Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today’s piece by Alice Slater is the latest in our Cooking from Life series, a collection of essays that offer a window into how food and kitchen-life work for different people in different parts of the world. Alice writes about how she found her way back to the martini, a drink she first made as a child for her late father.

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My father knew what it felt like to hold a beating human heart in his hands (‘like a fistful of worms,’ he said, due to the writhing junction of arteries and veins). When he arrived home from the hospital, an antiseptic chemical smell would cling to his hair and clothes, a bit like a freshly developed photo. If he wasn’t on call, he’d loosen his tie and pour himself a drink. Usually, this would be a glass of heart-healthy red wine, but once in a blue moon, he liked to make a martini.

My brother and I had no interest in medicine – I learned to write stories and Hank learned to write code – but that didn’t stop my father from sharing his med school wisdom. He taught me how to chop an onion with surgical precision, how to recognise the signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, and how to tie a knot with one hand (a useful trick in the operating theatre). He also taught me how to mix a bone-dry gin martini, presumably because he thought it would be a laugh to have a tiny underage bartender at his disposal, which I suppose it was.

He showed me how to apply a light vermouth rinse to the cocktail shaker, and explained that gin can bruise if you shake it for too long. I can’t remember exactly how old I was during this martini lesson, but I can’t have been more than twelve, because I had absolutely no interest in tasting the drink I made. I wish I could remember whether he preferred an olive or a twist, but that detail eludes me now.

*

I came back to martinis as an adult, in 2011. I was hanging out in the beer garden of the Oxford Arms in Camden when a gorgeous New Orleans native approached our table and asked if she could join us – an unthinkably bold social move in London. As soon as she sat down, the two of us sank into the kind of once-in-a-blue-moon conversation that made us both realise we were almost certainly destined to meet. Cocktails were in Nisha’s blood, and we spent many nights together drinking Sazeracs, Long Island iced teas and dirty martinis that were never quite cold enough or dirty enough for our liking. We soon figured out the best martinis were shaken in a clean jam jar in Nisha’s kitchen, where we could add as much brine as we liked without resorting to the kind of language that might encourage a bartender to lick his lips. We preferred vodka and didn’t think to buy vermouth, but I shared my father’s lesson about bruising gin anyway. When Nisha suffered a devastating loss, the kind of bone-rattling grief that reshapes the rest of your life, we chain-smoked and mixed martini after martini, refilling the olive jar with cold water to make the precious brine last. We spent many evenings sitting on Nisha’s kitchen floor drinking those watery dirty martinis, faces seasoned with the salt of tears.

*

During the pandemic, the corner shop opposite my house had a glut of blood oranges that remained in stock for an unseasonable number of months. I bought my first cocktail shaker and learned how to make sweet blood orange margaritas. It was a nice way to mark the end of the working week: chopping board bloody as an operating table, a peachy cocktail in hand, getting stuck into a long Zoom chat with my best friend Emily (who only lived a thirty-minute walk from my flat but may as well have been on Mars).

My thoughts returned to the dirty martini when Perelló olives took over the world in 2021. Bored of sticky margs, I experimented with a martini made with equal parts Perelló-infused vodka and the spicy liquid-gold Perelló brine, garnished with a single plump olive. The result was a proper slap-your-ass-and-spit-in-your-mouth kind of bev, murky as swamp water. My husband at the time declared it undrinkable, but I knew that I was on to something beautiful, and I wasn’t going to listen to a negroni-drinking naysayer. I was going to listen to Emily, a stained-glass artist and naturally blonde cockney, who said it was her platonic ideal of a dirty martini (incidentally, she still prefers her martinis mixed to this somewhat unhinged recipe to this day).

Then everything changed. One afternoon, I found myself in a hotel bar, drinking a dirty martini mixed by a woman who really seemed to have her life together. She was wearing a crisp white shirt and her hair was perfect. My curls were a frizzy mess and I still had last night’s eyeliner smudged under my eyes. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to utter the words ‘extra filthy’, so instead I had ordered a simple dirty vodka martini and trusted her to take the wheel. She had tipped Belvedere, a generous 15ml of dry vermouth and a mere barspoon of nondescript green olive brine into a crystal-cut jug, stirred until the glass was etched with frost, then double-strained into a chilled coupe. The resulting martini was glacier water, clean and astringent. It was fresh, almost steely, with an immediate neurological effect, like an oyster or a line of coke. My head was turned. It was the kind of martini my father would enjoy.

