill, which is such a crazy. And the Bliss Plus Pill was the thing that caused the apocalypse in the first place.

But it's such a crazy thing. It's this whole thing that you can be the happiest, most good-looking, most amazing person with the best libido or something, right? But then in exchange, you can't have children. And it was such a crazy concept. Yeah, the Bliss Plus Pill, it had four functions. So first of all, it protected against all sexually transmitted diseases. ideal. Second, it provided an unlimited libido.

Ideal. Third, it prolonged youth. Possibly ideal. And fourth, it sterilized the user so they would no longer be capable of producing children. Was this something that you discussed when you read this as a teenager with your friends? I think, I mean, I discussed it in Bahrain with a bunch of Middle Eastern people. Everyone's like, absolutely not. This is like a human right. That's what we're put on earth to do. You know, you don't really have the other side where people are like, well, maybe you don't really want that, or maybe, you know, it's a good way of controlling population. So everybody was kind of just like they found the whole concept just totally bizarre. But I think it says a lot about humankind, if that's what you seek to be, just to hold on to your youth and your beauty and give up something that is so intrinsic.

reading this as a teenager and sort of delving into navigating the choices that we make that will impact us for the rest of our lives. What kind of teenager were you? What kind of choices were you making? I was all, I think as a teenager, I was very much into like, yeah, humanity and feeling and the arts and these kind of things.

I was very much a creative. I loved, obviously, cooking, and I loved my drama classes and all these kind of things. So for me, I was very much on the character, Jimmy, in Oryx and Craig who kind of represented all of that side of things and not so much on the scientific advancement.

How did you get into food? How did I get into food? I think I was one of those kids who changed your mind every five seconds. So first I wanted to be an archaeologist, then I wanted to be a physiotherapist, and then I was like, oh, I like cooking. And then I told my dad,

who was like a Middle Eastern father, and he was like, what? He was like, no, you can be a doctor or a lawyer. And then he was like, oh, I'll get her a summer job. She'll hate it. So that's what I did. I got a summer job when I was 16, and I loved it because it was in a very controlled environment that I grew up in.

It was the most chaotic thing I'd ever seen, and I was so hooked. And I was like, I want to do that. That's how I got into food. Never looked back. What age were you when you left Bahrain then? So I left Bahrain when I was 27. Right. I had never lived in England, even though my mom is English, my experience of England was only in the summertime, visiting my grandparents.

So I didn't really know much about England or English culture, and I always said I would never move here because I didn't like the weather. So it's a very good reason. But then I did. I did move here because of all the opportunities, and I applied to Otolengi from Bahrain, and I was like, I'm going to work there. And then now it's been six years. having been so mesmerized by this chaos of the kitchen, of a restaurant kitchen, which can be the craziest place, did you feel like you had to build an assertiveness

that perhaps wasn't as intrinsic in you? Yeah, definitely. I was a very shy girl. I don't think I really came out of my shelf for many years. I think how I actually did come out of my shell was when I moved to America. I studied and worked in New York. And I was this 18.

year old girl from this tiny little Middle Eastern Island and I went to New York with these big outspoken personalities everybody in America has something to say and all of a sudden I was there and I just felt so lost but I spent almost five years there and by the time I came back I was also like this

sassy person and my mom was like what happened to you? You've come back with an attitude problem but that's kind of where I came out of my shell. Bailey's is proudly supporting the Women's Prize for Fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people.

Looking for a treat to pair with your favourite book, Bailey's is the perfect accompaniment to enjoy either over ice or over coffee. There are no better friendships than those formed around brilliant books. And since you're listening, we're guessing you love books as much as we do. The Women's Prize has created an exclusive community that gives you a bookish backstage pass

offering surprises and freebies plus unmissable reading recommendations and book chat from my founder friends, including me, Vic Hope. Search for Women's Prize friend to become a friend today. We cannot wait to meet you. Let's move on to your third book this week,

which is The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. It's a pioneering work of young adult fiction. It's following two rival teenage gangs in 1960s, Oklahoma. It was written when the author was only seven, 17 years old is a story of trust, friendship, portrayal, which perfectly captures the hunger and pain of adolescent life. How can you pick this? I think this is another one that I read in high school that really resonated with me.

