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Hetty Lui McKinnon | |
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| Born | Sydney, Australia |
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| Subject | Vegetarian/Plant-based/Vegan cookbooks |
| Notable works | Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds |
| Notable awards | James Beard Foundation Award |
Hetty Lui McKinnon is an Australian Chinese Vegetarian/plant-based/vegan cookbook author, recipe developer, food writer, and James Beard Award finalist and winner. She has written five cookbooks with the fifth, Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds winning the James Beard Award for Vegetable Focused Cooking in 2024.
McKinnon was born in Sydney to Chinese immigrant parents from Guangdong, China. [1] Her father immigrated in the late 50s and her mom arrived in the early 1960s. [2] She has two siblings and is the youngest sibling. [3]
McKinnon's father worked at the Flemington Markets as an importer and exporter of bananas. [4] He brought fresh produce back for his family, which had a huge influence on McKinnon's later cooking. [4] McKinnon's father died in 1989, when she was 15 years old. [4] [5]
McKinnon's Australian upbringing and cross-cultural experiences profoundly shaped her. She recalls feeling like a minority outside of her home while also growing up in a traditional Chinese household. [6] McKinnon has stated that food was central to her family, calling it a "common language." [6] Although McKinnon grew up eating her mother's Cantonese food, she did not really cook in her childhood. [6]
When she was a 15-year-old high school student, McKinnon's career advisor dissuaded her from becoming a journalist, and encouraged her to study public relations instead. [6]
In the early 2000s, McKinnon moved to London because her husband got a job there. [1] She got a job at a PR agency. [1] McKinnon resided there for four years before moving back to Sydney with her husband. [1]
After her move back to Sydney, McKinnon was freelancing for a PR agency, but found herself gravitating towards cooking. When Mckinnon would put her children down for their naps, she would cook through Yotam Ottolenghi's first cookbook. [1] She credits this as a major turning point that helped her fall in love with cooking, learn practical techniques, and layer flavors. [1]
In 2011, McKinnon founded Arthur Street Kitchen, a community kitchen making salads that highlight local produce, in Sydney's Surry Hills neighborhood. [4] She made salads and sweets out of her home kitchen and delivered them by bike throughout the neighborhood. [1] The menu would rotate, ranging from salads she had been making for years to ones inspired by classic dishes. [7] McKinnon emailed out a weekly menu to subscribers that featured two salads a day, making deliveries on Thursday and Friday for up to forty people. [7]
In 2017, McKinnon began publishing a multicultural food magazine called The Peddler Journal. [1]
In 2018, McKinnon began a monthly column on ABC Everyday. [8] She is also a regular contributor to New York Times Cooking, The Washington Post, Bon Appetit, and Epicurious. [9]
After about a year, McKinnon decided to write a cookbook. [1] McKinnon was inspired by people asking for her salad recipes, which taught her to develop and write recipes. [1] She met the book's photographer, Luisa Brimble, during an interview with Broadsheet magazine, a Sydney-based magazine. [1] In 2013, McKinnon self-published Community, which was initially just supposed to be for Arthur Street Kitchen's subscribers. [1] However, after a feature in the Australian website The Design Files, McKinnon sold out of cookbooks. [1] A publisher at Pan Macmillan saw her cookbook and published it throughout Australia, where it sold upwards of 80,000 copies. [1]
In 2015, McKinnon moved to New York City's Carroll Gardens. [1] There, she wrote her second book, Neighborhood, over the course of three months. [1]
Her third cookbook, Family, focuses on "vegetarian comfort food." [1] She was inspired by the crowd-pleasing meals she cooked for her children, which were much more kid-friendly than the salads she made for Arthur Street Kitchen. [1]
Her fourth cookbook, To Asia, with Love, came out in 2020. [10] McKinnon shot all the photos for this book. [2] The book features easy Asian recipes and draws heavy influence from her experience as a third culture kid. [11] In interviews, McKinnon discussed how this cookbook was a way for her to reclaim her Chinese Australian heritage and celebrate Asian food culture. [11]
McKinnon credits her fifth cookbook, Tenderheart, as a means of processing the emotions around her father's death. [5] Originally, she planned to write the cookbook about her favorite vegetables, but felt gravitated to write about her father. [3] Many of the recipes in the book incorporate foods that he loved, like garlic chile oil, adobo, and tater tots. [12]
| Year | Awards and Honors | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | James Beard Foundation Award | James Beard Foundation Award: Vegetable Focused Cooking for Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds. [13] |
| 2022 | Finalist (nominated) | James Beard Foundation Award: Vegetable Focused Cooking for To Asia, with Love: Everyday Asian Recipes and Stories from the Heart. [14] |
| 2019 | Best Illustrated Book of the Year | Australian Book Industry Awards for Family: New Vegetarian Comfort Foods to Nourish Every Day. [15] |
| 2015 | Best Illustrated Book of the Year (Shortlisted) | Australian Book Industry Awards for Community. [16] |
McKinnon has been vegetarian since she was 19 years old. [4] In an interview, she stated that she had a general dislike of meat and went fully vegetarian once she started university. [4]
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