FOOD Evie Harbury Evie Harbury: Everything you need to know about Czech food By Lauren Taylor, PA Czech cuisine is “kind of a mystery” to most British people, says chef and cookery author Evie Harbury – “apart from the beer”. Czechia, or the Czech Republic, is probably best known for its capital Prague, but its food has gone a little under the radar.“People sometimes can’t even place it on a map,” the 31-year-old notes. England-born with Czech heritage on her dad’s side of the family, Harbury spent her childhood summers visiting her grandmother in South Bohemia, an hour from Prague, making hot chocolate on a wood-fired stove and cooking traditional špekáček sausages over an open fire.“She was in a retired flour mill in a little hamlet, very rural, really off grid.” Unlike many cuisines around the world, Czech food “hasn’t had its moment”, says Harbury. “When people go to the Czech Republic, they quite often go to just Prague and Prague is amazing, it has an amazing food scene,Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, it’s got great Czech food in Prague – but there’s better Czech food outside of Prague. By not exploring, people often don’t actually know what it’s like.” So Harbury – who started cooking 10 years ago after moving to Czechia and working in a kitchen there, before formally training at Le Cordon Bleu – is on a mission to spread the word about this “small, unassuming” country and its food with her debut cookbook, My Bohemian Kitchen.
Here’s what you need to know…
Food (and drink) is at the heart of Czech culture
“If you are going round to someone’s house, they expect to feed you.You’re never going around just for a drink or just for a cup of tea – there’s always food on the table,” she says, “whether it’s something that they’ve handmade from scratch that morning, that they’ve picked from the garden, or it’s something that they’ve run out to the shop to get. “It’s kind of a way of telling you that they love you – by feeding or sharing their Slivovice with you.” Slivovice is a Czech plum brandy, which many people make at home, because there are plum trees everywhere.“When they share a bottle of their homemade Slivovice, that’s basically [saying] ‘I want you in my life forever’.And when you accept it, it’s like saying,‘Yeah I’m going to carry on drinking with you and spending time with you’. “Czechs – my family included – are not gushing people, saying ‘I love you so much, you’re the best’, but by giving you a box of Christmas biscuits, for example, you know that they love you, you know how welcome you are and you know that they don’t want you to leave by the extra dumpling on your plate.”
The basics
The first thing people think of is goulash, soups and dumplings, Harbury notes.And it’s true,
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