Young mum Clare Constant needed to find interesting recipes that would be good for the whole family including her young daughter, who has multiple allergies.  Her daughter was under the medical care of Ashford and St. Peter's Hospitals NHS Trust Consultant Paediatrician Dr Diab Haddad.

Clare, a Best Selling educational author teamed up with Cordon Bleu trained Home Economist of the Year and they have written a 100 plus recipe book designed for family cooking.

Said Clare: “For a busy working mum the reality of having to buy raw ingredients and start making meals from scratch three times a day, everyday, was very daunting indeed.  Plus the fact that many of the substitute ingredients just don’t behave like traditional ingredients.  For example: Gluten-free flour doesn't have the elastic properties of wheat-flour so you get a very heavy loaf of bread if you just substitute one ingredient for another. Rice Milk is very watery, Oat Cream doesn't whip, and so on. Soon after my daughter was diagnosed I began to worry about how we were going to cope with day to day living.”

Around that time Suzanne Wood was doing a Cordon Bleu course with Clare's neighbour and we were all discussing what next?

Said Suzanne: “I said that I wanted to write a cookery book on feeding children with allergies, but although I was a very knowledgeable allergy cook I didn't know how to write a book. I was put in touch with Clare and the rest is history - we soon got started on the book, as we knew that there is a huge need out there to get recipes to parents who have children with multiple food allergies!”

Dr Haddad said: “I thus welcomed the idea when I learned from Suzanne and Clare about their recipe book written specially for families with children allergic to foods. I was particularly enthused by the authors attempt to produce recipes for the whole family. As I mention in the foreword this may go some way to preserve some sense of normality and family experience around meal times.

“Over the last 60 years since the NHS was born the burden of allergic diseases on the health services has grown considerably. They are now one of the most frequent reasons for medical consultations in primary care, Accident & Emergency departments and hospital outpatient clinics. About a quarter of school children have had asthma at some point and up to one third of the population have had eczema during their life. The increase in the prevalence of allergies to food has also been dramatic: In recent surveys 3-4% of the whole population and up to 8% of children were found to be allergic to one or more foods.

“The recent Department of Health reviews have highlighted the inadequacies of the health provisions for allergy sufferers in the UK. Nevertheless, within the limitation of resources, NHS staff help millions of allergy sufferers every year. The scope of interventions which can be deployed to treat allergies has been refined and widened and there are now a number of effective treatments available for doctors to treat allergic disorders. On the horizon there is even the potential to find a “cure” for certain types of allergies.

“However, until such cure becomes a reality, there remains the need to deal with the anxieties and limitations that allergies impose on the sufferers and their families. Nowhere is this so starkly seen as it is in children with severe allergies to food. Some of the families I see in the allergy clinic have had to go through a transformation of the way they eat and drink, of the way they spend time together and, in some cases, of their whole lifestyle!”