🇬🇧Sfoglia chats with Felicity Cloake (o.v.)
cookbook author, travel writer and Guardian's columnist
«I love the fact that there is nothing that is not connected with food in some way»
The perfect recipe: why?
This is a column I have been writing for The Guardian since 2011, so a long time, and it started off actually as nothing to do with the perfect recipe, but as a column about different myths around cookery: weather it was true, as we say in the UK, that you shouldn’t wash mushrooms, because they get very water logged and soggy or weather it was possible to seal juices inside meat in a hot pan. I was exploring that and it was just an online little column, I think I got paid 75£ a week for doing it, and one time I wrote something about the best way to cook sausages and in the comment section people started arguing about the best way to cook a sausage and my editor thought that was interesting and asked me to write something about the best way to do mashed potatoes (because, you know, sausages and mash is a very popular dish here). I did that and suddenly people loved me looking at famous cookery writers, like Delia Smith or Nigella Lawson, and trying out their instructions and criticising them or praising them, and it was quite interactive because my readers wanted to add their own tips and so The Perfect column came out of that. But I always want to stress that although they given it this sort of catchy, clickbait title How to make the perfect it’s my perfect version, it’s the way I decided it’s perfect, but other people would disagree and that’s fine, I love that about food, that everyone has their opinions and we can all argue but also enjoy good food.
What is it about food in particular that sparks your curiosity?
Apart from the fact that I like eating it, which I made clear, I like the fact that it is so universal: it concerns the President of the US as much as it does someone living on the poverty line in Bangladesh all the same. We all need to eat, but we can all have our tastes, that are equally valid, and we all have our unique story around food, and that might even mean that we have problems around food, but I love that we all have a unique set of preferences that is proudly ours. And is completely a level playing field. I’m very interested in history, but actually I’m no so interested in the big history that you tend to learn at school, the wars, the kings and queens. I like social history and I love to go into a palace or a stately home and I love to go down to look at the kitchens, because that to me is telling the story of individual people’s lives, as opposed to the big political sweeps. I think for me that is the appeal of food generally, that is the story of lives and taste and joys. For most people food is a pleasure, when they can get it, and that brings me pleasure, the universality, the fact that links everyone around the world.
A childhood memory related to food.
My grandmother, my father’s mother, was always the one in charge of making the cake for Christmas, the big fruit cake that we have at Christmas. It is a big cake and has got lots of dried currants and cherries and raisins, sultanas and sometimes apricots, dates and lots of dried fruits and it’s very dark, and then you put on a layer of marzipan, and then a layer of icing, so it is big and it is heavy, and my dad always used to say that you could kill someone over Christmas with this cake. There was one Christmas when actually it did get used as a door stop, because the door to the kitchen kept closing. I don’t think that my grandmother was very happy about that, but it did make me laugh. She died when I was 11 and I now make the Christmas cake for everyone. These days the children in my family don’t really like fruit cake, they want a bouche de Noel type of chocolate swiss roll. But I still make it and it’s now August we are talking and I still have half the fruitcake from Christmas, because it keeps so well! You just wrapped that up and because of the icing and the alcohol in it, a lot of whisky or brandy, it keeps very well.
When you approach a dish are you someone who takes a lot of cookbooks out and starts searching through all the sources you have trying to find the best way of doing something?
I wish I could show you all of my cookbooks because I have so many! Too many for the size of the flat that I live in, so I don’t tend to go through all of them. If I have the time and if I’m cooking for myself and not work (which is not that often to be honest because I do a lot of recipe testing) I do try and go through cookbooks rather than the Internet, just because first, I find cookbooks more reliable and second, what I like about a cookbook is that you often get the story of the dish and you learn more about it and it feels more personal than recipes online. So I will take down a few books and see which recipe grabs me. It’s so easy these days to just go online and search, so I try not to do that. And it’s great to get things out there, instead of having cookbooks just sitting on the shelves, when you find a dish in a book, you make it, you enjoy it and then you want to share that with other people and tell the writer you enjoyed that, and that is what I think social media is great for. I love taking recipes out of the pages of the book and sharing them.
What do you expect from a great cookbook?
