Takeaway: Stories From a Childhood Behind the Counter

"This is a story of growing up in rural Wales. The impact of the closure of coal mines and deindustrialization in Wales has been profound and has left many towns and villages in a state of limbo. The industry that shaped their communities is no longer there—without a really definable new industry coming along. It’s a very specific experience and Angela captures it beautifully. Her parents own a takeaway. They’re one of many Chinese families dotted around the country who run takeaways. Several of her uncles are also running takeaways. Having a Chinese takeaway in rural Wales is a genre of experience all of its own. It’s inimitable. The book captures a lived experience, a slice of history. It feels like an important story that’s been told, and she’s told it very well. It’s a very moment-in-time book. It’s rooted in time and place and is very evocative of that time and place. “Fortnum & Mason’s is integral to Britain’s culinary history” It’s about the challenges of difference, of being one of the only Chinese people in the village. But there’s also the sense of a community that comes together when all of her family meet in Chinatown in Cardiff. Then they’re all together and they’re the norm rather than the other. It talks about her trips to Hong Kong every summer where they would buy all the ingredients that they couldn’t get in Cardiff. The book talks about the big Asian supermarket in Cardiff, and the wide-eyed wonder of being a child in these huge markets built for caterers. My grandparents owned a hotel and so I also remember going round these wholesale supermarkets with the kind of trolleys you get in garden centers and just piling huge sacks of flour on. I really related to that. It’s an incredible insight into what it must have been like. She has a loving, but tense, relationship with her father. They spent so much time at the takeaway. It was a family affair. It wasn’t just her parents: her brothers and her were roped into service. She felt quite estranged from her friends, not just in terms of her identity, but because of the time that she spent at the takeaway. All her spare time was filled by working there. It’s a very moving memoir, peppered with delicious meals. Yes. It really gives a grittiness that you’re not going to find in many food books. But it’s a grittiness that you can savor. Felicity Cloake, in Red Sauce Brown Sauce, talks about going back to a McMuffin. You expect her to hate it, but she loves it, because they’re disgustingly delicious. Angela talks about a teenager coming in and ordering chips and egg fried rice with curry sauce. She describes it and you’re like, ‘Oh, I really want chips and curry sauce and egg fried rice, right now!’ There’s a real place for foods that we know we shouldn’t have or shouldn’t have very often. We’ve gone down that rabbit hole and there they are and there’s no undoing them. There’s the cookbook award for established cookery writers, the debut cookbook award, the drinks book award and the debut drinks book award. And then we judged awards less relevant for your readers: food writer, debut food writer, cookery writer and debut cookery writer, drinks writer, debut drinks writer. And there are podcasts as well. It’s about food and love in all its many forms. It’s not just romantic love, it’s familial love, it’s friendship, it’s your colleagues, it’s yourself. It’s school food and funeral food. It’s the food you have after breakups and the way in which divorce shapes how you eat. It’s all the food and all the love I’ve experienced in my relatively short life. So it’s my story, but with other people’s stories woven in. I’m providing a narrative thread and then there are interviews with Diana Henry and Bee Wilson, with Olia Hercules and her husband, with friends of mine, with Lauren Bravo—an amazing fashion writer—with a kitchen designer, a psychologist and with a food historian. Not that I could find! Food and sex have been very much done, but there’s no sex in my book. That’s very obvious from the cover because it’s got alphabetic spaghetti on it."