I really, I think it was my first kind of insight into like the socioeconomic differences within society and how they affected the two different, the greasers and the socks. and I think it's also a story about love and loyalty as well because you have these people who are just looking out for each other in this gang and things just get out of control but in the end they're all just kind of sticking together and yeah I really I really love this book and I also love that S. E. Hinton kind of wrote it at such a young age

and that even she left her initials as S.E. Hinton, because she thought the books weren't going to sell as well if she had her full name and people would just think it was a man who wrote the book, which I found really interesting. Reading this as a teenager again, about 16. Yeah. While still at school. You know, it's about gangs in 1960s, Oklahoma. Yeah.

Did it strike the cord? Did you feel like it resonated with you on a personal level? Could you see yourself reflected and your experience has reflected? I think a little bit because of the divisions in society. in Bahrain anyway because I mean there's not really like a gang scene so much in Bahrain but I think there's a lot of division in society with

the two sects of Islam Shia and Sunnah and there can be a lot of budding of heads and a lot of rivalry almost and it does kind of almost feel like you belong here and you belong there and mixing is not a thing. When we're young we really like we really seek out

our identity and I try if at school working out where we fit. Can you remember navigating that? Can you remember trying to work out who you were and where you fit? I fit in the, you know, there's always that gang of like, miscellaneous.

Oh yeah, yeah, I was miscellaneous too. I was miscellaneous, yeah, yeah. Because I wasn't very, I think being half English, I wasn't Arab enough, but then there was also a school St. Christopher's school, and it was where all the expats were. But I wasn't English enough either. So I kind of just was in this in-between of just randoms,

and that was kind of how I navigated my life in Bahrain. As we mentioned just before, the outsiders, it depicts this real hunger that's felt by these teenagers. What were you hungry for as a teenager? I think I definitely had like small island syndrome. I felt very trapped, and I felt like I wanted to see the world, and I wanted to get out, and I wanted to kind of find my place in the world.

I think that's what I was really hungry for. So for me, going to New York, going to London, these are big cities that everyone just like kind of talks about, but you don't really think it's so much bigger than you. And I think that was something that I was really hungry for. On the subject of finding your home, finding where you belong, and finding comfort, the emphasis throughout shelf love is on comfort. It's on comfort foods.

It's sort of born of this time when we were in lockdown. and we were all experimenting a lot more with food in our homes. Do you think that food has become a comfort to you, for what reasons would it become a comfort to you? I think food is a comfort to everybody, if I'm honest. Not just to me. I think food is about nostalgia. Food's about evoking memories,

things that you remember eating growing up, something that maybe your family made, your mom made for you, or an experience. If you traveled and you had something amazing, and then eating that food always brings you back to that place. You know, shelf love was written during the pandemic. So it was all about raiding your kitchen, rating your shelves, rating your pantries,

using up what you have. And the whole language in shelf love is very forgiving. It's like, oh, if you don't have saffron, use turmeric. If you don't have chickpeas, use white beans. And that was the whole point in that I don't think recipes need to be super rigid and that you have to follow this recipe and it has to be this way. I think it should be open to interpret. and people can change and mix things around as they want.

And that was the first Otolengi Test Kitchen Book. Yeah. Do you feel like you've noticed people becoming more confident and creative with their home cooking over the past few years since the pandemic and we were all sort of stuck inside and just doing it, just giving it a go? Yeah, I definitely have. It was crazy, like, during the first lockdown,

like everybody was hooked to their phones and Instagram and stuff. But, like, you know, a lot of the shops didn't have everything. I remember I flew to Bahrain. I was like, I'm getting out here, I'm going home. And then I went to Bahrain and, you know, we didn't have so many stocks of things. There isn't like a waitrose there, you know. You're not going to get like cook's ingredient. That's not going to happen.

