Cook This: 3 recipes for summer grilling from How to BBQ, including corn on the cob

Jump to the recipes: grilled corn with ‘nduja butter and manchego , grilled eggplant with whipped goat’s cheese , orange zest and pumpkin seeds, and peanut wings with lime chili dipping sauce.

Genevieve Taylor came to live-fire cooking in a “roundabout way.” Now a fire-cooking specialist, the author of 14 cookbooks, many of them fire-based, and the founder of the Bristol Fire School in the U.K., barbecuing wasn’t part of her upbringing. “It just wasn’t what my family did. I grew up in a single-parent family. Mum worked full-time. There was no way on earth she was going to barbecue for us,” she says, laughing.

Taylor began cooking with fire in earnest two decades ago, when her children were toddlers. Looking for ways to make routine daily meals more interesting, they’d light a fire and cook together.

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After a few years, her children moved on to other things, but Taylor was hooked. With a background in biology and a past career as a TV producer making wildlife documentaries, she’s “very much an outside person.” Cooking with fire was a natural fit.

“It’s the perfect excuse to step away from how digital the world has become,” says Taylor. “What I really loved was, it was me, the fire and some ingredients. So, it wasn’t gadget-driven. It wasn’t performative. It was just cooking for my family, seeing the sky, being outside, and just trying to make life a tiny bit more adventurous.”

In early 2020, Taylor opened a live-fire cooking school, which she runs from her garden in Bristol, southwest England. Her new book, How to BBQ (Quadrille), is a distillation of the education she offers her students in class and on her YouTube channel, with more than 100 recipes.

The book begins with Taylor’s top 10 barbecue FAQs and an overview of 11 fire-cooking techniques, each with a foundational recipe to master.

“I wanted to make a very useful bit at the beginning, which explains some myths about fire cooking, and hopefully will enable people to get those basic skills to then take any cookbook off their shelf and go, ‘OK, if I want to cook outside, how do I adapt this recipe to my barbecue?’ It’s all about giving people confidence and skills.”