It is difficult to imagine an eight-year-old girl still making her way through the rigours of primary school, otherwise preoccupied with grappling with the skills associated with cooking. That was part of Debbie Houston’s experience as a child. Baking, she says, came later. Her culinary preoccupation had derived from watching her mother “in the kitchen baking and cooking up a storm for Christmas day lunch and other little family gatherings.”
Unsurprisingly, she became stuck with the cooking habit. At fifteen she enrolled in the Carnegie School of Home Economics and after she had made her way through her first tilt at a formal education in the culinary arts Debbie decided that it was time to strike a balance between Home Economics and academia.
