Review: Bella - My Life in Food
I have always struggled to reconcile conflicting aspects of Annabel Langbein’s public image. There’s the astute businessperson who self-published and published worldwide, making a lot more money than New Zealand food writers writing for our comparatively tiny market. Her The Free Range Cook television programme stuck conservatively to the middle of the road – also clearly designed to chase international profit. And yet we’re all familiar with the stories she tells about her time as a free-ranging hippie possum trapper or as a backpacker living la vida loca in South America.
Langbein tells a good yarn. In fact, even before this book we knew more about her personal life than any other New Zealand food writer or even most international food writers, come to think of it. Had Langbein been based in the UK, with her good looks and her adventurous past, the press would have dug the dirt for us. But Langbein has controlled her own story by sharing just enough with local media to keep us interested.
In this memoir, all the stories come together to give context to Langbein’s long and successful career. Her childhood was idyllic with a mother who was a good cook (of course). She learned to garden, fish and sail and cook but also received lots of love and attention from her parents, which gave her skills and the emotional intelligence not just to survive her life’s adventures, but to always be the most sensible person in the room.
Yes, all the stories worthy of women’s magazines and breakfast TV are there: the back broken in a horse-riding accident, the idealistic hippie lifestyle, possum trapping, baking croissants in Brazil, drugs, filthy language (tastefully in Spanish, mind you), bikinis and tsunamis of champagne.
Langbein has always liked to nudge-nudge wink-wink and the men are here, some of them named, some of them nicknamed, but she sensibly never shares any details from between the sheets.
You might not be buying Bella for the recipes but there are 60 of them. I checked Annabel Langbein’s website and a few were available there in slightly different formats. They’re vaguely thematically linked to what’s going on in the memoir, so I tested the only recipe that was specifically mentioned in the prose: pork cooked in milk. It was easy and the result was melt-in-the-mouth as billed.
Langbein’s breezy writing style means she moves effortlessly from one topic to the next, sometimes cramming so much information onto the page that you almost feel her energy. This energy must be the real secret to her success, though it also leads to a breakdown and a career pause. She is not afraid to share disappointment, sadness and heartache. In one touching chapter, she lyrically describes why she loved spending time in the bush while at the same time dealing with loneliness and deciding to take care of her boyfriend’s four children.
Bella adds an insight into the life of a successful food writer. She sometimes falls back on oversimplifying her life as risk-taking and lucky coincidences (OK, landing a Listener column in her mid-20s is almost too good to be true) but there was formal training and education, constant inquiry and learning about food, hard slog and perseverance. And yet at the peak of her career, attending the swanky Cannes television trade show, charmingly, “No other talent ever attended meetings, let alone brought home baking, but everyone seemed to like it.”
And the story of how her books came to be published in nine languages around the world is there and it’s a ripper of a yarn.
Reviewed by André Taber
