Feedback with Martha Collison

Feedback with Martha Collison

You might recognise Martha from the 2014 series of The Great British Bake Off, where she wowed everyone with her baking skills aged only 17.

Since then, she’s continued to share her love for baking through cookbooks, TV appearances and inspiring home bakers everywhere. She joins us as our guest this month and explains why her most memorable meal was in a refugee camp in Lebanon, and why the indentations on her rolling pin are from trying to release frozen ice cream sandwiches during a live demo!

Her latest book Pull up a Chair published this month, and is a book she says she has dreamed of writing for years. With 90 new recipes to take the fuss from entertaining it celebrates the joy of eating together. From breakfast to dinner, whether it’s a little treat to share over coffee with a friend, a three-course extravaganza or a weeknight dinner for two.

You can win a copy of Pull up a Chair in our competition - just click the link below.
 

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What food always reminds you of your childhood?
Neither of my parents were particularly keen cooks but there are two things that really take me back.  The first is tuna pasta bake, it was a weekday staple that I just looked forward to and loved. It was very simple, literally the tuna, sweetcorn, mayonnaise version with a pack of crumbled up cheese and onion crisps on top. But you know something that just feels very nostalgic whenever we have it even now, I do a pimped-up version with other little bits and pieces, but it takes me back to those after school evenings where we would just have a tuna pasta bake. The second thing is Jamaica ginger cake (yes, the McVitie’s one!) – my mum would use it to create the base of our birthday cakes, shaping it into whatever number our age was and then decorating it herself, so the taste is always nostalgic.

Do you have a current favourite restaurant or type of restaurant?
I feel like a lot of people aren’t keen, but I really like small plates restaurants. There are mixed opinions about them, my husband isn't a huge fan but when I was growing up as a kid in a restaurant, I would just ask for an empty plate rather than a kid’s menu because I would much rather try a little bit of everyone else's meal than commit to my own. There's a really great restaurant here in Hove called Palmito where they do really eclectic small plates that originate from all over the world. There are Asian, American, South American influenced dishes and you just have a little bit of everything. I really enjoy getting all those flavour sensations in the meal.

Do you think that the fact that you tried everybody's else's food when you were a child gave you the cooking bug?
I think so, it set a passion within me definitely because although my parents really like food, they just weren't that interested in cooking and spending a lot of time cooking. I loved sampling all the different things, and when I got to secondary school, I learnt how to cook really efficiently in food technology. I then pulled it together when we travelled on holidays as a family, so we'd get different influences from different places.

Did you end up taking over the family cooking then when you were young?
Yes, I did. My mum was very intent in teaching us how to make things that were useful, not just cakes, so I learnt how to make pasta sauce when I was about nine. Then I think from about thirteen I was the one saying, ‘What’s on the menu this week?’ and “What can I make from what’s in the fridge”? My family were okay with that because they didn't have to cook, and I was happy to do it.

What food or ingredient could you not do without?
I've gone with butter because I just think that proper salted butter is very transformative in both sweet and savoury cooking. It can make a boring loaf of bread taste brilliant. Particularly in sweet dishes I think really good, salted butter helps to balance out the levels of sweetness and can make something like a flapjack really nourishing and delicious.

Is there a memorable meal you can remember eating?
This was a difficult question - I was racking my brains. I think this is a memorable meal based on a memorable meal, but I got married six years ago and for our wedding we had a Lebanese-Meze style sharing situation. A couple of months before we got married, I went over to Lebanon with a charity I was working with, and we visited a refugee camp. There was a family that invited just me and two other members of the charity to have a meal with them. We actually sat on the floor of their refugee tent and learnt their story and they fed us with such a feast that they'd managed to cook on the one tiny camping stove with kind of like vermicelli rice, spiced chicken thighs, chopped salad and homemade bread. I sat there eating it thinking, I cannot believe your generosity and that you would share this food with us, it’s part of their culture and part of the way they love to make us feel welcome. And second, just how delicious everything is. We sit in our houses full of ingredients and we can't always be bothered to make our food taste so good. So, I took the kind of inspiration from that, and we translated that into our wedding, and I really enjoyed the memory.

Is there something particular you always keep in the fridge?
I feel like our fridge is always embarrassingly packed more so of ingredients than of actual food. People open our fridge and go 'Oh, you’ve got lots of jars', but I really love having what I would call flavour enhancers or flavour bombs. Things like jars of harissa, mustard, kimchi, capers, anchovies, that all last a long time but they can completely change a very simple pasta or rice dish with just a spoonful of it. So, things like that we have the plentiful stocks of.

If you spend a day working in the kitchen, what's your go-to quick supper?
I normally would go for eggs. My favourite for a lazy day would probably be dippy eggs and soldiers and I'd have sourdough toast with a very thin layer of Marmite and that would be that. And a cup of tea!

During your live demos, have you had any disasters that you've managed to keep away from the public eye?
Yeah, there's definitely been a few disasters. I'm quite good at working under pressure and covering things up. I worked on Graham Norton’s radio programme for a long time as a show chef, so I was making recipes and talking about them on the radio. Sometimes behind the scenes we would be all over the place and it would be chaos, but nobody could see it.  long time ago, I was doing a demo for ice cream sandwiches, and I was trying to show how you could use a cookie cutter to cut circles out of the layers, but it had frozen solid, and the cookie cutter just wouldn't go in. I took a rolling pin and tried to bash through the cutter into it as hard as I could, and the force made everything else on the bench start to slowly move towards the edge. We averted a crisis because nothing actually fell off, but my rolling pin ended up with big indentations and the ice cream remained as one huge slab - it never did pop out!

How are you managing to continue working since the arrival of baby Kenny?
We're doing well. Definitely a big adjustment but I'm very grateful for my village of people and my husband looks after him sometimes, my mum looks after him sometimes. I do a lot of late nights of recipe testing and I try out some of them on him too. I think he is got a very experienced palate now for such a young boy because sometimes I'm like oh “I wonder what he'd make of samphire!”

What would be your last supper if anything was available? Where would you eat it and who would you be with?
Oh, this is such a difficult question! I think I'm very much a family girl and I think it would just have to be one of my mum's roast dinners. She makes an epic roast chicken recipe but it's very simple because my mum isn't much of a cook, but she's got a great roast chicken recipe that I'm putting into my new book, Pull Up a Chair. She makes it with an amazing cauliflower cheese and lots of fresh veggies. Sticky toffee pudding is my favourite dessert, so I’d go for that, or some really good mint chocolate chip ice cream.  To drink I’d probably have a gin and tonic and if it's an ideal day it would be in the garden on a balmy summer’s day, with all my family.

Pull Up A Chair by Martha Collison published May 8th 2025 by Octopus Books. £26 Hardback

Win one of 3 copies of Martha's new book Pull up a Chair in our competition here