Jill Dupleix's husband lost 77lbs with help from her new book, Lighten Up. Marie-Claire Digbymeets the Australian food writer
Jill who? That was the reaction of many readers eight years ago when Jill Dupleix, an Australian sheep farmer's daughter and former advertising copywriter, replaced the much-loved Frances Bissell as "The Times Cook", the rather archaic title for the London newspaper's food editor.
Dupleix was food editor of the Sydney Morning Herald when the call came inviting her to London, and she didn't quite know what to make of the offer. "I actually rang Robert Carrier [the Australian chef, TV presenter and food writer], who is an old mate of mine, and I said, I've been offered this amazing-sounding job, but is it really amazing, or is it - and here's an Australian term coming up - is it really daggy - is it like, a bit naff, because it sounds really weird?
"And he said 'It's cookery editor of the Times. It's fabulous and you'd be great. Do it.' I had just fallen over laughing when they offered it to me. I thought, how could this be? The cookery editor of the Times . . . Jill from Camperdown, Victoria? But it was the year 2000, and everyone was going very 'new millennium', and I think they just wanted a breath of fresh air. And I loved it, but it was a bit of a learning curve on their part and mine, to have an Australian in there going: 'throw rocket on everything,' and 'bring out the barbie'."
Dupleix shook things up with her exciting new recipes, many of them infused with south-east Asian nuances, unusual ingredients, and what she describes as "a certain lightness and spontaneity." It wasn't all plain sailing however, and she remembers receiving a letter from a reader who lived in the country, saying "Do you think I am going to drive 40 miles to buy a bottle of soy sauce?"
Dupleix was the fourth Times Cook since the position was instigated in 1955, and after six years in the job, she is now a freelance food writer and author of 14 best-selling cookery books. When we meet to talk about her latest book, Lighten Up, she has been in Dublin only 48 hours - or "six meals", as she describes the time span - and already she's totally au fait with the city's best places to eat, drink and shop for good food.
"We loved the Winding Stair, both the bookshop and the restaurant. I can't work out which I like the most. What a special place. All the important things in life are there - good books, good food, good wine. I ate boiled collar of bacon and the most beautiful smoked salmon with little smoked mussels and smoked mackerel and beautiful, really treacley dark bread. That was stunning. Last night we had dinner at Locks, which was just gorgeous. But the menu I've seen in Dublin that I think is the most inspiring is at L'Écrivain. Whoever's putting that menu together really knows how to put food together, everything was just so compatible, and yet it wasn't done a million times before. There was a real freshness to it."
Dispatching her husband, restaurant critic Terry Durack, to Fallon & Byrne in search of the wild mushrooms she needs for her guest chef appearance on RTÉ television later that afternoon, she tells him she'll meet him there later, and it transpires that since their arrival in Dublin, the Exchequer Street food emporium has become something of a home from home for the couple.
"When the Afternoon Show invited me to do some cooking on the show, I said to Terry, come with me and we'll do one of our three-day attacks on a foodie city and find out what's good. Fallon & Byrne was definitely on my list, just to drop in and see what it's like. But we ended up having breakfast there one day, and a lunch.
"They have an idea that I'm going to pinch. They do little piles of a lemon jelly to serve with the smoked salmon, and we thought it would be great with oysters, too. I thought, what a clever idea. I'm always looking for ideas that give you loads of flavour, without fat. That punchy flavour of the lemon in the jelly gives you texture, it gives you fun, and it looks great. And it's a relish, but it's not loaded with sugar and cream."
The "no cream" bit is central to Dupleix's food philosophy, and although she's adamant that her latest book, Lighten Up, isn't a diet book - "it's a cook book that happens to have recipes that are healthy as well as delicious" - it helped her husband lose a hefty 35kg (77lbs), and keep it off. "I have always loved good food, but now I want it to be good for me, too. So I have learned how to lighten up on everything but freshness and flavour, without the cream, pastry and unnecessary animal fats that slow me up and weigh me down," she says.
Unlike most healthy eating regimes, Dupleix's version doesn't involve deprivation of any kind; there's even a recipe for cupcakes lurking among the more health-giving dishes. "Nutritionists say if you're eating moderately and well 80 per cent of the time, you're allowed the rest of the time off, which sounds good to me," she says. This approach to eating, she explains, "lets you off for a bit, so when you do run into a good cupcake, you can enjoy the hell out of it, and then move on."
Dupleix stresses that she and her husband changed their eating habits gradually, and Durack's significant weight loss didn't happen overnight. "It was slow, and I think that's the trick. Just doing it really slowly and really healthily and making decisions based on health rather than weight loss. I was doing it too, helping him. I don't really think you can say, 'I'm going to eat like a horse and you're not'. He noticed results over the first month, but then the belt started going in seriously over three or four months. Then he got really confident about it and just kept going. It's how we've been eating every since."
So, is it all too good to be true - lose weight and feel loads better while still eating full meals and enjoying them? "I think what is too good to be true is these diets that come in, the fad diets and the celebrity diets. Yes you can lose the weight on them, and yes, you put it back on. They're too unreal, you cannot sustain them. You've got to find a way of eating, especially if you love eating, that you can sustain for the rest of your life."
The Lighten Up philosophy relies on eating a little of what you want, when you want it, provided it's good, wholesome, fresh food. Nothing is forbidden, but a system of debits and credits applies. "There are all sorts of different ways of lightening up, but you've got to have a life, and you still have to look forward to every single meal," she says. "That's never going to change for Terry and I, we're too far gone now. And also, one of the real reasons we have to lighten up is, we love a drink. I just think, okay, I've worked out what's important to me and my glass of red wine with dinner is incredibly important to me, and my Campari and soda, therefore I am going to do a trade-off. I can do without cream, for instance, but not red wine. Terry has discovered he can live without beer, but not without sausages."
Eating a good breakfast, preferably one containing oats, is Dupleix's first advice to those trying to shed a few pounds. "My life only started working when I began having breakfast, and by that I mean porridge oats, every morning. Now, I'm too terrified to stop."
After that, it's a matter of making the right choices in what you eat, and retraining your appetite not to expect sugary, fat-laden foods. "It takes a while to change your eating habits, change your cravings. Terry used to crave a sandwich in the middle of the afternoon, or if we'd gone out for dinner and he wasn't fully happy, he'd come home and have another sandwich. And now it's "have we got any crisp apples, or pears? He has just switched, over time, to cravings for things like that."
It seems there's hope for us all.
Lighten Up: A Healthy New Way to Cook, by Jill Dupleix, with photographs by Petrina Tinslay, is published by Quadrille (£16.99)
SALMON, ORANGE AND CHICKPEA SALAD Serves four
600g salmon fillet, skin on, pin boned
sea salt and pepper
1 orange
1 tbsp orange zest
2 tbsp orange juice
1 tsp lemon zest
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp olive oil
400g canned chickpeas, rinsed
handful of rocket leaves or mâche
3 tbsp small black olives
1 tbsp tiny salted capers, rinsed
2 tbsp mint leaves
Heat the oven to 200 degrees/gas six. Place the salmon on a foil-lined roasting tray. Bake for 10 minutes. Rest the fish for 20 minutes. Peel off the skin, break the flesh into chunks with your fingers and season well. Cut away the skin and pith from the orange, then cut the flesh into chunks. Whisk the orange zest and juice, lemon zest and juice, olive oil, salt and pepper in bowl. Add the salmon, chickpeas, rocket or mâche, orange segments, olives, capers and mint leaves, and toss lightly. Serve on a large shared plate or four dinner pates.