Beloved Kiwi cook Annabelle White has made quite the habit of chance encounters with celebrities.
Beloved Kiwi cook Annabelle White has made quite the habit of chance encounters with celebrities.
Most people don’t bump into Tom Hanks on their morning walk. But most people aren’t beloved Kiwi cook Annabelle White, who has made quite the habit of chance encounters with celebrities.
“I was walking through Central Park three weeks ago and there’s Tom Hanks, sitting therein a little black hat, black T-shirt, and he’s talking away on the phone,” she told Newstalk ZB show Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night.
“He looked like an extra from Mission: Impossible, to be honest. But I looked at him and I did a double take. I felt like yelling out, ‘where’s Meg Ryan?’ or, ‘you should be running, Forrest Gump’!”
Thankfully, White kept her dignity intact, opting not even to take a sly photo or ask for a selfie, but instead to simply do “the very cool thing I see the All Blacks do … the eyebrow raised, a little flick of the hand, meaning ‘I know you’.”
“Someone told me ‘he [Hanks] is such a nice guy, he must be from California – ‘cause if he was a New Yorker, he’d just give you the finger and tell you to get lost'!
“But he actually didn’t. He’s very handsome and he gave me a lovely big smile and it made my day because he was, I think, relieved that I wasn’t going to come over and pester him.”
Annabelle White has authored 11 cookbooks, establishing herself as a regular on TV.
It wasn’t White’s first accidental interaction with one of the world’s most recognisable people. Years ago, she ran into now-US President Joe Biden while working in a kitchen in Delaware, she told Cowan.
Now, she’s a celebrity in her own right – having authored 11 cookbooks, establishing herself as a regular on TV and being a prolific food writer, all while making herself available for cooking classes and public speaking engagements.
Being such a recognisable face in Aotearoa is something she’s still getting to grips with.
“A man came up to me the other day at the supermarket and he said, ‘I remember, you used to be on TV’. And I said, ‘yes, New Zealand’s Next Top Model’. He goes, ‘nah, nah, not that’,” White told Real Life.
“He was in his pyjamas and he would have been in his 70s. He says, ‘don’t tell me, it was something to do with cooking’ ... and I wasn’t being very helpful because I knew he was trying to remember Cuddly Cook, which I used to have on my apron.
“Anyway, he goes, ‘I know who you are, you’re the Hefty Chef', And I thought, oh no, that’s actually terrible.
“But I just said, ‘yeah, that’s right’ because my attitude is that Christmas is coming, so you can be quite relaxed about these things. You’ve got to have the spirit of the festive season and you have to be good to people.”
White gets just as jazzed about cooking now as ever and speaks with pride about seeing one of her YouTube recipe videos – explaining how to make the “perfect scones” – go viral.
It’s so popular that it’s resulted in “marriage proposals from strange men in the Midwest of the United States”, she tells Cowan.
“One man wrote to me and he said, ‘lady, if you’re that frisky in the kitchen, can you imagine being married to you?’ So I wrote back and said, ‘that’s not going to happen, we’re not in Kansas’. You have to laugh!”
White spent time in a convent when she was younger and says the experience has shaped her to see the world beyond only herself.
“It’s not just about you,” she says. “And I think [that’s important] in a world where people are obsessed with social media and cellphones and there’s a lot of vanity.
“I think vanity is very serious. You know, there are people who go and get Botox, who go and get their eyebrows done and their faces done and their boob lifts, and I think to myself, ‘you’re just lovely as you are’.”
Elsewhere in the Real Life interview, White spoke about her time as a religious education teacher, how she turned that career into one all about food, and the art of a good banana cake.
Real Life is a weekly interview show in which John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing and the way they see the world. Tune in on Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.