So you have to try to change your whole way of cooking. And I think so many people were doing that and taking on all these challenges and cooking for themselves and cooking for their housemates or their families, whoever they were stuck with. And it was such a beautiful thing to see. And I think that something that has stayed with us, even coming out of it, And yeah, I really love that. Have you found Biscateers yet? Bisciteers are the original hand-iced biscuit gifting company

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It's so beautiful. It's Turkish author, Elie Shafak's 12th novel. It traces the Aftershocks. of civil war and several generations of the British Cypriot family. The book mines the questions of belonging, identity, and trauma in a multi-layered, bittersweet tale

of star-crossed lovers on the divided island of Cyprus. Plus, it was shortlisted for the Women's Prize this year. Tell us about when you discovered this book, because it can't have been that long ago. No, no. I was literally this year, I was flying to

Ashley, New York, to visit for a friend's wedding, and I picked it up in the airport, and I read the whole thing in one sitting before I knew it like we'd landed and I just, it was, it's such an unput-downable book. I love books like that where you're just like, oh, I just want to get a moment so I can read the next chapter. And you race and race and race and race. And then you get to the end, you're annoyed because it's over and you're having it anymore.

Because you're in the world. Yeah. And then you're like, oh, back to reality. Damn it. Yeah. Why did it resonate with you then? You know, I didn't know too much about the whole history and the conflict in Cyprus with the Greek side versus the Turkish side.

So really gave me a lot of insight into that. But more than anything, it was, you know, these Star Cross lovers who grew up in a small island. I also grew up in a small island, so that's something I can really understand. And also that it was all about forbidden love. You know, her being a Turkish Muslim woman, him being a Greek Catholic.

And, yeah, it really resonated with me because I know so many stories about forbidden love in Bahrain between the Shi'i and Sunni. people who, like maybe their families, don't want them to fall in love just because of, you know, the sect of Islam that they're in. When you were younger, did you sort of feel quite viscerally that divide? I mean, you've described this as a tiny island played with the politics. Did you realize that? Did you know that?

You know, I think my parents did a really good job of kind of shielding me from that, but I think the politics, I always knew there was like this underlying tone. in Bahrain with like the political struggles. But I don't think it really like blow up to me and like it became apparent until 2011 in the Arab Spring when there was like a bit of a revolution. And that was my first kind of like, oh, this is always, this is a huge thing

and a huge divide and a lot of discrimination. And that was the first time that I was aware of the political struggles in Bahrain. Sometimes it takes leaving or taking yourself out of the situation to get a bit of perspective on it. Yeah, it's true. I actually was living in New York in 2011. And I, my parents basically, I, you know, I was working like long, 16 hour days.

And I just didn't really look at the news or know what was happening. And I remember there was, I was working front of house. One of the waiters came to me and he was like, he was Bangladeshi and he was like, some real problems going on in your country. And I was like, what are you talking about? And then I googled the news.

And I was like, oh my God, and then I called my parents. I was like, why didn't you tell me? They're like, oh, we knew you don't watch the news. Like, it's fine. Everyone's fine. Like, we're okay. We're keeping low. And that's kind of, yeah, it took me kind of getting out and like looking in to really realize

the bigger picture of things. This book explores that divide and these two different cultures with such beautiful sensitivity. And one of the ways it does that is through food. We talked about the ability that food has to tell stories and the way we tell stories about food. And some of the passages, they make you salivate. It makes you hungry. Your mum's English, as we established before. Your dad's from Bahrain.

Does this dual heritage express itself in your cooking for your food? Yeah, absolutely. Like, I always say my main flavors are Middle Eastern flavors. Like, that's what I gravitate towards. You know, I would go out with my dad. We'd go to the markets. We'd get, like, fried sambosa, which is people call it samosa, filled with, like, mung beans or potatoes or cheese, and we'd eat it.

