Regula Ysewijn, MBE (born 1983) is a Flemish food writer and photographer. She is known in Belgium as a judge for the television programmes Bake Off Vlaanderen and Junior Bake Off and internationally as one of the judges for the special progamme BBC One's The Jubilee Pudding: 70 Years in the Baking [1] (2022). Ysewijn is the author of six books on food and drink culture and has been a judge for the Guild of Fine Food for 10 years.
Ysewijn grew up in Antwerp, in the Flemish part of Belgium. She studied graphic design at the Sint Maria Institute in Antwerp, after which she did two more years of specialization in fashion design. After working for a short time in the fashion industry, she worked for seven years as a graphic designer in advertising.
In 2010, she started her blog, which led to her becoming a freelance writer in 2013. From 2014 to 2016 she wrote for the British digital magazine Fish on Friday. Pieces for The Guardian [2] and the iNews [3] and several other publications followed. Ysewijn mainly writes about culinary history and published her first book, Pride and Pudding in 2015, about the history of British puddings in Belgium and in 2016 in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US. Belgian Café Culture, the National Trust Book of Puddings, Brits Bakboek, Oats in the North, Wheat from the South [4] (The British Baking Book in the US) and The Official Downton Abbey Christmas Cookbook [5] followed.
Following the release of The British Baking Book, Ysewijn was praised in 2020 by The New Yorker Magazine for recognizing the role of slavery in the development of a baking culture in Europe, but also for writing culinary history in a readable and clear way. [6] On June 8 2024 she became the first Belgian author to win the prestigious James Beard Awardhttps://www.eater.com/24173865/james-beard-foundation-awards-2024-media-winners-cookbooks-journalism for her book Dark rye and Honey cake, Festival baking from Belgium the heart of the Low Countries. A book with history and recipes.
She has been one of the two judges for the Bake-off Vlaanderen program since 2017 and Junior Bake Off since 2020. She is also a jury member of the Guild of Fine Food's 'Great Taste Awards' and the World Cheese Awards. On January 10, 2022, Regula was announced as one of the judges of The Platinum Pudding Competition in honor of the Platinum Jubilee of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II.
In August 2024, she was awarded the title of MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) by King Charles III in recognition of her services to British food and culture in Belgium and the UK.
Besides Bake Off Vlaanderen, which started in 2017, Ysewijn also regularly participates in television and radio programs in the United Kingdom, including BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme, BBC One Breakfast, BBC One 'Inside the Factory ' and as a jury member in BBC One The Platinum Pudding: 70 years in the baking , a program about the search for the Platinum Pudding [7] [8] for the Queen's Jubilee in 2022.
2016 - Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink Awards nomination for Pride and Pudding
2016 - Andre Simon Memorial Award Nomination for Pride and Pudding
2017 - Best British Culinary Heritage Book (Gourmand World Cookbook Awards) for Pride and Pudding
2018 - Best Belgian Culinary Heritage Book (Gourmand World Book Awards) for Authentic Belgian Cafés
2019 - Best Cookbooks of the 2000s (Great British Food Awards) for Pride and Pudding [9]
2019 - Silver medal 'The Golden Cookbook' for British baking book
2020 - Best British Culinary Heritage Book (Gourmand World Cookbook Awards) for Oats in the North, Wheat from the South
2020 - 'Andre Simon Memorial Award' Nomination and 'Highly Commended' nomination by the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2021 for Oats in the North, Wheat from the South [10]
2023 - Silver medal 'The Golden Cookbook' for Dark rye and Honey cake
2024 - 'Andre Simon Memorial Award' Nomination for Dark rye and Honey cake
2024 - 'James Beard Award' for Dark rye and Honey cake
2024 - 'MBE' (Member of the Order of the British Empire) by King Charles III for services to British food and culture in Belgium and the UK.
Dessert is a course that concludes a meal. The course consists of sweet foods, such as cake, biscuit, ice cream and possibly a beverage such as dessert wine and liqueur. Some cultures sweeten foods that are more commonly savory to create desserts. In some parts of the world there is no tradition of a dessert course to conclude a meal.
Bread pudding is a bread-based dessert popular in many countries' cuisines. It is made with stale bread and milk or cream, generally containing eggs, a form of fat such as oil, butter or suet and, depending on whether the pudding is sweet or savory, a variety of other ingredients. Sweet bread puddings may use sugar, syrup, honey, dried fruit, nuts, as well as spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, or vanilla. The bread is soaked in the liquids, mixed with the other ingredients, and baked.
