Chef who puts the super into fresh soup

FOOD and Yorkshire are the lifeblood of Belinda Williams, who grew up on a farm near Masham, where everything was home-made.

“We lived, breathed and slept food as a family,” says Belinda. “My parents were from the generation that grew up on rations and they made everything themselves.

We didn’t buy anything from the grocer apart from yeast, flour, sugar and some breakfast cereal.

“We had our own chickens and pigs and I knew how to boil and braise a tongue by the age of eight.”

Mum Peta and dad Mike tended a kitchen garden too.

Family meals, recalls Belinda, were simple but “quite foodie” – “fresh eggs on wilted spinach with home-cured bacon,” she says.

Home is now a converted farm cottage and cattle shed on the edge of Bedale, to which Belinda and husband Terry have added a showstopping kitchen annexe.

With three grown-up sons – Joss, 21, Louis, 20 and Ben, 18 – they now share the home with their two dogs, black Labrador Gillie, and Fox, a Border terrier dachshund, as well as the family cat. Belinda’s horse Ash and her new foal Pepper are stabled in the farm outside.

Work began on the conversion last year, finally providing Belinda with a kitchen worthy of her culinary credentials.

Gone is the tiny galley kitchen, replaced by a spacious designer version, with sleek black marble tops and shiny gloss-white doors.

There is a conventional cooker and an Aga as well as a central island with sink and oak worktop, which doubles as a breakfast bar.

The modern design contrasts with the rest of the downstairs, which retains its period feel – all flagstones, exposed beams and open fires.

The showpiece of the dining room is a large wooden table, picked up at a local auction. An oversized basket sits in an alcove, filled with logs, ready for the fire.

Red rowan berries are prettily arranged in vases throughout, picked by Belinda from the hedgerows around the farm.

“I love flowers,” she says, enthusiastically. “If I hadn’t been a cook, I would have loved to have been a florist.”

Belinda has been cooking – and making a business from cooking – for as long as she remembers. At the age of 14, she set up The Blin Thing, and began cooking at dinner parties and filling client’s freezers with delicious, home-made fare. At weekends, the family served afternoon teas from their front parlour.

“It was my pocket money,”

says Belinda. “I spent the money on clothes.”

Aged 17, she trained as a cordon bleu chef at a private cookery school, then used her skills to see the world, working on yachts in the Caribbean and at ski resorts in Switzerland.

She met her husband, an Aussie, while travelling Down Under.

Together, they set up the Yorkshire Party Company, then launched Yorkshire Provender soups seven years ago, after spotting a gap in the market.

Soup was probably man’s first hot meal, says Belinda Williams

This winter, Belinda’s first soup book is released – Delicious Soups – featuring a feast of imaginative recipes.

It’s been a genuine labour of love, says Belinda. Each recipe begins with an anecdote, linking the soup to a memory, person or occasion.

Take Yorkshire Provender’s trailblazing beetroot and parsnip soup with horseradish.

Belinda describes how she wanted to make a bright and colourful dish and was inspired by childhood recollections of playing with Play- Doh. Far from being just a winter soup, she insists, her beetroot recipe is one for all seasons.

“In summer, serve it with some creme fraiche with wasabi or horseradish and topped with a scattering of edamame beans. In winter, add creme fraiche, but sprinkle it with root veg crisps.”

From simple broths to luxurious consommes and seafood bisques, the book reflects Belinda’s passion for soup.

She says: “Soup is a brilliant medium. It has the ability to be incredibly elegant or atmospheric or homely and healing. I think soup was probably man’s first hot meal and most likely it will be his last.”

• Delicious Soups by Belinda Williams (Ryland Peters & Small, £16.99)