How Anna Jones Became the Leading Figure in Modern British Vegetarian Cooking

Explore Anna Jones' rise to prominence in modern British vegetarian cooking. Discover how she revolutionized the culinary scene with innovative plant-based recipes, and learn about her journey, influences, and impact on contemporary cuisine.

Twenty years ago, Anna Jones was one of Jamie Oliver's TV apprentices; today, she's established herself as a queen of vegetarian cookbooks. She explains to Hannah Twiggs why she chose to pursue a career in her own kitchen rather than life as a chef.

Some people can listen to a piece of music and instantly identify the chords, recognize the bassline's intricacies, recite relevant musical theory, and even recall the drummer's name.

Similarly, cook and author Anna Jones can taste a dish and identify even the subtlest ingredients. She can discuss the techniques used, and compare it to a recipe from a chef she saw 20 years ago.

“No one taught me that,” Jones says. “It came from my own brain and my desire to recreate what I was eating.”

Discovering you have superpowered taste buds sounds like the start of any chef’s career, but it’s a surprisingly uncommon analogy. Jones didn’t learn to cook by standing on a stool next to her grandma or mother. “My mum is a good cook, but she doesn’t love cooking. It’s not something that brings her great joy or something she laments over.” Instead, her mum, presumably humoring her daughter’s childhood curiosity, supplied Jones with cookbooks and let her prepare the family dinner.

This special intuition for taste and flavor shines in Jones’s newest book, Easy Wins. Released in March, it features 12 hero ingredients that she says are guaranteed to make recipes like double lemon pilaf, traybake lemon dhal, and miso rarebit not only taste amazing but also come together quickly for those nights when you want maximum flavor with minimal effort.

However, this life in food almost never happened. Like many chefs, Jones’s journey began differently: she studied economics and philosophy at university, aiming to work in policy around third-world debt. She quickly tired of it and returned to her passion for cooking. Many famous chefs started in desk-bound careers like accounting and architecture. A pivotal moment for Jones was reading an article on "how to find your calling." “It said you can determine your real passion by the Sunday supplement papers you turn to first. It was like a little lightbulb went off. I was like, ‘Yes! It’s always been cooking!’”

Now, she finds herself being interviewed for the type of article that might have inspired her over 20 years ago. Does that feel strange? A bit, she admits, but Jones is known for her positivity as much as her cooking. “I feel like it’s a real privilege to be doing something I love as my job, and it constantly amazes me that the recipes I come up with in my little kitchen in Hackney then get recreated and cooked by people for the people they love,” she says. With over 300,000 followers on Instagram, five cookbooks—three of them Sunday Times bestsellers—and a Guardian column, she’s inspiring a lot of people.

She’s perhaps best known for being the most successful recruit from Jamie Oliver's 2004 TV show, Jamie’s Kitchen, which aimed to get unemployed young people into the hospitality industry. Following this experience, she worked in Oliver's wider business for seven years. Regardless of opinions about the Naked Chef, Jones considers herself fortunate to have been part of it. “I mean, it was just brilliant,” she says. “I got the benefit of being there when Jamie was just starting out, and everyone was very excited about working with him. It was an education in food that was truly invaluable.”

They remain in touch, with Oliver just a phone call away for advice and a strong supporter of her projects. “Jamie’s always been very supportive of me and has always been a great cheerleader for my work, which I’m really, really grateful for. He’s done some amazing work and I think he deserves a lot of credit.”

You might have assumed that her natural path would have led straight into professional kitchens. However, when she was on the show in the early 2000s, the industry was still very much in the Boiling Point era—a time characterized by (mostly male) chefs with fiery tempers, aggressive behavior, and profane language. Although Oliver’s kitchen was nurturing, it depicted a future she wasn’t sure she wanted.

“I understand the need for direct communication during service because it’s a frenetic environment with hot stuff around. In some ways, that very direct, slightly hierarchical communication is necessary during service,” she says, diplomatically avoiding naming names, though she surely knows them. “But I really don’t understand why that kind of hierarchy and behavior need to exist outside of service. Fortunately, I think things have changed.”

She believes the kitchens of 20 years ago “were maybe not a particularly nurturing environment for a 20-year-old woman. Back then, if I’d just strolled into a Michelin-starred kitchen, I wouldn’t have loved it.”

At any rate, she had already chosen family over career, a decision not often heard from a successful woman in a male-dominated industry. “I knew I wanted to start a family at some point, and I couldn’t really see how working in a restaurant at that time and eventually having kids and a family would work.”

The harsh realities of being a parent, especially a mother, in the restaurant business have always been a hot topic. Working in professional kitchens is physically demanding, with few accommodations for pregnant women: few restaurant businesses offer maternity or paternity pay beyond what’s statutory, and the pay is often not sufficient to afford childcare. When she saw Oliver’s team writing recipes and staging photoshoots for his cookbooks, “it felt like a meeting point of all the things that I loved: writing, that creative, artistic sense of bringing the food to life in a photograph, and then, of course, the cooking and food.” She knew she wanted to write cookbooks, so that’s exactly what she did.

