Quantcast
Supermodel embraces love of food with new cookbook – Metro US

Supermodel embraces love of food with new cookbook

Supermodels aren’t known for sumptuous cooking and extravagant eating, but Sophie Dahl has broken the mould.

Dahl, 32, who has graced the cover of Vogue and posed nude for an Yves Saint Laurent Opium ad, is the proud author of Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights (HarperCollins), a new cookbook that dishes sensual pleasure through food. Though she has certainly done her fair share of diets — and talks about them in the book – Dahl has overcome earlier weirdness about food and answered what she calls a siren call to the kitchen.

“I live for cookbooks. I go to bed reading recipes,” she told Metro in a phone interview from the U.K., where she lives.

Recipes such as Vegetarian Monkfish with saffron sauce, Coconut Curry with Shrimp and Poached Eggs on Portobello Mushrooms with Goat’s Cheese are lovingly presented and beautifully photographed.

Dahl is a vegetarian — “the hangover of a hippie childhood,” so the recipes reflect that. In her modelling days, she was known as “the voluptuous Sophie Dahl” because she wasn’t paper-thin like most models.

“When I started modelling, I was a curvy, round 18-year-old. As I got older I stopped sticking my head in the fridge every two minutes and started exercising, so then I wasn’t so round. The great voluptuous Sophie Dahl, there’s a myth to the whole thing,” she tells Metro.

In the cookbook, she writes playfully about the effect her curvaceous figure had on people.

“The photographers at the end of the runway would sometimes catcall and whistle. It had been a long time since the advent of tits in fashion, so they were pretty enthused.”

Writing is in Dahl’s genes. She’s the grand-daughter of the famous Roald Dahl, author of children’s books James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She shares his famous sense of humour, which comes through in the names of her recipes. Try Hangover Eggs (“when nothing but a fry-up will do”) or Coquette’s eggs, which she served once to then-boyfriend Jamie Cullum, who is now her husband.

Dahl has already written one novel and is writing another. She’s also working on a cookery show for BBC, “like the world needs another!” she laughs.

“As much as I love food, I also love words,” says the prolific Dahl. “Words are as important to me as recipes. I love all those round words like abundance and voluptuous.”