Trifle is a layered dessert of English origin. The usual ingredients are a thin layer of sponge fingers or sponge cake soaked in sherry or another fortified wine, a fruit element, custard and whipped cream layered in that ascending order in a glass dish. The contents of a trifle are highly variable and many varieties exist, some forgoing fruit entirely and instead using other ingredients, such as chocolate, coffee or vanilla. The fruit and sponge layers may be suspended in fruit-flavoured jelly, and these ingredients are usually arranged to produce three or four layers. The assembled dessert can be topped with whipped cream or, more traditionally, syllabub.
Pudding is a type of food. It can be either a dessert, served after the main meal, or a savoury dish, served as part of the main meal.
Groats are the hulled kernels of various cereal grains, such as oats, wheat, rye, and barley. Groats are whole grains that include the cereal germ and fiber-rich bran portion of the grain, as well as the endosperm.
Chocolate puddings are a class of desserts in the pudding family with chocolate flavors. There are two main types: a boiled then chilled dessert, texturally a custard set with starch, commonly eaten in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Sweden, Poland, and East and South East Asia; and a steamed/baked version, texturally similar to cake, popular in the UK, Ireland, Australia, Germany and New Zealand.
Carrot cake is cake that contains carrots mixed into the batter.
Sticky toffee pudding, known as sticky date pudding in Australia and New Zealand, is a British dessert consisting of a moist sponge cake covered in a toffee sauce, often served with a vanilla custard or vanilla ice cream. It is widely served in the Lake District in northwest England, where it is a culinary symbol.
Dame Mary Rosa Alleyne Hunnings is an English food writer, chef, baker and television presenter. After being encouraged in domestic science classes at school, she studied catering at college. She then moved to France at the age of 22 to study at Le Cordon Bleu culinary school, before working in a number of cooking-related jobs.
Summer pudding or summer fruit pudding is an English dessert made of sliced white bread, layered in a deep bowl with fruit and fruit juice. It is left to soak overnight and turned out onto a plate. The dessert was most popular from the late 19th to the early 20th century. It first appears in print with its current name in 1904, but identical recipes for 'hydropathic pudding' and 'Malvern pudding' from as far back as 1868 have been found.
Scottish cuisine encompasses the cooking styles, traditions and recipes associated with Scotland. It has distinctive attributes and recipes of its own, but also shares much with other British and wider European cuisine as a result of local, regional, and continental influences — both ancient and modern.
Ching-He Huang (Chinese: 黃瀞億; pinyin: Huáng Jìngyì; Wade–Giles: Huang2 Ching4-i4;, often known in English-language merely as Ching, is a Taiwanese-born British food writer and TV chef. She has appeared in a variety of television cooking programmes, and is the author of nine best-selling cookbooks. Ching is recognized as a foodie entrepreneur, having created her own food businesses. She has become known for Chinese cookery internationally through her TV programmes, books, noodle range, tableware range, and involvement in many campaigns and causes.
American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons, is the first known cookbook written by an American, published in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1796. Until then, the cookbooks printed and used in the Thirteen Colonies were British. Its full title is: American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life.
Irena Chalmers-Taylor was an author and food commentator/essayist, teacher and culinary mentor. Named "the culinary oracle of 100 cookbooks" by noted American restaurant critic and journalist, Gael Greene, Chalmers was recognized as the pioneer of the single subject cookbook. Her life story revealed an unlikely journey to becoming a James Beard Foundation "Who's Who" of Food and Beverage in America 1988 Award Recipient.
Greg Patent is an American cookbook author and baker. He also co-hosts a weekly radio show about food on Montana Public Radio, The Food Guys, with Jon Jackson, and has made guest appearances on television and radio programs throughout the United States.
Sponge cake is a light cake made with eggs, flour and sugar, sometimes leavened with baking powder. Some sponge cakes do not contain egg yolks, like angel food cake, but most of them do. Sponge cakes, leavened with beaten eggs, originated during the Renaissance, possibly in Spain. The sponge cake is thought to be one of the first non-yeasted cakes, and the earliest attested sponge cake recipe in English is found in a book by the British poet Gervase Markham, The English Huswife, Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman (1615). Still, the cake was much more like a cracker: thin and crispy. Sponge cakes became the cake recognised today when bakers started using beaten eggs as a rising agent in the mid-18th century. The Victorian creation of baking powder by British food manufacturer Alfred Bird in 1843 allowed the addition of butter to the traditional sponge recipe, resulting in the creation of the Victoria sponge. Cakes are available in many flavours and have many recipes as well. Sponge cakes have become snack cakes via the Twinkie.
Liam Charles is a British baker, television presenter and contestant from Series 8 of The Great British Bake Off. He is currently a presenter on Bake Off: The Professionals and a judge on Junior Bake Off.
The Platinum Pudding is a British pudding consisting of a lemon and amaretti trifle. It was created by Jemma Melvin in 2022 for a competition celebrating the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.
Annie Gray is a British food historian specialising in the era from the 1650s to 1950s.