I think the most important thing with a cookbook, which is very obvious, but is not universal, is that the recipes should have been tested and work. This is THE most important thing. However assuming that the recipes work, then for me the value of a great cookbook, as opposed to what you can find online, is that it should be personal, it should tell a particular story. This doesn’t have to mean that the writers gives their life story in the pages (although I enjoy that, if that’s happening, I’m here for it) but they should explain where the recipe has come from, how has developed, what it means to them, it should feel like their recipes, their creations, not a generic recipe for Christmas cake or Panforte or whatever it is. I want to learn something from a cookbook, I don’t want to just have my dinner, I want to come away enriched, knowing more about that culture, or that person, or history. The cookbooks I get most excited about are the ones that teach me something usually very niche. I love a very regional book, I’d always rather have a book about the cuisine of Puglia, than a book about just Italian food. An if it is something about the Jewish cooking of Puglia even better, I want something that feels like your grandmother’s recipe book, that is just brilliant. The last cookbook that I bought (I’m lucky I get sent a lot of cookbooks through my work) is from America, is called I am From Here, and is written by an Indian born American man called Vishwesh Bhatt. He lives in the South of the United States and he cooks Southern American food, often with Indian flavours and even though a lot of the recipes I can’t make, because we have very different produce here, I love reading it. It’s transporting and it’s teaching, because he is unusual, I don’t know any other Indian Southern food writers, he has such a unique prospective and it is a joy for me to read it. I’m very nosy, I want to learn something about you or a particular cuisine, something to teach me as well as allow me to cook delicious things.
Your latest books are travelogues rather than cookbooks. I imagine they have been a bit different to write, but you have this very strong and unique voice. How did you find it?
I think, if I’m honest, I just write like I speak. I have done 5 cookbooks before writing One More Croissant for The Road, which is a travel book with a handful of recipes. It was very different and quite scary for me, because cookbooks are quite impersonal, maybe you tell a story about your recipe, but you don’t put so much of yourself into the book, whereas travel books are me, and that’s quite scary. Journalists often are told to keep things very impersonal and formal, and I couldn’t do that. But once I accepted that, then I enjoyed it and I found it fun. It was a hard change to make and also you don’t know weather the things that you find interesting and funny other people are going to as well. For example, I thought about putting my friends in or leaving them out, but my editor actually loved the bits with my friends, because they are funny and have their own personalities. It was a strange thing sharing people that have nothing to do with food, that I was at university with or school with, that are now in my books. I try not to overthink the writing, I try and just type, how I see what happens, almost as if I’m writing a diary or an Instagram post. But that obviously goes through my editor and she makes changes, just to make it a bit tighter (as you will tell, I like to talk, so sometimes it need to be edited). I wouldn’t want to work too hard at it, because then I think it wouldn’t feel natural, people seem to like when it feels like me, which is my aim, like a good version of me! I took notes, but not as many as I wish I had done. I usually would go away for 8-10 weeks and when you are on the road you aren’t always planning the next move, you don’t always think “I have to take notes, I have to start writing” and you are worrying about where you’re going the next day or setting up a meeting with someone in two weeks time, and so I would try and take notes. I take lots of photos, and actually photos are so helpful in jogging your memory about details that might not even be in the photo, but help you remember what happened. If I’m interviewing someone then I do take notes or I record them on my phone, but just trying to get those little details. Sometimes is the silly things that really bring somewhere to life, it’s remembering that in that small town in Cornwall there was a Scottish kilt shop and an exotic lizard shop, the weird things like that, that normally you just go “Ah! I need to remember it” because in two days time you will have forgotten. It is a difficult balance between living in the moment, but also thinking when you get home you’ve got 8000 words to write.
What kind of home cook you are?
When I’m at home and I’m not following someone else’s recipe then I tend to be very classic. I’m always impress by chefs who put together ingredients that don’t necessarily belong together in a geographical sense, someone who will mix a Korean pickle with a French sausage and a Mexican rice. That is not the way my mind works, so if something has got Mediterranean flavours, maybe I’ll add something from Greece, but it feels almost wrong to me mixing things up, I’m a purist like that. When I read someone like Yotam Ottolenghi that goes crazy with the ingredients from everywhere, I’m not attracted by that, but then when I make it I always love it. I hate food waste so most of my cooking, if I’m not making recipes, is using other things up, so I will put some crazy things together just to see if they work. I’m not a very glamorous home cook, I ate a lot of stuff on toast. I enjoy playing around and trying things that aren’t really recipes. I think I’m quite good if you give me a fridge full of half empty packets and half and old carrots or something, I’m good at see how to put them into a nice meal.
