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BIOGRAPHY
Vicky Bhogal exploded onto the food scene at 25 years old with her first cookbook, the bestselling and highly acclaimed Cooking Like Mummyji in 2003, a love letter to the Punjabi Indian food she was brought up on. It won the Jeremy Round award for Best First Book at the Guild of Food Writers Awards and short-listed for Best Book at the Glenfiddich Awards.
An avid campaigner of many causes, next was Vicky's brainchild celebrity recipe book A Fair Feast in 2005, which she compiled and edited. Insisting that 100% of the proceeds go to charity, the book has raised over £100,000 for The Fairtrade Foundation and Oxfam's Make Trade Fair Campaign.
2006 saw the release of Vicky's beautiful third book, A Year of Cooking Like Mummyji, picking up the much-loved thread of her first book and exploring it further through other British Asian styles of cookery and against the backdrop of the seasons.
Vicky also created her own authentic food range, ‘Just Like Mummyji's' exclusively with Tesco 2004-2007, winning her a Grocer Award in 2006.
Vicky's new book, FLAVOUR: A World of Beautiful Food is out now and published by Hodder and Stoughton. In FLAVOUR: A World of Beautiful Food, Vicky Bhogal takes an array of delicious ingredients and shows how to combine them according to their flavour in simple and imaginative ways, to create exciting new dishes.
Vicky lives, cooks and eats in her beloved London and is currently working on the launch of her own restaurant, television projects and is writing her first novel and screenplay.
GROWING UP IN BRITAIN, WHERE THE LOVE OF FOOD BEGAN…
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Like many of her generation, 31 year old Vicky classes herself as a ‘British Asian’. Born and bred in Britain to Indian parents who came to this country in their childhood, food played a central role in Vicky’s childhood and family life. Helping her mother with the cooking was part and parcel of her upbringing – as was the case with many young British Asian girls. Her earliest memories are intertwined with those of delicious meals created by her family and relatives; women cooking together in the kitchen and gossiping, whilst lovingly feeding and nourishing her with their culinary delights. Vicky says this was like ‘literally being fed your cultural heritage’ and this is what cemented her love of and fascination with food and its role within culture and people’s lives.
Her family and relatives remember how discerning she was about flavours even when she was only five years old!
Many years later when Vicky was at University, she developed a real pining for her mother’s home cooking. Although she could cook the dishes, she couldn’t make them exactly as good as her mum and, as none of the recipe books available covered the real, traditional recipes families make at home, she had nothing to refer to whilst she was away.
After graduating from University in 2000, King’s College London where she studied English Literature, Vicky decided to hone and perfect her culinary techniques.
THE IDEA FOR THE FIRST BOOK - COOKING LIKE MUMMYJI - WAS BORN...
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It was Spring 2002. Vicky, having also worked as a journalist during her degree, was now working as an Advertising Executive at a top London agency. She was at her parent’s home for the weekend and some relatives had come to visit. Vicky was cooking a dish for them when her aunt commented, “It’s such a shame that, unlike you, so many Indian girls nowadays don’t know how to cook”.
Vicky pondered this and realised that it wasn’t because such girls did not enjoy such food anymore or cooking in itself but simply reflected a change of lifestyle. Asian girls now have academic aspirations, social lives, careers. The days were gone - and absolutely quite rightly too - when all that was considered important for a girl to know was how to cook and clean.
As no measurements were used, the only method of passing traditional Indian recipes down was through word of mouth; or, as Vicky puts it, “by standing in the kitchen with your mum for about 20 years, watching and practising and if you’re lucky you might just pick something up” . This was becoming a little impractical of course. So, with Indian restaurants, supermarkets and recipe books featuring food and recipes that, although much loved and enjoyable, were created for the Western palate and bore no resemblance to the traditional and authentic Indian food eaten in homes in India and Britain; Vicky decided to kill two birds with one stone and write a book that preserved all the recipes her family had taught her. Her dual aim was to provide a manual for other Asian females and males (Asian men should, and certainly now do, cook too!) and that would also invite non-Asians into the secret world of real Indian culinary treasures.
But how? Vicky had no knowledge of publishing whatsoever and so the week after her aunt’s comment sparked her interest she borrowed a copy of the Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook, stayed late at work one night and wrote a simple three paragraph letter detailing her idea and posted it off to every publisher.
The best outcome she was hoping for was that maybe someone might kindly spare a few minutes to get back to her and give her some advice on where to start, maybe how to get an agent? She sent the letters on a Friday. By the Tuesday she had four major publishers interested in taking this further. Simon and Schuster immediately invited her in for a meeting and gave her a book deal a few weeks later when they told her that at the UK Commissioning meeting, her editor presented Vicky’s book idea by reading out what Vicky had wrote. After a few sentences, the head of commissioning put his hand up and said ‘I’m sold, let’s publish it’.
“Cooking like Mummyji” hit the shelves in October 2003 and received rave reviews from the public and critical acclaim. The book took a fresh look at real British Asian home cooking and culture whilst exploding a few myths and stereotypes along the way. In 2004, it won the Jeremy Round award for Best First Book at the Guild of Food Writers Awards and later that year it was short listed for Best Book at the Glenfiddich Food and Drink awards. She received personal letters from celebrities as diverse as Nigella Lawson and Meera Syal, all telling her how much they enjoyed her book, Nigella has even included Vicky’s recipe for Keema Lamb in her latest offering ‘Feast’.