The next time I found myself lured by the siren song of a dirty martini, I thought of that hotel bartender and bought a bottle of Noilly Prat, a dry vermouth aged in oak casks that are exposed to the salty sea air. Next, I discovered the joys of a split base – half cheap vodka, half expensive savoury gin. I learned, to my surprise, that my palate had sharpened and I preferred less brine than my previous filthy predilections. A generous dash of olive bitters was enough to provide that extra hit of salinity and deepen the savoury olive flavour. I learned that it’s bad luck to garnish a martini with an even number of olives, although this became academic when I realised I preferred the fresh zesty flavour of an expressed lemon peel cutting through the salt. While my father’s shaken martini was an aerated cocktail, cloudy as bath water, I began to stir mine in a frozen glass jug – a hat tip to the hotel bartender with the crisp white shirt – which allowed the ice to dilute the drink slowly and kept it crystal clear.

The resulting cocktail is dirty but looks clean – almost surgically so. It’s tailored to my palate, based on every martini lesson I’ve ever undertaken with every martini drinker I’ve ever admired. It reminds me of tearful nights with Nisha, Zoom calls with Emily, that beautiful bartender and, of course, martini lessons with my father.

I never had the chance to share a martini with my dad. The worms of his heart quit wriggling when he was just fifty-four, a cardiac arrest so sudden and so cruel we were told that even he – who a newspaper once described as a ‘miracle worker’ for saving a teenage boy stabbed directly in the heart – would not have been able to save himself. The trauma of his death will sit in my chest until my own heart stops beating.

The salinity of every dirty martini I make contains the slightest echo of that first martini lesson. But if, by some miracle, my father were to walk into my kitchen this evening, loosen his tie and ask for a martini, I wouldn’t make him the recipe I’ve perfected. In the twenty years I’ve had to endure of this life without him, I’ve learned something that I didn’t pick up from his tutorial: martini drinkers are particular. So, instead, I’d make him a bone-dry shaken gin martini, perhaps not with surgical precision, but with a lot of heart. Then I’d ask him whether he’d prefer it with an olive or a twist.

I’ve always wanted to know.

A Surgically Clean Dirty Martini

Keeping your spirits in the freezer, mixing in a frozen jug and using a generous quantity of ice will ensure a suitably cold martini. Serving in a frosty coupe will keep that chill until the last sip – as long as you drink your cocktail at the right pace. Drink too slowly and the last few mouthfuls will taste like straight paint thinner, too quickly and you risk immediate intoxication (as Marlowe Granados cautioned recently, martini drinking is serious business).

Ingredients

35ml frozen Four Pillars Olive Leaf Gin
35ml frozen vodka
5–10ml dry vermouth
a dash of The Bitter Truth Olive Bitters
lemon peel, to garnish

Method

1. Tip your gin, vodka, vermouth and bitters into a frozen glass jug, then add more ice than seems reasonable.

2. Stir eighty times (count your rotations), then double-strain into a frozen martini glass.

3. Squeeze a lemon peel over the surface of your drink, and rub it around the lip of the glass so the first mouthful is accompanied by a clean sniff of citrus.

Credits

Alice Slater is a writer and ex-bookseller from London. Her debut novel, Death of a Bookseller, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller and won Debut Crime Book of the Year at Capital Crime’s Fingerprint Awards 2024. She co-hosts the literary podcast What Page Are You On? Her second novel, Let the Bad Times Roll, is out now in paperback. All photographs in this piece were provided by Alice.

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Further Reading

• ‘Serious Business’ by Marlowe Granados

• ‘Sweetness and Substance’ by Robin Craig

• ‘Good Pye: Catering Funerals with my Father’ by Vida Adamczewski

• ‘How to Eat an Orange’ by Vijeta Kumar

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My dad and I have accidentally found ourselves in the funeral-catering business. In many ways, it is the perfect gig for my father, a retired chef with a penchant for gossiping over an afternoon pint. He has cultivated a large flock of near-expiry acquaintances, armed with free bus passes and hearty appetites, all teetering on the barstools of Peckham’s pubs. When one of them drops off, it is my dad who gets the call, asking him to pass the funeral details along the bar – and if he can rustle up some pies for the wake. We’ve made hundreds of pies for South-East London’s pub royalty since 2020, when my dad was asked to make pork pies for the funeral of Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame), who liked a pie with his pint – and so, it’s rumoured, always kept one in his pocket for this purpose.

