Caroline Byron on mission to show gluten-free food tastes good
Caroline Byron is on a mission to show healthy food can also taste good.
Caroline Byron is standing in the middle of a private members’ club in central London. She is 27, tall and super-slim with clear skin, clean, glossy, curled brown hair (lots of it), chocolate-brown almond-shaped eyes and legs like knitting needles. She looks utterly amazing, like a long streak of dark honey on legs.
The Upper East Side New Yorker has with her three round, white containers that look like hat boxes. They are inscribed with the words Simply Caro, the umbrella term for brand Byron. If that brings to mind Simply Nigella, the name of Nigella Lawson’s last book and television series, then it might interest you to know that she shares a literary agent, Ed Victor, with the domestic goddess.
Byron is the latest in-vogue cook who considers health as much as taste when she creates her recipes. She may soon be up there with Ella Woodward of Deliciously Ella fame and Amelia Freer — an American poster girl for eating yourself healthy. As well as having a slick social-media profile — website, blog, Instagram, etc — she is the party caterer of the moment, much in demand among the fashion crowd and modelling set. Everything she makes is gluten-free.
Though she caters for the likes of Rebecca Minkoff and Herve Leger, it’s not all glamour. “I’m often sweating away in a hot kitchen,” she insists. Still, she lunches with Diane von Furstenberg and hangs out with the Hemsleys when they’re in New York.
A former model herself, Byron was seen recently on the front row at New York Fashion Week with Princess Beatrice. What did they gossip about? “She was asking me about my gluten-free diet and she was really interested,” says Byron. Did she try any? “Yes. She tried my chocolate-chip cookies and she said that she loved them.”
It seems inevitable that Byron will be labelled as the latest “new Nigella”, but though she looks similar to Lawson — only about half her size — she looks far too wholesome to lick chocolate suggestively from a spoon.
“I love Nigella,” she says. “When I watch her programs it feels as if I am in her home. Of course I’d like that profile. And I do use chocolate in my recipes,” she adds defensively, “but it’s 75 per cent dark chocolate.”
Would she like to do a television program? “Yes. I’d be really happy to do that,” she enthuses. It helps that she is so good-looking, I suggest. “Erm, I guess so ... but I hope it’s also about the quality of the food. I am trying to show people that cooking gluten-free is good for you but it is also tasty.”
Byron may be gluten-free but she is not a vegetarian. She doesn’t spend her entire life cooking quinoa — though, let’s be honest, she does eat a lot of quinoa and much of her baking uses quinoa flour. She is also obsessed with food and where it comes from, spending hours traipsing around New York trying to find the best fish and going to farmers’ markets to buy organic vegetables.
Yet she eats sweet things: cookies, apple pies and carrot cupcakes topped with swirls of sweet icing. She makes “crinkle chocolate and coconut small bites”, as she calls them, pear tarts and the sort of sweet, more-ish, fripperies and fancies that you would assume the fashion set would avoid as if they were laced with poison.
“No! I don’t find that,” she says. “People love my sweet things. I do cupcakes all the time for fashion shows and parties.”
How has she persuaded people with a reputation for ultra-healthy living and a commitment to being sub-size zero (maybe unfounded) to eat sugar and chocolate? “It’s about two things,” she says. “When you tell people that the cake or cookie is gluten-free they relax a bit. It sounds healthier and it is more healthy because I use better ingredients in my cookies. I use coconut oil instead of butter and I replace a lot of the sugar with healthier alternatives such as agave syrup or coconut sugar so you don’t get a sugar spike when you eat them. Also, I make them small. My chocolate and coconut crinkles are tiny so people can get a lovely sweet treat without feeling guilty.”
Quite often, she says, she doesn’t let on that what she is cooking is gluten-free. “I’ve done canapes for parties and mini pizzas and I don’t tell people because I want to know if they like the food regardless.” She says that the response has been overwhelmingly positive. “Most people say they can barely tell the difference.”
In many ways, Byron’s story is more similar to Woodward’s than Nigella’s. Like Woodward, Byron came to her dietary epiphany through being very ill as a child. “I got Lyme disease when I was about 10 years old,” she says. Unfortunately, it was not diagnosed until she was 15. “By then I’d been homeschooled.”
She spent her time watching cookery programs. “I loved the Barefoot Contessa,” she says. She would try to recreate the dishes for her mother and the bridge group that came round each week. “I loved baking. My grandmother used to bake a lot and I’d watch her. My mother didn’t cook, though. We’d either eat out or get takeaways.”
It was only when a doctor suggested that Byron try going gluten-free to ease her symptoms that she noticed a change in her health. “Up until then my guts were a mess. I had acne. My limbs ached all the time. It’s so hard to explain but it felt terrible.” Once she had cut out gluten, her symptoms started to go.
“That’s when it changed for me,” she says. “It wasn’t easy because there wasn’t a lot of gluten-free stuff available back then, so I spent my time sourcing different flours and grains and trying to recreate recipes without the gluten in them.”
Unlike Woodward, Byron is a trained chef. She dropped out of college in Boston — “couldn’t stand it, it all felt wrong” — seemingly destined for a career in modelling, which she had done alongside her studies between the ages of 18 and 22. Then friends persuaded her to develop her talent for cooking, and she enrolled at the French Culinary Institute in New York. Its most famous alumnus is Anthony Bourdain, the rebel chef who wrote about his experiences there in the best-selling Kitchen Confidential.
“It was an incredible place,” Byron says. “It was full of these ancient French chefs who made me cook an omelet 20 times in order to get it right. I had to chop carrots in so many different ways and if they were half a millimetre over the required width or length they’d be chucked out and I had to start again.”
It was such intense work that any ambition she had of modelling was soon forgotten. The effect of her training also meant she was back on eating gluten and sugar. “My weight ballooned. My skin was terrible. My symptoms came back.” It’s what convinced her to make the change in her diet for good, and she says the rigorous training helped her. “I got to understand how ingredients work together and what role they play in the creation of a dish. I can see why you need fats and eggs and flour, so now I experiment with getting the same result but in a different way.”
She hands me a coconut chocolate cookie from one of the hat boxes. It’s moist and tasty. I try a chocolate cookie from another box. It also tastes great but of coconut (again), as do the carrot cakes. The icing is lovely but, she says: “I still haven’t managed to make icing without butter in. I can’t get it to work.” The only other thing she has failed to recreate satisfactorily is the croissant. “I haven’t perfected a gluten-free croissant. I just don’t think it’s possible.”
She accepts that there is no scientific base to the argument that going gluten-free helps her or anyone else’s symptoms. “I think it’s probably sketchy,” she says, “but I know that cutting gluten and sugar out of my diet has made a real difference to my health.” On holiday in Cuba last year she accidentally ate something with gluten and felt terrible.
Maybe all this “healthy” eating is masking eating disorders in some people, I suggest. After all, if you want to be thin, what better way than to say you can’t eat gluten or sugar or fats or anything? “I accept the fact that there may be people for whom that is true,” she says, “but the rise in gluten-free products is about more than that.”
It is a First World issue though, isn’t it? “Yes, I guess so, but that doesn’t mean people in other countries aren’t suffering ill health because of too much gluten in the diet. How on earth would we know?” She also points out that her concern is that flour and other products in the US have much higher gluten in them than they used to. “I source things like sorghum flour and millet and lots of Third World countries use more natural products anyway.”
She rails against the pervasive “take out” culture in New York. “My friends are on their phones all the time ordering food and it’s so depressing,” she says. She often has dinner parties. She cooks for her boyfriend. “He is not gluten-free,” she says, “but he loves my food. He’ll get there eventually.”
The Times