Meet the woman who helped bring Asian food to British tables

Her kitchen is worthy of a Pinterest board on dream kitchens. A large island with wraparound worktops full of woks and a huge array of hanging utensils is part of an open plan room with a large, well-loved wooden table and sofa area that looks out on to the beautiful garden – a mini Kew in southwest London. On the walls are beautiful blue and white pieces of crockery, paintings of the homes she’s lived in around the world and enlarged photos of her travels.

Sallie Morris has built a career on specialising in Asian food in the UK after falling in love with it while her husband’s job took their young family abroad.

She’s been writing recipes and cookbooks for more than 60 years, and learned her trade at the famous Edinburgh School of Cookery in 1955, which is now part of Queen Margaret University.

“Rather like Mary Berry, I first worked in the electricity board showroom demonstrating how to use ovens to people,” she says.

But considering her professional training, it wasn’t what she had wanted to do. She soon found a job at Woman Magazine as a recipe writer.

“At that stage, we had a readership of 1.25 million. Ruth Morgan was the cookery editor and she was doing a series highlighting local food in counties across the UK, from Scotland to Cornwall to the Lake District, where I come from.”

Sallie has the original magazine from 1969, still crisp and perfectly kept, and opens it to a huge colour feature from the series, which is of her family – parents included – and the feast covering the table. “My father was so proud of that piece. He never really knew what I did, but he’d say, ‘Our Sallie is working on a magazine’.”

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After meeting husband Johnnie, who had been in Africa teaching at a mission school and yearned to return, they packed up and took their 10-week-old baby daughter to Nairobi. “I had never lived overseas and I didn’t know anybody. I had a very young baby and I didn’t know what I was going to do there.”

Before leaving the magazine, she’d been working on the early beginnings of the first freezer cookbook. But once people knew about her professional cooking background in Nairobi, she began giving lessons on how to make the best of your freezer.

“People asked if I could teach them how to use the freezer for entertaining, as they said theirs was full of meat to feed the dogs,” she says. She held these courses for the entire five years they were in Nairobi.

Following a short stint back in London, the pair moved abroad again, this time to Malaysia. At first, Sallie thought it would be too hot to give cookery classes, and instead had the idea of painting watercolours. “But that didn’t last long as the food was just so wonderful,” she says.

She was in awe of the recipes and the new techniques needed to make the dishes. “When I saw the amount of ingredients, I thought ‘oh my goodness’, because you have to make your own pastes, so the list of ingredients was rather mind blowing.”

And so she began teaching again.

“My greatest success was a lady who had lived there for 22 years, and she’d never set foot in the local food market.

“The first part of my class was to take people to the market so they could see the fruit, the vegetables, the fish and the spices that people could cook with. After that, she came to all my subsequent lessons. It was quite a revelation to her.”

For Sallie, the markets were where it all began, a type of Aladdin’s cave for food lovers that enthralled her and taught her about more about the country and the way people ate and lived.

“I’d go to the market and say I was going to make a fish curry for however many people who either do or don’t like it hot and then they would measure out from their huge mounds of chillies, ginger and other spices and put it all in a banana leaf and that’s what you’d take home. It was wonderful.”

Later, Sallie learnt how to make her own paste, “which is all in here now”, she says, tapping her temple.

After three years of living in Malaysia, the family came back to London, where Sallie was approached by Marks and Spencer, which asked her to write a book on herbs and spices.

When her books first came out in the 1980s, to many it was an entirely new cuisine, a gap in the market that until then been filled by simple pasta dishes and chewy garlic bread or convenience American food. “At the time, it was really quite ground breaking,” says Sallie.

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“People would say ‘oh, I can’t get chillies’, or ginger and lime leaves, lemongrass, and coriander – all of those things were not commonplace, at all. But the people who came here for dinner were always expecting a feast of something different,” she says.

To get her ingredients back in London to create these feasts, Sallie would go to Earl’s Court, as that’s where people who used these ingredients were living and had shops there too.

After this, more books came, covering Indonesian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Burmese food (which included her own photos of family, the local fishmonger and of course the markets).

“The food in Burma was not as good as Thailand (her favourite). The national dish – tea leaf salad – is quite bitter and sour,” she says. “When we first got there, we went to the market – that’s what I always do first – and I saw strawberries, mushrooms and roses, which I never dreamt I would see there.”

Her Thai books came later, and one, Easy Thai Cookbook, has been republished this year. It’s a concise collection of the classic recipes that she fell in love with, with simple steps in the method making it easy for beginners.

Sallie has run cookery lessons from her own kitchen, and still entertains (Johnnie washes up), but she thinks this is her last book.

“I think, I’m sort of retiring now,” she says with a smile.

She’s seen the food industry change, with the rise of the TV cookery shows, cookbooks creating meals from five ingredients, chefs campaigning for the environment, a move from daily food shopping to weekly which creates more food waste, and a decline in teaching cookery in schools.

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She still visits Kenya, and noticed last year that plastic bags had been outlawed overnight. Shops are using paper bags instead “which keep things fresher for longer”.

Although now firmly based in London, her children and grandchildren are in Spain and Abu Dhabi, and though her last book might be done, her love of travel-inspired cooking will most certainly continue.

Easy Thai Cookbook by Sallie Morris. Published by Nourish books (£14.99)