Andi Oliver has been a regular presence on our screens in recent years, first as judge and then more latterly as presenter of The Great British Menu but her expertise in both food and presenting go back to the early 1980s. Her career started in the music industry, as a member of post-punk group Rip, Rag and Panic, but cookery has always been part of her repertoire and in 2007 she combined both when she worked with her lifelong best friend, Neneh Cherry on the BBC2 show, Neneh and Andi Dish It Up. As a chef, she has run her own (award-winning) restaurants; she has presented, judged and appeared as panellist on numerous radio and TV shows; she is something of a podcast queen, regularly appearing on many and hosting her own (Stirring it Up) with daughter, Miquita Oliver; and in 2023 she wrote her first book, The Pepperpot Diaries: Stories from my Caribbean Table. She is speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival in the first ever Oxford Brookes Chancellor’s Conversation.
Andi, you’re coming to Oxford as the guest of Paterson Joseph for his inaugural Oxford Brookes Chancellor’s Conversation. How did this come about?
Last year, I did a pop up, The Pepperpot Rum Shop, in Antigua. Lots of lovely people came out and cooked with me because we were there for 100 days, and two of the brilliant people were Paterson Joseph and Ben Park who came to do a live version of Sancho and Me [based on Paterson’s bestselling book, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho].
I love the visceral enjoyment that you get from a really brilliant, inspired piece of theatre. And this performance was all that and more. They did it on the beach in Fort James where the slave ships would have docked. The performance was on the beach at night time with the waves lapping against the shore. I made a whole bunch of dishes that I felt echoed some of the spices and cooking methods used at the time, and it was one of the most incredible nights ever.
Paterson is an extraordinary man. He's an actor – a brilliantly versatile actor – but he's also a really knowledgeable historian. He's one of those people that when you talk to them about history, they bring it to life. Suddenly, when you're with them; you could just feel and sense every moment that he was creating. Ben works with different musical instruments to support the performance, and it's like a conversation between Paterson and Ben on the stage.
So a friendship was born?
We're the sort of the same age, and we are inspired by very similar things. We both used to bunk off school and go to the library when we were kids. Sometimes you meet another person, and you sort of see directly into something of their soul. So when he called me and said, Will you come and do this with me in Oxford?’ I said yes, immediately.
It's going to be a conversation about things that we're both inspired and excited by: writing, music, literature, life, love humanity, community, you know? We even talk about style. I think it's going to be a really fantastic conversation, because we just have a cerebral connection. Also, it felt like quite an honour to be asked; I was really, really chuffed.
Is there anything else on the programme that you hope to see?
I love a literary festival. I’m a big fan of Elif Shafak. There Are Rivers in the Sky is the most astonishing piece of work. Her lyrical-like grasp of language is just exceptional, and she wields her pen with such weight and delicacy at the same time.
I just love to hear a writer speak, because writing is such solitary thing and when writers come out to play, it can be really wonderful. My best friend, Neneh Cherry, has just been long-listed for the Women's Prize in Non Fiction, an absolutely inspired brilliant memoir called A Thousand Threads. I'm so proud of her. To see that other people responding to her prose outside of her music is really special and wonderful.
Andi, you’ve spoken so eloquently and enthusiastically about other people. Can we talk about you? Tell me about your book, The Pepperpot Diaries.
It's a love letter to my family and to my grandmother, really. It’s a book I've carried in my head for a long time, and I only got to write it because of Covid: I was in Antigua and I started writing, and I couldn't stop – it was fantastic. I had all this time to cook with ingredients that I'd grown up with, but also things that I hadn't even heard of, really old dishes. I think that it's very important that whilst we honour our culinary traditions, wherever we're from, we are also moving them forward.
The food I love the most, that I'm most excited about is what people call soul food, or la cucina povera, or farmhouse cooking – all these terms encompass the idea of the food that poor people cook: the food of necessity, the food of imagination. The Pepperpot Diaries is really the first part of me having that discussion about food with other people. It was about exploring and celebrating the food of Caribbean heritage. People see the Caribbean as one place but it's hundreds of islands and hundreds of territories. So I specifically chose dishes particular to certain islands and I try to talk about the provenance of these dishes, so people understand that the food on the plate is more than just the ingredients. It's how those ingredients got there, why they got there, and what that really means in terms of telling our history and our story.
Can you give me an example?
Something like breadfruit, for instance, is ubiquitous across the Caribbean but it’s not indigenous. It came from the Philippines to feed the enslaved Africans because it was cheaper than bread and it grows really easily. You know Christian Fletcher and Captain Bligh [Mutiny on the Bounty] were bringing breadfruit to the Caribbean? That's how far back it goes.
