Chef Karen Dudley’s ‘Onwards’ is a call to presence

Recipe books are usually a hit and miss for me. I love making up a recipe in my head and trying it out in my kitchen. Balancing flavours and seeing how they come to life is always a fun little experiment.

Karen Dudley, however, seems to be spying on what’s in my head. Her love of play with spices, flavours and food really is what my culinary dreams are made of. Her recipes read like wonderful tales punctuated with fanciful flavours and adventures of both the mind and palate.

Reading Dudley’s cookbooks is a wonderful meander around all the flavours there are to explore in the world. She started with her first cookbook,  A Week in the Kitchen, based on her Woodstock-based restaurant The Kitchen, which was loved by locals and also had the highlight of Michelle Obama’s lunch stop in June 2011.

The pandemic brought The Kitchen to a close, but as Dudley so aptly puts it, “the connection does not only reside in bricks and mortar”. If you follow her on social media, you can see just how engaged and connected she is with her audience. I will never forget asking her a question about how she made a flavoured butter on Instagram and she took to posting a recipe named, “For Tshepo: Tamarind date butter”. This butter has delighted the fan girl in me and the taste buds of my friends and family for years.

As Dudley chose to move onwards, her latest cookbook by the same name really is a feat. This is the first time I’ve ever cooked the first recipe in a cookbook, and I was not disappointed. It is a roast sweet potato salad with tomato-tamarind dressing and toasted peanuts. Dudley delivers a symphony of flavours and a tousle of textures that will make you wonder where this dish has been all your life, and have it on high rotation well into the future.

The photography and plating are also a visual feast for your eyes as you page through Onwards and delight in each dish. Dudley really taps into one’s nostalgia as well, as those who’ve visited The Kitchen or have used her other cookbooks will recall. You’ll be transported to your granny’s dining room table while wondering if she ever thought to fry a radish and whip feta.

My favourite part in this book is chapter 6, “I make lunch for my sweetheart now”. I loved this. Making food for our significant other is a special moment. It made me smile thinking of how I took meals to my love’s desk as he took call after call in years past. Some of my finest experiments took place then too and I did not record them, unlike Dudley. I remember one breakfast was so good, he called his mother.

The recipes in this book are delicious: Dudley has a skill to make even a boiled egg dish sound moreish. Her recipes are also mostly simple, the two-ingredient naan bears testament to this. And it works.

Buy this book for yourself, your loved ones. It should be on every gifting list, even for your non-cooking friends, the stories around the recipes are so worth a read. This cookbook was released towards the end of 2023 and is available at all book stores and online.

Onwards we march into our kitchens and our hearts. This book sums up so much of what I feel about food, it brings us moments of connection, expression, deep love, delight, surprise and nostalgia, and it makes us remember. Onwards is a call to presence.