At 14 Thomasina Miers began earning cash ("£100-200") cooking for parents' friends' dinner parties, serving, "as a starter, lemongrass and coriander vichyssoise, for 12". Nowadays aged 38 and known for her cookbooks and Wahaca chain of Mexican street food restaurants she sits in her family kitchen in Kensal Green recalling her formative food memory. "I caused a boy I fancied to choke terribly on chilli oil I put on pasta at 16." In her gap year she headed off to Mexico and Central America, "sleeping in a hammock" and eating street food. But her parents insisted she pursue something mathematical.
"After university I had shit jobs including a prison management consultancy designing staff relocation programmes," she says, sitting at her kitchen's 14-capacity table (crafted from cattle truck panels). "But I found myself coming back to food as my meaningful pursuit." At 26, she met Clarissa Dickson Wright who told her, "Go off to cookery school at once don't waste more time". And Ballymaloe Cooking School was a total epiphany."
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