SALLIE Morris has been writing cookbooks for over 60 years, mostly inspired by the oriental food she fell in love with while living abroad.

Born in Bassenthwaite, she went on to build a career specialising in Asian food and helped spice up British cuisine.

Although she has lived in Asia, Africa and cities across the UK, her roots are still firmly in West Cumbria where she now lives with her husband, Johnnie in Great Broughton.

She said: “We love it here. My father was born in Dearham and my mother was born in Abbeytown so I feel very local.”

“I’ve always been interested in food. I was one of four so my mum was always happy when I helped.”

Sallie moved away to study at the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science when she was 17. After that, she worked in Liverpool, Newcastle and then London, sharing flats with fellow Cumbrians. “They called us the Cumbrian Mafia,” she laughed.

Sallie then took a job as a recipe writer at Woman magazine, which at the time, was selling one and a quarter million copies a week.

She said: “It was a good experience. My boss is still alive and we’re in touch with each other.”

Sallie’s work included a feature on ‘High Tea in the Lake District’, with a photograph of her family in Bassenthwaite.

She still has a copy of the 1969 edition in which it featured. She worked at the magazine for seven years until she married. The couple then made the decision to move to Nairobi with their 10-week-old baby daughter.

Before leaving the magazine, Sallie had been working on her first freezer cookbook. She began giving lessons on how to make the best of your freezer and held courses for the five years they lived there.

Following a short spell back in London, the pair moved abroad again to Malaysia. Sallie was enthralled by the food markets there. “Going to markets – it’s a great indication on how people live. It’s my first port of call when I go to a new country because food changes all the time.”

Sallie began holding cookery classes while living in a country where it was the norm for men to depend on the women to cook. “It was a great way to meet people,” Sallie said.

After three years of living in Malaysia, the family came back to London. Sallie was approached by Marks and Spencer, to write a book on herbs and spices.

When her books first came out in the 1980s, to many it was a new cuisine and some of the ingredients to create the dishes were not readily available.

She said: “When we got back from Malaysia, people would say, ‘what’s chilli? I don’t use that.’ Now you can buy spice pastes and things in the supermarket.”

More books followed, covering Indonesian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Burmese food.

Sallie recently found one of her cookbooks, published in 1999, for sale in a second-hand bookshop in Cockermouth. “It was completely by chance. The man said to me, “I’ve never sold a book to an author before!’”

Sallie has had several Thai books published and one, Easy Thai Cookbook has been republished this year.

“They decided of the whole easy cookbook series, to re-publish mine,” she beamed.

Sallie had visited Thailand while in Malaysia and the family later travelled there. The book is a concise collection of the classic recipes that she fell in love with, with simple steps in the method making it easy for beginners.

She said: “I’ve done a lot of travelling and I had collected a lot of recipes. I have a chef friend in London and we co-operated on that.

“The preparation for a lot of these dishes are the main part of it – the cooking doesn’t take long. It’s a very quick way of cooking.” Sallie has had 14 cookbooks published in total and said she still “very much” enjoys cooking.