ARTSMANIA

By Anita Malhotra

World traveller, writer, photographer and cook, Naomi Duguid is equally at home exploring the culinary offerings of countries like Thailand and Tibet as she is recreating them in her Toronto kitchen. She has co-authored six award-winning travel cookbooks (with former partner Jeffrey Alford) that explore the cuisines of Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Europe and Africa through photographs, recipes and stories. Two of the books, Flatbreads & Flavors (1995) and Hot Sour Salty Sweet (2000), were honoured with the James Beard Foundation Cookbook of the Year award and Hot Sour Salty Sweet has just gone into its eighth printing.

Duguid has recently completed work on a new book, Rivers of Flavor – Recipes and Travel Tales from Burma, which will be published next fall.  Anita Malhotra interviewed Duguid, who was at her Toronto home, via Skype video on November 5, 2011, a few days before she left on the latest of many trips to Thailand and Burma.

Naomi Duguid speaking at the Women’s Culinary Network Woman of the Year Awards in 2009 (photo by Laura Berman)

AM: You have many interests – food, travel, writing and photography. How did each of these develop?

ND: I’ve always assumed that the whole world was out there to be explored or dreamed about. I was a reader as a child – still am. My grandfather had been to India as a young man, so the larger world was there. I remember going to England when I was 10 with my mother and brother because my father had a business trip, and my mother said to us, “Now, the people in England won’t be curious about you and your lives, but you have to remember to ask them about how they think and what they do.”  It was a very good lesson for travel – I’ve never forgotten. When I was 17, I lived in France for a year, and then I did my third year away at the London School of Economics. I like being a traveller, wherever I am. I’m a person who likes to not know what’s around the corner and to move forward towards the corner.  And it turns out that travel is one way of doing that, but I can also do it walking or bicycling the streets of Toronto.

“Flatbreads & Flavors,” the first of six travel cookbooks co-authored by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford

AM: What about your interest in food? Does that date back to an early age?

ND: The things I’ve done the last 25 or 30 years arise out of travel, but my undergraduate degree was in geography. I really like to understand how things work – how things work for people emotionally and how things work in a geeky, practical way like, “Where does the rain fall?” and “What grows?” So food, of course, is, “How do people live? What do they grow? What do they have, what don’t they have? How do they make do? How do they work around the problem of a shortage of water or a shortage of fuel?” Continue reading →