When Angus, my eldest son was diagnosed with severe allergies to dairy and egg, I was obliged to alter the ingredients I had always cooked with before so that we could still eat as a family. Last year, when my second son was diagnosed with an intolerance to gluten, I had to do the same again. Although I have cooked professionally for years, cooking for dairy, egg and gluten free diets has been challenging. Talking to friends with food allergic children, it is clear that there are a lot of people out there who are not confident in the kitchen, struggling to feed their families a balanced, varied diet without the basic ingredients we take so for granted in the Western diet. The range of ready foods suitable for food allergies is improving but is still very limited and expensive.
To eat a balanced and varied diet, cooking from fresh is the only way, and this reality is daunting to the inexperienced cook. Without a basic understanding of the ingredients we use in our cooking and the methods employed to prepare them, cooking for restrictive diets is a daunting task.
All of this convinced me that there was a need for a book dealing with this issue and my experience with my allergic children – together with my professional cookery background and the success of the Leiths Techniques Bible – gave me the insight into what this book needed to contain. I had been mulling over the idea ever since the publication of the Leiths Techniques Bible, but it was the flurry of press coverage in 2005 that convinced me to do something about it.
