Czech IT OUT

FOR most British people Czech cuisine is “kind of a mystery’ says chef and cookery author Evie Harbury... “apart from the beer”.

- LAUREN TAYLOR chats to Evie Harbury about her debut cookbook and the food of her heritage

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 place it on a map,’ the 31-year-old notes.

England-born with Czech heritage on her dad’s side, Evie spent her childhood summers visiting her grandmother in South Bohemia, an hour from Prague, making hot chocolate on a wood-fired stove and cooking spekacek sausages over an open fire. “She was in a retired flour mill in a little hamlet, very rural, really off grid”

Evie - 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.

Food (and drink) is at the heart of Czech culture