About

Danny Vale

I spent about 20 years in British kitchens. Pub carveries, seaside holiday hotels, a couple of gastropubs that thought they were a great deal better than they were. Then several years developing recipes in the health food trade, which is where I learned what actually happens when you take the fat and the sugar out of a dish people love.

Mostly what happens is that it gets worse. Not always, and not by much if you know which lever to pull. But the pretence that a lightened version is identical to the original is the thing that made me want to write these books in the first place. I've read a lot of cookbooks that quietly halved the butter and said nothing.

What I'm claiming, and what I'm not

I know kitchens. I know what happens to a sauce when you take the cream out of it and I know which dishes come back from that and which ones don't. That's the authority these books rest on.

I'm not a nutritionist, I don't have a dietetics qualification, and nothing in these books is dietary advice. I never had a Michelin star and never wanted one. And I'm not Italian, or Mexican, or anyone's grandmother, which is exactly why the series is called Authentic-ish rather than something with the word traditional in it.

Where the numbers come from

Every calorie and macro figure in every book is computed from the actual ingredient list against two public databases: USDA FoodData Central and McCance & Widdowson's Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset. The appendix at the back of each book prints the exact row used for each ingredient, so you can check any figure you doubt.

Nothing is estimated. If a number couldn't be traced, the recipe didn't go in the book.