A Curious Cook

New Year New Sletter

You might’ve noticed that I recently acquired a little tick next to my name. There’s also a very good chance that you’ve had better things to do than notice that I recently acquired a little tick next to my name. I myself have looked at it a few times an hour for the past day. That little tick means that this newsletter is a best-seller! The first thing to say is a huge, huge thank you to everybody reading this from around the world. I’ve never paywalled any of my writing or recipes here because I wanted to find a style and a rhythm that felt right, and together I think we are finding it.

I’m truly grateful to anyone who reads this, as a paid subscriber or not, but that fact that enough of you have decided that this is worth paying for is a huge vote of confidence. On a physical level, it also allows me to begin to balance more of my time between developing recipes for brands and other publications, and creating recipes that go directly to you, right here. This represents a kind of virtual tipping point that I’ve been aiming for, whereby my work is able to move beyond the limitations of client briefs or the use of particular products.

This is not because recipe development for brands isn’t something I enjoy - I love it and will continue to do as much as possible. Sometimes with cooking, the challenge of thinking inside the box (having to work within certain guidelines from a client) really pushes you to innovate and create something that works for everybody. The brand is happy, my followers get a nice recipe, and I get paid. But what’s exciting about Substack is having a greater freedom to write and cook and communicate directly with an audience on topics that might not be commercially appealing but that I, and hopefully you, think are interesting and worth being written about.

As someone whose work is spread across various media, I can say quite happily that this is the community that I value the most, the readers of this fledgling newsletter. That sounds like false flattery, but let me explain. Two and a half years ago, I moved from working in physical restaurant kitchens into the world of food media and recipe developing, and adopted the necessary digital platforms that go along with that line of work - primarily social media. While I have a much greater audience there, social media is the place I least like to be social. I take a decent photo and chop together a fair video, but ultimately I’m very content to use social media solely as a tool for work, and to hold it at arms length for the sake of my sanity. It’s also not a great place to write, and I like to write, so despite some hesitation and with some persuasion from friends, I’ve spent the past few months writing here and I love it.

In many ways, reading and writing are the antithesis of the algorithmic onslaught of social media. I’m not a doctor, and these thoughts are based on nothing more than my own beliefs, but I think that reading is one of the single best things you can do for your brain. It hones and it sharpens, yes, but it’s the singular focus of reading that gives it a meditative quality. Losing yourself in someone’s writing, to be deep in that aesthetic experience, is a balm for the mind. But reading also takes time, and asking people to give you their time is a big ask, and that is why I say that you, my readers, are the community I value most. Because a view or a ‘like’ is cheap but to set aside the time to read this is truly generous.

I will always send out free newsletters because I enjoy sharing things with people. What I’d like to do now is bring a little more structure to my writing here and introduce some subscriber-only writing too. Some of this will be newsletters focussing on a recipe with some history and anecdotes, like Foundations. I also enjoy writing about wider aspects of food culture and anthropology, which often tie in deeply with stories of migration, politics and people. This is an area I want to explore more this year, and hopefully you will enjoy that too. One of my favourite things about this platform are the comments you leave. Just as I hope you learn something from reading what I write, I learn so much from reading what you write - a dish to research, a interesting ingredients I’ve never heard of, a book recommendation. I try my best to reply to everyone so please continue, the more the merrier!

In light of those ambitions, ‘Start By Chopping Your Onion’ no longer feels like the right name to carry this newsletter forward. Luckily, it’s not a name I’m particularly attached to, it simply came about from the fact that so many of my recipes started with that sentence. And whilst recipe writing is my bread and butter, I rarely start the process with a dish in mind - more often than not the recipe is the end result of a process of learning. Something piques my interest; an ingredient, an idea, a story, something that pokes out of its cultural subsoil like a flower from a field and makes me think ‘how did that get there?’.

A recipe for tomato pasta is great, but so is the story of how tomatoes only arrived in Italy 200 years ago and nobody ate them because they thought them poisonous. Some people think these stories are unnecessary, they just want a recipe, and I see that point of view too - a simple recipe that works well is a thing worth having. But things not being necessary is what makes life interesting, they’re the little extras that give depth and texture to our short tenure on Earth.

In many cases though, these stories are not unnecessary, they are more important than the recipe. In my country, England, food is not deeply tied to identity. But in many parts of the world, what you eat runs deep in the veins of your culture, and all too often that critical subtext of the why is skimmed over in favour of a quick, easy and simple rendition of a dish, a 2D projection of a 3D object. It will always taste flat.

Finally, I think that understanding what you are cooking makes you a better cook. There are two facets to this understanding, the physical and the anthropological, and this is true of many crafts. Understanding the properties of a certain fabric will affect the way a tailor cuts a suit, but so will the history and traditions of Saville Row suit-making. Knowing the different qualities of different paints will change the way a painter paints (try and say that fast 5 times) but so will the ideas of linear perspective laid out by Filippo Brunelleschi in the 1400’s. It’s the same in the kitchen; understanding the science of acidity will make your cooking more balanced, but so will understanding the history of citrus and why limes taste different to lemons. The best way to understand these things is to be a curious cook. Welcome to A Curious Cook.