“"I knew I wanted to start a family at some point, and I couldn’t see how working in a restaurant at that time and eventually having kids and a family would be feasible."

Since then, she’s become one of the leading figures in modern British vegetarian cooking. She hasn’t eaten meat in 15 years, but her decision to give it up wasn’t driven by altruistic reasons like animal welfare, the environment, or health. Instead, it was due to boredom. “I was cooking a lot, eating a lot, and trying a lot. I felt a little jaded.” She decided to stop eating meat and fish “to reset my palate, reset my excitement around food.” After a few weeks, she realized she’d never been more excited about food than when she wasn’t eating meat. “The longer I slept on it, the more the concept of eating meat and fish became abstract to me. I’ve never gone back.”

Fans of Jones might be surprised to learn that it was ennui, not environmental concerns, that inspired her decision. Her books and columns have been geared towards sustainability and health-conscious readers. However, she hasn’t just been producing books to meet publisher demands or to align with changing food habits and attitudes. Her books read more like chapters of her life. Her first book, A Modern Way To Eat, came out in 2014 shortly after she turned vegetarian and served as a guidebook for making the switch, both for herself and her readers. “It’s all about the staples that I reworked for myself when I stopped eating meat,” she says, plus a few ideas she had (or pinched, she jokes) while working with Oliver.

A Modern Way To Cook, released a year later, “spoke to the need for us all to put food on the table quickly.” However, it was with The Modern Cook’s Year, published in 2017, that Jones truly came into her own. “I would say that’s my most foodie book,” she says. It’s a substantial cookbook with over 250 recipes that emphasize her love for seasonal eating. “Eating seasonally is even more important when you’re putting vegetables at the center of your diet because we rely on the flavor of these amazing vegetables. An in-season strawberry tastes completely different from one flown in from somewhere else.”

The book I know Jones best for is One: Pot, Pan, Planet. I’ve just spent the weekend putting up shelves for my hundreds of cookbooks, but this one takes pride of place, I tell her. Published in 2021, when everyone was discussing the benefits of a meat-free diet, it’s not surprising that it’s her most sustainability-focused book. “I felt an urgent need to be more upfront about the importance of putting vegetables at the center of our diets, both for our health and because it tastes amazing, but also for the world around us.”

While it was the first time she’d spoken so explicitly on the topic, One doesn’t seek to preach. “I know not everyone wants or can be vegan or vegetarian, and I think most people aren’t going to read a book about sustainability, but they’re very happy to flick through a recipe book.”

Easy Wins is her fifth book and reflects where she is now, simultaneously raising an eight-year-old and a one-year-old. “I want to make really delicious food for my family, but I feel like time is short. So I wanted to reverse engineer those recipes where two and two add up to a hundred, where you’re doing a simple process with simple ingredients, but there’s that extra bit of recipe magic that turns it into something really, really delicious.”

That recipe magic involves a capsule of 12 pantry ingredients, from tahini to lemons, olive oil to miso, that elevate simple base ingredients and make the ordinary extraordinary. “For example, a teaspoon of miso added to some roasted vegetables and tossed together will really amp up the flavor of your food, but the effort is so minimal.”

Her life has certainly changed since her first book a decade ago, and so has the landscape of the food world. “In the 20 years I’ve been cooking, my job has changed beyond recognition. So has the vegetarian conversation,” she says. As a vegetarian back then, “there were so many things that you couldn’t get your hands on. I’d have to go around to like 20 different shops to get all of the things that I needed.” Nowadays, everything is so immediately available.

However, she notes that while we are more knowledgeable about food and flavor, we have less and less time to cook. “Everyone demands so much more flavor and excitement from their food, but everyone wants to spend way less time actually cooking it. We’re at a point where we’re only spending under 20 minutes a night in the kitchen,” she says. While Easy Wins addresses this challenge, she sees it as a loss in some ways. “There’s absolutely no point in sharing the sort of cheffy recipes I might be able to cook because, you know, no one is going to make a bechamel sauce on a Tuesday night.”

If her books have kept a finger on the pulse of food for the past 10 years, what might be next? “Looking ahead, I think it’s becoming ever more urgent for us to move away from factory farming and the foods that are damaging the world around us,” she reflects. She mentions regenerative farming—a method of farming that works with nature to help tackle climate change and ecological collapse—as the next big buzzword, though it's not yet accessible enough to be mainstream. For now, regenerative farmers are a minority, and their products are usually prohibitively expensive. “I think that at the moment, the regenerative conversation is essentially for people who either go out of their way to seek it out or for people who can afford it. Bringing these kinds of climate-positive businesses and food to everyone is an interesting space to explore.”

Ever the optimist, Jones encourages us to look forward as she does. “When it comes to climate, I think guilt is not a useful emotion, and looking back at what we haven’t done is not useful,” she says. Instead, she advocates for staying calm and keeping things simple. “We make 40,000 decisions a day. A great number of those will be related to food, so every day is an opportunity to make some good decisions. Every day refreshes with new opportunities. I think that’s a really great way to look at it.”

Easy Wins is out now, published by Fourth Estate. Anna Jones appears at Hay Festival on Thursday, 23 May, at 5.30pm; hayfestival.com.

Source: independent