Now, I have great respect for the funeral sandwich: white bread as thin and insubstantial as a Eucharist wafer spread with butter or marg and filled with pickles, cheese, onions and ham (though please save me from the immortal essence of egg and tuna in a hot, stuffy room of distant relations). But since our first pie-making gig, I have come to believe that individually portioned pies are the perfect funeral food. They are easy to transport and can be slung into a Tupperware without manners. They can be served hot or cold, depending on the amenities at the wake, so suit both winter and summer funerals. They require no cutlery, reducing the menial labour demanded of grieving loved ones. They are substantial enough to line the stomach of even the most committed alcoholic. And crucially, they have a certain allegorical mystery: as John Webster suitably put it in his 1612 play The White Devil, ‘as if a man / Should know what foule is coffind in a bak’t meat / Afore you cut it up.’ (The word ‘coffin’ was used to describe pie crust as early as the fifteenth century, and this usage continued well into the 1700s.) The wake will echo with the question ‘What’s in them?’, which serves as a smaller, more digestible placeholder for the existential question haunting the proceedings: ‘What happens when you die?’

The exact nature of the pies we make changes from wake to wake; it’s a heavily personalised service. We’ve sourced a man’s favourite ale, decanted into Tupperware by his favourite barman, for steak and ale pies. We’ve made chicken and tarragon pies for a man who took noble care of his rescue chickens (a little morbid on reflection). We usually supply a few roast leek quiches for the vegetarian relatives, heady with rosemary for remembrance. For Terry, we took pains to produce a pork pie that would have pleased his discerning palate. The herby minced pork filling was studded with diced smoked ham. My father cooked down the pig’s head and trotters for the jelly. I learned to make hot water crust pastry, boiling an obscene quantity of lard in our kitchen that left my skin waxy with evaporated fat for days.

But typically my dad and I lean towards pies with a buttery shortcrust and a wine-rich steak and kidney filling. They are single-portion pies, baked in muffin trays. We make about sixty pies per funeral on average, requiring about eight kilos of filling and four kilos of pastry. We have three funerals this month. That’s a lot of pies.

This level of production is facilitated by my dad’s immense catering oven that forms the centre of his kitchen. It has been condemned twice by engineers brought in to fix it, the door has to be wedged shut with a fork and its pilot light is always snuffing out, but my dad knows exactly how to resurrect it using a cook’s match, a prayer and a wrench.

For our pie production line, my dad is on fillings, while pastry is my remit. I have an aptitude for pastry dough, thanks to my mortuary-cold hands. My dad’s pastry is good too, but over the last few years he has had problems with his hands, including arthritis and Dupuytren’s contracture, which have made the crumbing of butter and flour difficult. At least this was the excuse when he asked me that first time.

But I think I’m really there because, when you are grieving over the stove, it’s good to have someone to talk to. I’ll be elbows-deep in flour and butter, and my dad will remark, ‘It would be very painful, losing a friend at your age. But you will get to a point when more of your friends are dead than alive.’ He’ll be at the hob, stirring one of two hiccupping pots of stewed meat. ‘And you keep going and eventually you’re like Granny, the only one left, and all your friends are dead,’ he’ll continue, as I crack an egg. ‘They start going about the same time as your teeth. A few unlucky people lose one or two to road accidents and fights and various addictions in their twenties and thirties. The rest hang on till later, then one by one they drop and eventually you’re old and you’ve no one to talk to and nothing in your gums to do the talking with.’ He’ll grin at me. I know the variegated discolouration of his smile so well. The silver flash of that cap at the back, the creamier ones that are fake, solid plastic, and don’t have the black shadowing of petrifying blood under the enamel. ‘Fortunately, our pies are denture proof.’

