As for her love of Thai food in particular, this was ignited after she visited the country. “It awakened something that was lying dormant in me,” she says, later adding: “I believe that in a previous life, whether you believe in this or not, I was Thai. I truly believe that, because there’s no logical explanation – I don’t have a Thai grandmother, I had a Jewish grandmother!”
When I ask what, specifically, captivated her about the cuisine, she explains: “It’s the sweet, the sour, the salty, the spicy. It’s the blend, the combination. It’s pure taste. It’s a balance of the yin and the yang, it really is.”
RECIPE: Philippa Kingsley’s Pad Thai noodles with vegan chicken or tofu
Green mango salad: yam mamuang (Photo: Phil Bekker)[Missing Credit]
Kingsley explains that the cornerstone of Thai cooking are the “fresh herbs and spices,” listing “lemongrass, galangal – which is a member of the ginger family, kaffir lime leaves, Thai chillies, coriander, mint and Thai basil – which is very different to the basil we use in Italian cooking,” as the key players. She also explains that Thai food is far from a monolith, telling me there are in fact five different styles. “You’ve got Royal Palace cuisine, which is what I call the cordon bleu of Thai cooking. Then you’ve got the food from the north, which is sandwiched between Burma and Laos, so it’s hot and spicy. The north east is even hotter, hot to trot as I call it – they tend to have a lot of chillies. Down south you’ve got you the ocean, so it’s very different there, there’s lots of coconut milk.
“Then, finally, you have the food in the middle of the night, the street-hawker food from the stalls and carts, and that’s great and fabulous,” she concludes, sharing her street food “rule of thumb” that “you won’t go wrong as long as the food is cooked freshly in front of you.”
Stir-fried pineapple rice: khao pad sapparot (Photo: Phil Bekker)[Missing Credit]
Tastes of Love and Light is packed full of wonderful wisdom like this, and so much more. Kingsley is keen the explain that it’s more than just a recipe book, telling me that she has brought her decades of experience cooking and teaching Thai food to the project, approaching each recipe as she would a class – sharing countless tips, tricks and insights, with the aim of not simply instructing readers on how to make one specific dish, but helping them to truly understand the essence of the cuisine itself.
The book features 86 of Kingsley’s personal recipes which she painstakingly veganised over a period of two years, split into nine chapters running from “awesome appetisers and canapes” to “delightful drinks” via the likes of “sumptuous salads” and “scintillating stir fries + noodles and rice”. What’s particularly fantastic is that being vegan, the whole book is naturally kosher, and Kinsley says that anyone struggling to source ingredients is welcome to reach out to her directly for help and advice.
Anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with Thai food will recognise some of the dishes and flavours – from sweet chilli sauce to pad Thai – but the book takes you far beyond the well-known classics. As a big curry fan, I’m particularly excited by her recipes for homemade pastes – which along with the ever-popular green, red and massaman, includes recipes for lesser-known Thai curries such as Phanaeng and pad prik khing.
RECIPE: Philippa Kingsley’s Thai coconut soup with vegan chicken or tofu
Kingsley at her book launch with Priabthip Krishnamra, the wife of the Thai ambassador to the UK (Photo: Philippa Kingsley)[Missing Credit]
Kingsley is a dizzying polymath – as well as a Thai cooking expert, she’s also an animal communicator, certified VortexHealing® practitioner, trained psychic and trance medium – and she rather movingly brings all of these aspects of her being into the book, explaining in the introduction that Tastes of Love and Light “bridges spirituality with Thai vegan cuisine”.
While these other aspects may not be to everyone’s taste, it’s worth noting that the woo-woo doesn’t intrude on the recipes themselves, and Kingsley is refreshingly neither preachy nor militant in her veganism.
“Whatever you choose to do in life is personal choice,” she tells me. “There are different reasons why one doesn’t eat meat – it’s not right or wrong. I don’t tell people you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that, because it’s a process, and you can’t tell people anyway.”
At other points, when she finds herself waxing lyrical about meat or fish, she tells me: “I can’t get away from my roots, because most of us all grew up eating meat. I have to honour where I came from. It’s a journey for all of us with everything in life.”
Ada Miller – Philippa Kingsley's maternal grandmother, and cooking inspiration (Photo: Philippa Kingsley)[Missing Credit]
While Thai food has become her passion, Kingsley traces her love of food back to her maternal grandmother’s traditional Jewish fare. “My grandmother was the most wonderful cook, she was my first influence 100 per cent,” she says, telling me how she “loved” and “embraced” her gefilte fish and halibut in egg and lemon sauce, and later worked her way through Florence Greenberg’s Jewish Cookbook, mastering these dishes for herself.
“Jewish cooking was in my soul,” she says, adding: “Food is connection. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you are, you connect through food.”
Tastes of Love and Light: A Thai Vegan Cookbook by Philippa Kingsley is on sale now, philippakingsley.com
Instagram: @philippakingsley
Tastes of love and light: a Thai vegan cookbook (Photo: Julia van Rijn)[Missing Credit]