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Introduction

The Intolerant Gourmet is for everyone who loves food and who loves to cook. This includes anyone who suffers from an intolerance or allergy to certain foods, people not usually catered for by cookery books. For that reason all the recipes in this book are completely free from wheat, dairy produce, soya, eggs and yeast, and almost entirely free from gluten. Yet they taste fantastic – designed to inspire and make you want to eat. And, most important of all, they don’t let on that there is anything missing. For this not an earnest cookbook but one that celebrates the joy of good food; every recipe could (and should) be served to friends and family, whether suffering from a food intolerance or not, without a single person finishing their meal feeling that they’ve gone without.

Through my own experience of learning how to cope with various food intolerances, I have met many fellow sufferers and this book has emerged as a result. The Intolerant Gourmet focuses on the culprit foods – how to avoid and replace the ones most commonly associated with food intolerances. It focuses less on full-blown food allergies, which are relatively rare and usually confined to one type of food, such as nuts or shellfish. By contrast, food intolerances are widespread and often multiple, with the sufferer developing a sensitivity to a whole range of foods. For this reason I haven’t excluded nuts from this book as I find that, in the absence of other ingredients, they provide vital texture and flavour to my dishes. However, less than a third of the recipes contain nuts. Those that do are clearly marked and there is a wealth of choice for readers wishing to avoid them. For those who are allergic to any of the foodstuffs focused on in this book, such as wheat or dairy produce, then absolutely every recipe is open to you.

When first diagnosed with an intolerance or allergy, you may feel depressed at the idea of having to give up certain foods, but your diet need only be as restrictive as you make it. It takes a little extra forethought, admittedly, but within a short space of time preparing intolerance-friendly meals will become second nature. The benefits of avoiding the problem foods will leave you feeling so much better that you’ll never want to go back to your old ways.

Cooking and eating are, by their very nature, sociable acts. Hence people who become restricted in their diet worry that they may also become restricted in their lives. Family meals or dinners with friends can become an act of isolation, with one meal for you and another for everyone else. Eating out can be equally fraught, its pleasures outweighed by the simple lack of anything on the menu that you can actually eat! Having lived with multiple food intolerances for years, I have experienced these frustrations many times. So when I began writing The Intolerant Gourmet it was very important to me that this was a cookbook that could be used by as many people as possible. In these pages you will find dishes that you can eat blissful in the knowledge that they contain nothing that could make you unwell. Not only that but they will make you and those eating with you feel both indulged and well fed. These are dishes that everyone can take pleasure in, whether they’ve a food sensitivity or not.

The recipes in this book aim not only to satisfy your dietary requirements, but also to inspire you in the way of intolerance-friendly home cooking. The thought of all the things you can’t eat can seem overwhelming, but there are so many ways around this that you need never feel as though you are going without. Whether it is a combination of naturally non-allergenic ingredients, or an adaptation of a traditional dish using intolerance-friendly substitutes, these recipes will show you that being sensitive to certain foods does not mean a lifetime of deprivation. In fact, it can open up a whole new way of cooking that uses fresh ingredients, makes you feel fantastic and, most importantly, tastes really, really good.