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Food, travel, books, stories – all the good things

Jul 08, 2024

But first a story: it all started with an onion…

Why would you leave a job you’d loved for 14 years? That’s just what I did a few weeks ago and it was a huge decision. HUGE. The job was editing the UK edition of delicious. and I loved that magazine so much I pinched myself daily to check I wasn’t in some kind of alternate reality. So why give up such a thing? The magazine had won multiple awards; to my amazement I’d won two; our loyal band of readers loved (mostly – I did get the odd ranting email) what the team put so much heart and soul into. When I mooted the idea of moving on, a flicker of worry scudded across the faces of friends and family. But it was time. I had an itch to create something food-related of my own; an itch that dates back to when I was six or seven years old, making my first magazine, hand-written with felt-tip pen on scraps of paper torn from a notebook and tied together with blue wool. That magazine had stories, it had people, it had cut-out-and-stick pictures and, most telling, it had a recipe by my mum. Whatever happened to that? Lost in a house move, probably.

Mum was a cook ahead of her time (that’s her above – a beauty from a Welsh mining town). It was the 1970s and most of my schoolmates were eating Vesta Chow Mein or tinned spaghetti hoops on toast for tea. I loved those things, actually, but we were more likely to have fricassée made with leftover roast chicken or lasagne (revolutionary in south-east London back then). The story of how Mum came to leave the Welsh valleys and learn to cook those dishes is one for the future, but you need to know it was she, with her kind, generous spirit, who first inspired me in the kitchen. When I was five, she handed me an onion to peel and chop, showing me how to ease away the papery and slippery silky layers, leave the root intact and carefully slice first this way then that, while she got on with sizzling something on the hob, glancing sideways to check how I was getting on. Prepping that onion took an age and I remember thinking, ‘I’ll never get good at this.’ But I practised and was soon helping daily in the kitchen, perched on a stool.

Lost happiness – and how cooking helped

In my early teens, everything changed. Mum fell seriously ill and the joy was sucked out of life for me and my four-years-younger brother Mark. I floundered. We all did. But there was one thing I could influence positively: DINNER – the simple planning, preparing and cooking of it. I realised, in those quiet kitchen moments, away from the sadness we were struggling to comprehend, that cooking helped to bind our challenged family together by invisible silk threads of love and care: the after-school supermarket shop once a week (sneaking a box of Green’s cheesecake mix and tin of cherry pie filling into the basket); the marathon batch cooking and freezing session at weekends (who was that person? I don’t even do that now); the moment of putting food on the table and seeing smiles. There’s a lot more to that story, which I’ll save for another day… For now let’s just say I clocked that food has the power to do more than fill a gap.

Skip forward to now… Why a newsletter?

Years of crafting a magazine taught me the importance of edited choice – and never more so than now, when the noise of social media, websites and innumerable TV channels is tugging at our virtual sleeves for attention. It’s constant. I’m asked several times a week for advice on anything from restaurants to go to, best beaches and places to eat in Cornwall (Dad’s home county), products I’ve discovered, books I recommend buying for gifts, and the chefs I rate (not to mention who’s a joy to work with – and who’s more Devil-Wears-Prada challenging ha ha). I’ve always been happy to share the good stuff (not the DWP bit, obviously), but it was only when a friend said, ‘You need to do this on Substack so everyone can read it,’ that I realised there might be something in that… Could I? Should I? Would it work?

So here I am, jumping into an unknown lake of creativity and inviting you to join me – and (much as it makes my toes curl to mention it), I’d love you to support me on that journey by subscribing. See below for what you can look forward to…

What to expect (there’s joy in the offing)

Alongside a wealth of information I hope you’ll be interested in, I’ll be seeking out inside knowledge from chefs, other experts and new voices in food. Uniting theme: people who put generosity at the heart of what they do.

Things I rate – and love

At the beginning I’ll be sending out two free newsletters per month, each of which will drop into your email inbox, so you’ll never miss them. Paid subscribers will receive two other emails per month and sometimes additional exclusive recipes. There’s a Substack app if you’d rather do your reading that way (although you can only become a paid subscriber via an emailed newsletter/the Substack website).

Here’s what you can look forward to:

Restaurant recommendations.
Excellent places to visit and stay.
Recipes – sometimes mine; sometimes from other people (I’ll champion new voices as well as writing heroes I’ve long admired). This roast chicken recipe is one of my all-time favourites, by the way. I cook it at least once a month and it’s the recipe I’m asked for most.
Favourite locations in depth: the people to know about, the producers to seek out, where to eat, where to visit, what to look for.
Gadgets worth buying and gold-dust cooking tips I’ve discovered.
Best new books – and treasured classics.
Interviews with authors, plus stories from experts in the food world: perhaps wisdom and a virtual tasting from a cheeseophile; insights into what it’s like to be a baker for a living (those 3am starts…). And more – it will evolve! The people on the look-forward-to list so far are Nicola Lamb, Paul Ainsworth, Mark Diacono, Marie Mitchell, Caroline Eden, Ruby Bhogal, Matt Tebbutt, Georgina Hayden – and many more to come.

Why Substack?

It’s about reading what you want to read and (hallelujah) there are no algorithms involved so you see what you want to see and engage with the people you want to engage with. No ads; no nonsense. There’s a sense of a gathering of friends, too – a little like the chat around the kitchen table while you’re cooking: this is a two-way flow of thoughts, conversation and ideas. I’d love you to tell me what you’ve discovered; what you want more (or less) of; I’ll listen. And if you only want to read, not chat, that’s fine too.

At the launch, two full newsletters a month are free, but if you want the full gamut of tips, interviews, stories and recipes, plus access to the online community, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber, which costs only a tad more per month than the price of a good coffee. Puff over!