British live-fire cook Genevieve Taylor didn’t start out romanticizing cooking over an open flame, with visions of industry cred or Michelin stars dancing in her head. She started doing it as a practical escape.
“I used to be a natural history television producer making wildlife documentaries,” said Taylor in a phone interview from her home in Bristol, England. “Then I had my family and realized I couldn’t travel the world doing that anymore.” At home with two young children, she found the rhythm of daily meals a tad stifling. “I get very frustrated if I’m shut inside for too long, like a little wild cat.”
So she went outside.
Taylor began cooking over fire pits in her garden, sometimes with her then-toddlers (safely) helping out. “I wired forks onto long bamboo poles and stuck sausages on the end so they could cook their own dinner,” she explained.
That small workaround, an al-fresco reprieve prompted by being cooped up indoors, soon became a career. Big time. Now the author of 14 cookbooks and founder of Bristol Fire School (where she teaches live-fire cooking in her own yard), Taylor is one of the United Kingdom’s leading voices in live-fire cooking, the art of preparing food over burning wood or coals.
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On May 1, Taylor will bring her fiery prowess to Heritage Barbecue for a one-night, 42-seat dinner alongside lauded pitmaster Daniel Castillo. The $200, five-course feast celebrates her latest book, “How to BBQ: The Definitive Guide to Fire Cooking” and doubles as a fundraiser for scholarships at the Co-Lab Culinary Training Collective in Santa Ana.
Menu highlights will include maple-cured cold smoked bass crudo with lime and tequila, smoked honey carrots with burrata, ribeye tagliata, slow-roasted and pork shoulder, alongside fig leaf custard with walnut meringue for dessert presented, but of course, in Eton Mess style.
Taylor’s cooking resists cliches often shellacked to barbecued fare. “It certainly isn’t going to be ribs and sweet sauce,” she said. “You can create food that has incredible nuance, layers of color and texture freshness.”
Her philosophy extends to how she thinks about fire itself. Many home cooks, she explained, misunderstand barbecue as simply high heat. “People just burn the crap out of everything because they’re cooking it way too hot,” she said.
But her work with the flame focuses on control. In her view, fire is not a blunt instrument to pummel meat or blaze it into charred submission, but as a tool, noting, “Once you understand what fire is, you can control it and use it to cook anything.”
That technical expertise is central to her new book, which opens with 11 core techniques before moving into recipes. The goal of “How to BBQ” isn’t so much dish replication as it is culinary fluency. “Once you’ve mastered those techniques, you can pick up any cookbook and go, ‘Actually, I can cook this on my barbecue.’”
At Heritage Barbecue, the San Juan Capistrano institution regarded as one of America’s finest barbecue spots, Taylor will put her ethos on full display. “They just said, “What do you want to cook?’ So I’ve come up with this menu, and it’s going to be different from anything else on their menu,” she revealed. (Taylor and Castillo met years ago at one of the Ecology Center’s Community Table dinner series.)
When asked what she’s looking forward to most when she lands in the Golden State, Taylor said she’s especially interested in California’s produce, which she called “insane” compared to what’s available in the U.K. “All those things we eat over here, we have to import them, so they’re not at their peak,” she said.
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More broadly, Taylor said she sees live-fire cooking gaining traction globally, both in restaurants and at home. Part of the reason, she suspects, is a reaction to our modern age and interferences. “Cooking got technical and very digital” over the last few years, she said, adding that “there’s a bit of a kickback to take it back to basics, taking some fuel and some ingredients and putting the two together.”
This return, at least for Taylor, isn’t steeped in nostalgia but connection. According to the prolific author and pitmaster, fire is universal, cutting across borders, traditions and trends.
“There’s not a country on the planet that doesn’t have a history of cooking with fire,” she said. ”It’s something deep down in all of us somewhere.”