You know, it costs, like, you know, 50p and you get eight little samosas in a bag, and we eat it in the car, with like, you know, grease-stained shirts, and we get home, and mom's got like a spaghetti balanese. So I couldn't help but, like, cross over these two cultures in my cooking. So when I started working at Otolengi, it made sense to me because I was like, oh, this is Middle Eastern flavor, is westernized. This is completely where I belong. So in our household, my dad's English, my mom's Nigerian, and we used to have a Nigerian take on a full English breakfast.

So instead of half rounds, we'd have like plantain. I love that. There'd be like a little tomato salsa on the side. Chili sprinkled all over the whole thing. And it's so exciting. I love that we had this, our dual heritage was expressed through the food that we ate in our house, although my dad was not allowed

to make certain dishes. My mum was not allowed to touch the Yorkshire puddings on a Sunday because he was like, no one else can do that, right? Especially not you. Do you have a particular recipe that's like a favorite from Bahrain, your culinary traditions? I love Madroba.

I think it's like my desert island dish. It sounds really weird, but it's so good. Madroba means beaten in Arabic, and it's called that because, well, there's a story behind it since, you know, every food has a story. So basically, as a lady was trying to make a type of dish like biryani, it's rice and meat and spices cooked down.

And then obviously, whenever you cook rice, you have to get the ratio right, right? Water to rice, if you add too much, it becomes mushy. Anyway, the story goes that she was making this dish for her husband and added too much liquid, like way too much liquid, and it turned into mush. And she was like, oh my God, he's going to be home soon, what do I do? And she just started stirring it and stirring it and beating it and beating it.

So it became like this, the rice grains were discernible. You can see them anymore. It became like a porridge with beaten chicken and spices and rice. And then when she presented to her husband, she said, this is a dish called Maduro. but. And it's all the rage. And that's the story

that it became a thing. It's supposed to be like. Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to be that way. The catchphrase of my kitchen. Yeah, yeah. That's what chefs do every time they make a mistake. They just say that. The Yotelengue Test Kitchen, it's been described as a culinary Dahl's chocolate factory. Yes.

Sounds magical. Yes. How has your cooking been influenced by Yota Meta Lengi and the other members of the test kitchen? Well, I always say the Test Kitchen is such a cool place to work in because there's so many different people with different cultures. We have someone from Mauritius, someone else from Germany, other people who grew up in London, others from Israel. So everybody has their own taste and their own identity, and you just kind of learn from each other. The Test Kitchen is a super collaborative place, so I wouldn't say it's just like, oh, it's one person.

I think that's the thing about working at Otolengi is that Ossolengi doesn't ask you to conform to Otolengi. creates space for you to kind of grow and it kind of takes on your flavors in the way that you cook and makes room for it. It is honestly the most delicious foods. It's just so, it's like science but art at the same time. It's beautiful. Let's move on to your fifth and final book, Shelfly Book, this week, which is Three Women by Lisa Todayo.

This book is a gripping exploration of female sexuality and the often cruel chasms between fantasy and reality. It's a vital document of 21st century sexual politics. This book follows Maggie, Lena, and Sloan, three very different but very real women and charts their desires and sexual proclivities with both brutal honesty and sincere empathy. Why is this on your list? I don't think there is a woman who could read three women and not relate in some way. It explores the stories of three different women.

I find it so intriguing that this journalist actually, actually followed these women in their lives for, was it 10 years or something, to create this book? I think it really kind of hones into the whole idea that a lot of women are not satisfied, but they kind of internalize it in so many aspects of their life. And that's something that really resonated with me reading all three of the stories. It's just like a theme that's continuing throughout. Do you remember identifying with any of the women in particular when you were reading it? Probably, honestly, all of them, I think, I think, okay, so Sloan is one that I identified with because, so she got into, she like basically has threesomes with her husband and something went wrong and she takes the blame for it. And instead of asking her husband to kind of stand up for her, she just kind of internalized it and she didn't really talk about it or she just completely took the blame for it.