Who are your greatest inspirations?
There is a British food writer called Jane Grigson, who died in the 1990’s, and she was a recipe columnist for The Observer newspaper, which is the Sunday edition of The Guardian. Her writing is so beautiful. She is a recipe writer, she comes before the time when we all shared essays and things on food, so she works on recipes, but she always includes an introduction, that is often very scholarly and shows a great deal of knowledge of the history, or the context, or sometimes the literature, and you always learn something from her, not just to make a dish. But she is very unfussy, it is not high literature, just a beautiful and very unassuming writer. She wrote a book called English Food in the the 1980’s, I am British and I know that “English food” is a subject of amusement around the world, but she took it seriously and collected recipes from around England and the rest of the British Isles, saying this is good food, that stands up to the food of rural France or the cucina povera of Italy. We have those things too and we must be celebrating them, so I think she is brilliant. More recently I really like Nigella Lawson not so much for her recipes, which are great, but because she is really an underrated writer. She started off as a writer before she became a tv person and if you go back and read her first book How to Eat, there are no pictures, it is just her words and it is very accessible, but very well written. With her latest book, Cook, Eat, Repeat she has gone back to that, there are pictures but there’s a lot more in a way of words and storytelling there. I really admire her writing, I think she is a mega star, but she should be celebrated for her writing more.
Why do you think cookbooks in Britain are so popular and food writers are so well known?
I can only speak in terms of the UK vs France, which is the other country I know slightly. I think in the UK we are more open to lots of other cuisines, in France, although is very easy to find a Vietnamese restaurant, or a Cambodian restaurant or a North African restaurant, in general that is, in most places, about the limit. There is not a lot of interest at the general popular level in other cuisines. In the UK, probably because of our empire, we have a much more diverse diet and therefore we are constantly getting trends from around the world that aren’t just popular amongst foodie people, but you will find in Marks and Spencer. We are like culinary magpies. The other side of that is, of course, that because of our early industrial revolution and because of our empire, our own traditional food, and food culture, is infinitely weaker than it is in, say, France or Italy, and it is not championed in the same way. My grandmother was Irish and she would have cooked British Irish food, and that was it, she wouldn’t have been making one day a Bangladeshi curry and the next day a Brazilian stew, she had things that she knew how to make and she would make them well and that was that. These days I think our diet is so wide that there’s no way that you could master any of those cuisines and so we buy lots of cookbooks, we have lots of food tv and we don’t actually do justice to many of them. That is bit sad, I think it is much better to be able to make a few things well, than be able to follow recipes from everywhere and not really have great results. I think it’s great that we have a huge appetite for different food in this country, but because we never allow ourselves to cook any of them well, I think that we don’t end up cooking at home as much as these many cookbooks and cookbook shows suggest. Because, obviously, we are disappointed that we can’t make that curry taste like it does at the restaurant, we are not experts, and so people are put off, and they get convenience food and that makes me really sad. I think it’s a mixed picture. Certainly publishers, broadcasters are making a lot of money out of food content, but I don’t necessarily think that means that we are eating better than our grandparents, which is a shame. I love the fact that people are more open to outside influences, but I do think we need to calm down.
Do you feel that British people relationship with food has changed during these past years?
I’d like to say yes and I think people now are prepared to take food more seriously than they used to. I think in the past certainly maybe after the II World War, when we had the rationing and things were very grim in British food, there was this idea that you didn’t really talk about it, it was just something you ate to live and it should be very simple, solid and give you energy, but not necessarily something pleasurable. These days is ok to take pleasure in it, to talk about it. My concern is that sometimes again we swayed too easily by the latest fashion, the thing that looks good on social media, the celebrity aspect and we neglect the things that actually are quietly good. We have something here that we call “beige food” and a lot of our traditional food is very brown, because we are a cold, wet, country and that is the food that does well, but it doesn’t look nice in photographs, so people always want to put a little bit of coriander, or some pomegranate seeds on. That is not necessary, unless you are Yotam Ottolenghi you don’t need to do that. I think that things have changed for the better, but I think there is still too much reliance on pre prepared things and industrial foods. If I go into a restaurant and they have a big menu that worries me because I think you can’t make all of these things from scratch. I want a really short menu of simple things that I know you have made. The cost of living crisis has made that worse, because restaurateurs are struggling, they are having to cut corners, their struggling for staff because of Brexit, it is a tough time. And I think we are not used to pay enough for food, we’re happy if it’s cheap and it’s hot. It is changing, but I’d like it to change more.
