Early in her new cookbook Time & Tide, Emily Scott writes that her life in Cornwall could be “drawn from the lines of a Daphne du Maurier story”. And so it appears from the gorgeous book as a whole. When she’s not explaining how to make crab sandwiches and gorse-flower fudge to pack for boat trips, Scott is evoking sea mists and screeching gulls, precarious cliff walks and the whitewashed walls of her Newquay home decked out with nautical maps and seaweed prints.
“I was feeling really romantic that day,” admits Scott, laughing when I ask her about the Du Maurier line and implying that her Cornish existence isn’t necessarily all cream teas and smuggler’s coves. “But it is very beautiful here,” she says of Watergate Bay, where her restaurant, Emily Scott Food, nestles against the sea wall. Demands on her time have only intensified since she cooked for world leaders at the G7 summit in 2021, but her days “always start by the sea, whatever the weather”, usually with an early-morning beach walk with her spaniel.