A FAIR FEAST – A WAY TO HUMBLY GIVE A LITTLE SOMETHING BACK…
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A second publication followed in September 2005 called A Fair Feast. Vicky is a passionate supporter of fair trade, having giving speeches for the Fairtrade Foundation alongside MP’s and celebrities at events around the UK. She wanted to do more to help so persuaded Simon and Schuster to publish a book, of which all proceeds would be split between The Fairtrade Foundation and Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair Campaign. She was adamant that no-one should make any money out of this or be paid. Within three months, with nothing but a laptop in her bedroom and no celebrity contacts, she had convinced 70 celebrities and chefs to donate recipes (including Sir Elton John, Minnie Driver, Jamie Oliver and Dido), written all the information about fair trade and edited the book. It won the praise of Richard Curtis and it rapidly became part of the Make Poverty History Campaign. By December 2006 it had raised over £100,000 to date.
A YEAR OF COOKING LIKE MUMMYJI – EXPLORING OTHER STYLES OF BRITISH ASIAN HOME FOOD…
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The follow up to Cooking like Mummyji; A Year of Cooking Like Mummyji launched in February 2006 and covers more British Asian cooking, this time set across the calendar year and encompassing religious and secular festivities and different regional styles of Indian cookery as cooked at home in the various communities here in Britain. Vicky interviews people from Manchester to Brick Lane to discover the dishes close to people’s hearts as cooked by their mothers. The book also features some of Vicky’s poetry!
CONQUERING TESCO WITH THE ‘JUST LIKE MUMMYJI’S’ PRODUCT RANGE…
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Following the success of her first book which launched October 2003, cooking on television shows and for many non-Asian friends (some of whom confessed to previously disliking Indian food but were bowled over by her completely different style of cooking to Indian restaurant cuisine); Vicky was constantly being asked the question ‘why isn’t food like this available anywhere?’
After receiving more requests to cook for friends who were craving homestyle Indian food than she could handle, she gave this some thought and decided that authentic, fantastic quality Indian food made with real, natural ingredients should be available to all in the UK at an affordable price. Vicky felt that, although preferable, occasionally people really do not have the time to cook a meal from scratch but that there is no reason, or excuse, why a chilled-meal cannot be of high quality and similar to heating up in the microwave a dish your mum made the day before.
In terms of the usual Indian supermarket offerings, Vicky felt there was little variety and choice for Asians and non-Asians alike.
With no factory or company of her own, no food industry or business background and despite the advice of some people who told her she didn’t have a chance in hell, Vicky wrote a short letter in early 2004 to Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco, outlining her ambition to put tradition back on the shelves in all their stores nationwide and re-energise the Indian chilled-meals market with her innovative ideas and fresh approach.
A couple of weeks later, Vicky received a call on her mobile whilst out shopping, from the head of Chilled Foods at Tesco. Very keen to have further discussions with her, Vicky soon found herself at the Tesco Head Office carrying tupperware boxes of her cooking.
Immediately impressed with her dishes and ideas, Tesco put her in contact with one of their key suppliers to create a range of chilled products based on Vicky’s authentic recipes, that used only natural ingredients and involved changing elements of the factory process to replicate traditional techniques and thus create that real home-cooked taste. Even the bulk-bought garam masala was switched to one made bespoke to Vicky's mother's recipe.
Over a period of six months, Vicky worked with a team of skilled chefs at the factory to create each and every dish ensuring that both the taste and the methods used to prepare the meals were mirroring the ways customary to Indian home cooking and that followed her recipes to the letter.
The Just like Mummyji's range launched in Tesco stores nationwide in April 2005 to immediate high levels of commercial success and won much praise. It attracted 67,000 new consumers who previously had not bought any Indian chilled foods; customers rated the products as better than an Indian restaurant meal or takeaway and the range achieved a very high level of repeat purchasing - showing a clearly loyal fan base. A fitting way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the range, the Just Like Mummyji's Mango Chicken won the Grocer Own Label Excellence Award in the Chilled Foods category on 16th May 2006 against industry heavyweights and later that year became a brand worth £3.2million. She was also shortlisted to the final four from thousands of entrants for the Entrepreneur of the Year Award at the Asian Jewel Awards 2006, sponsored by Lloyds TSB.
A LITTE FLAVOUR, VICKY’S OWN UNIQUE CULINARY APPROACH…
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Though Vicky has always adored her family’s Indian cooking, she has always loved all types of food and over the years has developed her own style of cooking, which friends and family have come to simply know as ‘Vicky food’. After taking some time out to write and cook and simply just live life, it was suggested to her that this could be the subject of her next book.
Vicky began working on FLAVOUR: A World of Beautiful Food, which encapsulates her own approach to food and her daily life as she weaves all the colours, tastes and influences around her into the dishes she creates.
Vicky is also writing her first novel and screenplay and developing her own restaurant venture.
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