Could you explain Marmite to Italian people?
The thing with Marmite is that perhaps you have to grow up eating it to love it. It’s a thin paste and it’s very dark brown, and it’s a byproduct of the brewing industry, so the yeast that is used to brew beer. Once beer is brewed, then all of the yeast is made into this paste that has a very savoury character. We also have another product called Bovril, that looks very similar, but is made from very reduced beef stock and is also a very dark brown paste and you can use it like you would a stock cube. Marmite is vegetarian and it is really useful for adding some savoury umami notes to a stew without adding meat. But most commonly in the UK is used on toast. You don’t need very much because it is very salty, but it’s very similar in many ways to something like anchovy paste, it has got that very aggressively salty, savoury note. I absolutely love it. It does divide even British people, but I cannot get enough Marmite, it’s delicious. I’ve seen people online and maybe they think is like Nutella so they take a big spoonful: do not do that, it’s very strong! Anna Del Conte has a recipe that she gave Nigella, who made it more famous, for “spaghetti with butter and Marmite” and it’s a very quick dinner, like you might have spaghetti with oil and garlic, and it’s just very savoury and maybe with some grated cheese, it is so nice!
One small dream and one big dream.
One small dream is that I would really like to write a book about “road food” in America but on a bike. America has such a big road food, diner culture: route 66, big trucks. But there’s lot good food in my experience on this highways, like independent restaurants, Mexican food or very regionally specific diners and I’d love to do that on a bike, because I think turning up on a bike would be very surprising to many Americans. I could eat lots of very calorific food, because I’d be cycling, and I think it will be fun to explore this American road food culture under my own steam. That’s a dream, not so small, but at the moment is not happening. And my big dream is that I would like to open a café in the French Alps serving cheese toasties. In America they call them grilled cheese sandwiches and I think it could be really popular among skiers particularly. They are so delicious, they are brilliant skiing food and I think they are one of the things that in the UK we do better. I love France, it is one of my favourite countries, but they don’t have such a sandwich culture. i think we could bring these sandwiches to the Alps, that is my big dream.
Your “fantasy dinner”: three guests, dead or alive, from whichever field or background you want. Who would they be and what would you cook for them?
The late Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy – not someone who seemed to care much about food, but one of the most fearless, curious women I’ve ever had the pleasure to read, the late American chef and travel writer Anthony Bourdain, because like Dervla, he seemed to have boundless appetite for people’s stories, and unlike her, loved the ones about food best of all, and the very much alive British travel writer Caroline Eden, because she always has an eye for how the role food plays in a culture – and I think we’d all enjoy a whisky together. I’d keep it simple I think – some spanking fresh local seafood (crab, scallops, cockles, Dublin bay prawns etc) with plenty of brown bread and salted butter, followed by a steamed pudding, maybe mutton and onion, with mashed potato, swede and kale, and a sherry trifle, because I adore it, and as with everything else, I could make it in advance so I’d have more time to listen to them chat!
The “hot” question: fry up or cappuccino e cornetto?
Fry up every time, with a cup of tea! I don’t like sweet breakfast, I love Italian food but your breakfasts are too sweet for me, I can’t do that.
3 cookbooks suggested by Felicity:
Florence White, Good Things in England, Persephone Books, 1999
recently reissued by Persephone Press, this is as much a historical record of British (despite the name) tastes and traditions as a cookbook, though many of the recipes, collected from home cooks between the wars, are well worth a try.
Gurdeep Loyal, Mother Tongue: Flavour of a Second Generation, Fourth Estate, 2023
A second-generation immigrant to the UK, from a Punjabi family, Gurdeep’s first book is a joyful celebration of his mixed culinary heritage, with touches of mad genius that are all his own.
Simon Hopkinson, Lindsay Bareham, The Prawn Cocktail Years, Michael Joseph, 2006
A nostalgic look back at food fashions in twentieth-century Britain, from beef wellington to Black Forest gateau, I think that I share a palate with the authors, because every single dish I’ve cooked from this has been a banger. And not the sausage kind.