FERVENT FUSION

FOOD WRITER MEHAK KANSAL TELLS ELLA WALKER ABOUT NEW COOKBOOK BINDAS, AND HOW SUMMERS SPENT IN INDIA, COMBINED WITH A VERY ENGLISH CHILDHOOD, HAVE SHAPED HER STYLE

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MEHAK Kansal cannot believe she has just gone and poured her “whole life into a book”. It sounds rather daunting, filling the pages of a cookbook with your entire world, but Mehak doesn’t seem the hesitant sort. At least, not these days.

The self-taught chef, food writer and founder of Bindas Eatery in West London, grew up in Wiltshire, where she spent her time riding horses and quad bikes and attending boarding school.

But her summers were spent with family in India, where she'd pay her grandmother's driver to take her on food-based jaunts. “It used to be: pay the driver, go and eat guavas, go to Haji Ali's juice centre, get fresh mango juice, complain about stomach pain, go and get something to remedy that. The driver would go to the phar-macy and give us something so my grandma wouldn’t know.

“Then we would go to the bowl-ing alley and afterward have butterscotch ice cream,” remembers Mehak happily. “Then we would say, ‘Yes, yes. We went to the tai-lor. Yes, yes, we went to the tem-ple’ Did we do any of those things? No, we just basically ate. That's what we did!”