Clarissa Hyman is an award-winning, freelance writer specialising in food and travel: food with travel, travel with food, food without travel, but never travel without food. Her ambition, partially fulfilled, is to find other people to pay for her to eat her way around the world. She contributes to a wide range of newspapers, magazines and guides, and has published a number of books, including The Spanish Kitchen (2005), Cucina Siciliana (2002) and The Jewish Kitchen (2003).  As she says, the difference between an Italian and a Jewish mother is "the accent!"

Clarissa comes from a family dedicated to eating. Her parents owned a jewish deli in her home city of Manchester, England and she confesses to being brought up in a pickle barrel, with "schmaltz in my veins".

She has a love-hate relationship with food: "Love to eat it, hate to leave it."

Food, however delicious in itself, is also a means for Clarissa to explore a wider world of culture and history, art and agriculture.

"It is a way in which to understand different peoples and societies: why they eat, what they eat, how they eat, when they eat all contributes to a picture of a certain society at a certain point in time. That is why I find writing about food eternally fascinating, never boring, always revelatory. You take a slice of bread, for example, and can end up learning about religious practices, superstitions, botantical classifications, farming methods, chemistry or social history. And that's before you even begin to butter it!"

Coming from a journalistic background, cookery writing is a relatively new departure for Clarissa. Rather than try and re-invent the wheel, however, she prefers to regard herself as a culinary archivist, never happier than collecting recipes: "I love nothing better than to stand next to someone in their kitchen, either domestic or professional, whilst they tell me about their recipe, how they cook it, what it means to them and the stories behind that recipe."

As such, her interest in food is broad-based, taking in producers, ingredients, restaurants, recipes, food policy, consumer trends and much more. With a background in television production, Clarissa can also bring a multi-media approach to her work and writing.

SPECIAL INTERESTS

• Food and travel
• Italian and Sicilian food
• Spanish food
• Jewish food
• Restaurants
• Producers
• Ingredients