As soon as you start to look at these ingredients, you can place things by time. There's a dark past to our shared history, but from that history, we can draw light if we look hard enough. Particularly now, people would like to draw a veil over [the past] and pretend it didn't happen, but I think it's all the more important to talk about the history of enslavement and colonialism and the effects that that's had all over the world, not just in the Caribbean. Some of that past is dark and brutal and violent, and we can't change that. But look at it, accept it, understand it, and together we can move forward to create new pathways with light and good: community and family and multicultural communing together.
So, there’s history but it also speaks to the present.
I find really deeply disturbing that multiculturalism is [seen as] a problem, an issue, a mistake. For a start, you're talking about my family, about older people I love. We are all migrant people. People have been moving around the world for millennia, forever, since time began. This idea that migration is new, or that refugees are new, or that war is new, and that people have to flee, is manipulative, and makes me very angry. I think that food – sharing food, the breaking of bread – sitting around a table together, sharing recipes and stories, brings us closer together as human beings. And that's what I want my writing to do. I'm trying to explore these ideas and these feelings.
Family is clearly very important to you…
The men and the women in my family are incredible. I feel really proud to be a part of my family. My grandmother was an extraordinary woman, and her father was an incredible man. He was called Doctor Simon Powell Sebastian, and he co-founded the first hospital dedicated to treatment and training of black nurses and doctors in segregated Greensboro, North Carolina (in 1912). Can you imagine that? He was killed by the Klan. They pulled him out of his car, and they murdered him.
I feel like I come from a line of people who always took the risk, broke through glass ceilings and doors, and pushed for change. I feel like I have a responsibility to continue that line. My generation, my daughter's generation, we're working really hard to keep those voices present, because when we move forward, we carry them with us and take them wherever we go.
This is my bloodline, and this is something I carry with me with such pride. It gives me fire to keep moving forward and I don't take it lightly. In the culinary world, there aren't many people at this level that look like me. I take my work seriously, and I take it as a welcome responsibility – but it is a responsibility. I think about it, and I have to make proper choices and use the platform I have to the best effect.
With that in mind, can we touch on your style which is also inspirational. A woman ‘of a certain age’ and not conforming…
61! Let’s say it, I’m not scared of age. It's beautiful to be 61 – I'm privileged to get older. I just don't see why you would suddenly have a personality transplant just because you've got older. This is how I've always looked but now I have a stylist who helps me look even more like myself. Shara Johnson is absolutely incredible, and she's brilliant. She's helped me feel really confident. The idea that we’re supposed to disappear as we get older, doesn't make any sense to me.
Finally Andi, I’ve got some quickfire, culinary questions:
What’s your desert island carb?
Oh, baby, baby, baby, that's a hard one. I did make the most exceptional mac and cheese last night – I had about eight different cheeses in the fridge. So there's that, but then there's also roast potatoes. I mean, what are you going to do?
You're going to take rice. Rice is the correct answer.
You see, I was thinking about rice. I was thinking about seasoned rice, which is a really old school way of cooking rice in the Caribbean. It's traditionally made with bits of pork, like the foot, to get that sticky, cartilaginous, lovely mouth feel. You cook it with Gunga peas traditionally, but you can make it with black eyed peas. You don't even have to put any peas in. It holds together in a way that’s not claggy, but unified in its grain delivery.
I’ll let you take just one spice…
Just one spice? Interesting. Possibly turmeric, or coriander seed. Oh, or green cardamom.
If you're home alone, what do you make for yourself that’s not very cheffy but you love it?
I love lots of butter on a rice cake, a Marmite rice cake, with cheese on it. And what I like is really shit cheese, like Jarlsberg that's already been cut in packets. I love that.
The other thing I will eat industrial amounts of is dumpling noodle soup. I've worked out a way to make it fast with frozen dumplings (I used to have an actual dumpling freezer in my old flat that was specifically for dumpling emergencies). Buy half a roast Chinese duck and whack that in the oven. Get stock cubes, Chinese or Vietnamese [from an Asian supermarket]. Put them in hot water and suddenly you've got a bubbling pot of Asian broth. Chuck in noodles and some greens. Get the dumplings, dump them in. Get the duck out of the oven. All done in 40 minutes.
Hang on, can we rewind? A dumpling freezer?
At the moment, I know there's about five different bags of dumplings in my freezer and that helps keeps me feeling safe. Like, it's alright, there's something in the freezer. Nobody panic.
Oxford Brookes Chancellor’s Conversation.
The Pepperpot Diaries: Stories From My Caribbean Table
Andi Oliver talks to Paterson Joseph
The Sheldonian Theatre
Thursday 3 April
