Lunchtime Legends: Elisabeth Luard with Olia Hercules
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-06-17

Chefs recreate their favourite dish, while reflecting on the shared language of food, friendship and the legacy that cooks and food writers can offer generations following in their footsteps.

This session features Elisabeth Luard whose work on European food cultures has inspired and influenced chef and food writer Olia Hercules. Olia makes Elisabeth’s recipe for Slovakian wedding dumplings as they talk together about the culinary traditions that fascinate them.

Elisabeth Luard is a food-writer and illustrator with a strong interest in how latitude, landscape and trade-routes traditionally dictate how people cook and eat. She has published some 20 cookbooks, a couple of door-stopper novels and four memoirs with recipes, including Family Life and Squirrel Pie, with a new one on the way. Books-in-print include European Peasant Cookery and The Flavours of Andalucia. Work on television includes The Rich Tradition, filmed on location round Europe in 1992. Her work has appeared in newspapers and magazines including Country Living, Daily Telegraph and The Scotsman, and she currently contributes a cookery column to The Oldie magazine.

Olia Hercules was born in the Ukraine and lived in Cyprus before moving to the UK to study. After working for a time as a reporter for Screen International, her interest in food led her to retrain as a chef at the renowned Leith’s School of Food and Wine. She then worked as a chef de partie in restaurant including Ottolenghi, and as a recipe developer, before landing a book deal for Mamushka, a cookbook that celebrates her family recipes, from Ukraine and Moldova to Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. It won the prestigious Fortnum and Mason Award for best debut cookbook 2016, has been translated into five languages, and to date has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. Olia was named the Observer Rising Star of 2015. She has since written Kaukasis and, most recently, Summer Kitchens (2020). Olia lives in London..

Food Season supported by:
https://www.kitchenaid.co.uk/