‘Whatever people say, no-one denies that Jews and food are a winning combination’

Timing is everything. On the day Helen Graham moved into a new flat in Hackney she signed the deal on her recipe book, Centrepiece. On the day after she moved out she handed in the manuscript. 

“You could say that Centrepiece was bookended by the flat, which was the perfect place to do all the recipe testing because it had a huge island in the kitchen,” she tells me via Zoom from her new flat, which doesn’t have the same space.

Formerly executive chef at famed vegetarian restaurant Bubala, which opened in Spitalfields in 2019, Helen, 38, had always wanted to write a recipe book. “After Bubala, I felt there was a gap in the market for a vegetarian entertaining book. It’s easy when you’re making a dinner with chicken or the beef, because that’s the focus. I wanted to make a book that celebrates vegetables in the same way and elevates them to ‘special occasion’ status.”

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There’s a big difference between being a chef cooking dishes and actually writing them all down. Helen very much works on ‘feeling’ her way around a recipe, but “when I was testing, I would literally type out every single thing and my
laptop was always covered in tahini”, she says.

There is a decidedly Middle Eastern bent to her recipes, but Helen was raised on Ashkenazi food – “a very beige habit”. Working at the Palomar (she joined in 2014) was her first experience of Middle Eastern cooking. “Discovering Sephardic cuisine was so exciting and really eye-opening to me – it’s such a vibrant palette.”

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She then went on to work at The Barbary, Ottolenghi and The Good Egg and then she was burnt out and tired of unsociable hours. She posted on Facebook looking for a part-time job and Mark Summers, who was about to launch a vegetarian pop-up restaurant called Bubala, reached out.

Helen joined the team and went on to become executive chef, developing many of the dishes that are still on the menu. Helen is not vegetarian herself, but she doesn’t really cook with meat or fish, “apart from the odd can of tuna or anchovies”.

She says: “There needs to be more education around cooking vegetables, because there is such a wide range of them. It could be dressed up as a more adventurous way of cooking rather than a less adventurous way .” That said, when testing out the recipes she made a point of only shopping at major supermarkets “because if you can’t get hold of the ingredients, then what’s the point?”

Her favourite vegetable is kohlrabi. “I discovered it at the Palomar and I love its turnipy-pineapple flavour and its versatility. The book has a recipe for kohlrabi with a Nori and wasabi crème fraîche and a sumac pistachio mint salsa. I also really like courgettes. I fry some really hard so they’re nicely browned and then leave the rest raw – that’s a delicious way of eating them. And I love any kind of cabbage.”

Helen claims her Jewish heritage loud and clear in the foreword to the book. “My food is so much influenced by who I am and my background that I wanted to communicate that. Whatever people say about us, no-one denies that Jews and food are a winning combination. Everyone loves bagels and babka! Food is my love language. I love to entertain and if I’m coming to you, I’ll bring you something
I’ve made”.

I think I’ll invite her over her soon.

Centrepiece by Helen Graham is published by Hamlyn, £28