fall and just let it be. And I think that's something that women just always tend to do sometimes a lot of the time instead of they just internalize a lot of their struggles. Another one, the lady who was married and she was in a really sad relationship. And then she continues like an affair outside of her marriage or she ended her marriage. And, you know, instead of communicating to this man that she was falling in love with him, she just kind of let it be. And that was just another thing that really kind of resonated with me. Yeah, it explores in so many ways the ways that women can control their impulses

to the point where they can become totally divorced from them. Is that something that you can identify with? Yeah, I definitely think so. I think it's taken me a long time to be a lot more communicative and open. I don't know if that's just growing up in the Middle East where you're kind of just told that you should be a certain way as a woman,

and it wasn't really until coming to London that I really found that I found my voice in food and working on Talenghi where everybody is encouraged to be themselves. But sometimes I still struggle with it. I still struggle to communicate really who I am. Well, it's a typically male-dominated industry and there's always that thing, you know,

men are chefs and women are cooks and that's changed, obviously, a huge amount. But how did you find it when you started working in this industry? I think, yeah, definitely. it was very male-dominated and there have been kitchens where I've been the only female. The cool thing about the test kitchen, though, and I don't know if it's something about test kitchens

or just because there's no ego in a test kitchen. You're not like on the line, there's no tickets, it's not like crazy service kind of thing. So it's just like actually cooking a lot with your heart and cooking slow and cooking for making recipes for people at home who are going to recreate these days. dishes. And historically in the Teskitchen, the test kitchen existed way before

my time. It's been around for like over a decade when Yatam originally created it. It was always women. Always women recipe testers in the test kitchen until this year when I hired a man. And one of the owners of Autolenghi, she was like, Noor, a man? And I was like, I know.

She's like, and he's straight? I was like, yes. And yeah, I don't know what it is about like maybe that recipe testing is that you have to rely a lot on your instincts and listening to yourself, I think that historically, there's so many women at Ocelengi who have been doing that, and I think Yatam always knew that, so he always hired women. When you were working in restaurants, and when you were in New York,

for example, were there any coping mechanisms that you employed for making sure that you were heard and making sure that you felt respected in the kitchen? Coffee. was my coping mechanism. I found it really, really hard, especially in New York. There were so many times that I felt like I was going to fail or so many times I felt like I would actually leave the industry. I remember I had a chef at school.

It was like during knife skills. It was a knife skills class at culinary school. And like, you know, in Bahrain, there's no knife skills. You know, it's pretty like housewife style. Have a tomato, you have a tiny little serrated knife. You cut it in your hands, you know. That's how I learn how to cook. I didn't do like brunois and Julianne and like perfect French style cooking.

Like it wasn't something that I did. And we had to present all these knife cuts to your chef. And I did. And he looked at it and he was like, you're never going to make it in this industry. You might as well give it up now. And I remember I called my parents. I know. He was such a dick about it.

And I called up my parents. I was like, I'm never going to make it. And my dad was like, you've committed, you're finishing this. And I'm really glad I did. you know, so I think really my coffee mechanism is probably just having a really strong support group, family, friends who I can lean on when I need it most. Well, I think we're also glad that you did persevere because also don't listen to him. Yeah, no, I mean, I should write him a letter now.

Right in a Atlanta, right a letter. Show him the 300 odd people that you're cooking for tomorrow here at the Wilderness Kitchen. Yeah, no, it's smart. Sounds unbelievable. And also, a Saturday at a festival, imagine getting a feast. Like, it's the perfect time for it. I'm so excited for you, and it sounds like the most spectacular, magnificent menu. Thank you.

Just finally, I've got to push you for this, and it's not always pretty, people don't want to, but if you had to choose one of the five books that you've talked about today, as your favorite, as the one that you would take to the Desert Island, if you had to, which would it be in why? Definitely Persepolis, because it has pictures. just a comic book and yeah just definitely Perseplus

I've read that book so many times and each time it feels like a treat so on that note you've left us feeling so enriched and with lots of book recommendations that I cannot wait to get stuck into so no thank you so so much

thank you and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast if you like today's podcast please recommend it to your friends and help spread the word about the talent you've heard about today. The Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast is brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Bird Lime Media. Thank you so much to see you next.

And thank you to our audience here at Wilburne. Thank you so much.