This time in the limbo between a death and a funeral is the only time my dad and I cook together, which is usually impossible given our (genetic) stubbornness and aversion to sharing. My dad’s reluctance to share extends to recipes. He has been known to bestow a recipe on someone by surprise – my ex-boyfriend benefitted from a small Moleskine describing how to prepare eggs eight ways, because my dad had correctly assessed that he was a terrible cook – but generally if you ask him how he made something, he’ll smile slyly and go monosyllabic. Not ideal for my purposes here, then.

I’ve been keeping a closer eye on him recently, as part of my research for this essay, and I’ve seen him put all sorts of things into the pot: mustard, Worcestershire sauce, a fistful of bay leaves, slugs of wine, sometimes secretive dashes of tomato paste, tablespoons from obliquely unmarked jars of herbs and spices. Yet my dad insists that time is the key ingredient (and I did check he didn’t mean the herb). In fact, he recommends you let the filling simmer away at home while you partake of a pint at your local (ideally in the company of a vintage celebrity), making the most of the hours you have on this earth.

The recipe for ‘a good pie filling’ that he has generously provided was like something from one of his antique cookbooks, with the method and ingredients merged together into a colloquial paragraph. I’ve tried to preserve his tone, but have added some useful measurements (and punctuation). I cooked it myself to ensure that the method works, but remember that it permits and anticipates the need for improvisation, substitutions and estimation.

When any of us cook, we are participating in the twin processes of creation and destruction. Every ingredient used to be alive and is now breaking down. The alchemy of cookery arrests natural decay to make these dead things temporarily delicious. And, once digested, the meat, the butter, the veg, the wheat will be repurposed as your skin, your hair and, yes, your teeth.

In my family, buttoned up and recalcitrant as we are, food is how we demonstrate our love. My dad’s eulogy for his own father contained a recipe for chicken soup. I suppose when eventually my dad goes, I might read this.

Good Pye

Note: these pies are baked in muffin trays.

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My then-boyfriend watched me slice tomatoes on his chopping board, a few weeks after I had moved in. A scoff, then a laugh that became irritation. Why are you doing it like that? He was referring to the way I gripped the knife like a spoon, how the fingers of my left hand were dangerously placed, how the mushy, seedy result was nothing like the small, clean diced cubes he made for his daily salad of chopped tomatoes, mini cucumbers, carrots and some dill or parsley, all dressed in tahini and lemon.

I found the chopped salads boring and utilitarian, but went along with them since I was in his house and knew I needed more sustenance than the chocolate-covered pretzels I had stashed in the fridge door to stop them from melting. I would boil eggs to top the salad or grill the pitta, but after his criticism I would never volunteer to chop again. More importantly – an even bigger deterrent than his fault-finding – the sound of the knife on wood made my ears drum.

It happens often. Like a taiko drummer has taken sudden residence in my head and is playing that beat from Jumanji, signalling an invitation to another world, one more threatening. It’s actually called pulsatile tinnitus, my blood pressure rising so high that I can hear my heart throb in my ears, blood rushing through the carotid artery. It can happen when I hold a knife. It can happen when someone else is holding one. It can happen when something just sounds like a knife – the sound of metal on metal, cutlery or pots and pans being put away. I can even be in another room and I will hear the drumming before I am consciously aware that another person has started cooking or tidying. My ears are on high alert. This is why I am bad at chopping. Any recipe which includes an estimated time – say, thirty minutes – will likely stretch to sixty or ninety under my watch because I am so slow, distracted by the drums.

When I was a teenager, I spent days in silence. A catastrophic argument with my mother, of the scale that happened once or twice a year, would result in the silent treatment, sometimes for weeks on end. I would wake up to an empty house, my mother and stepfather having left for work and my younger sister and brother at school or nursery already. I was sleeping in the attic with no alarm and no wake-up call. I would come home from school to an empty house and then, two hours later, the others would arrive. My mother would stand silent, eating at the kitchen counter while I ate a chicken fillet, baby carrots and potatoes – all boiled and unsalted – with my much younger siblings. Then they would all go to bed, no goodnights. Just silence – mine and theirs. In between there was the sound of cutlery, of washing up, of clinking, the soundtrack to tension and the anticipation of future explosions.

There was an episode with a bread knife, waved in my face as I was told off for being rude. At the time I thought, Do not make this mean anything. But I did – I filed it away under ‘trauma’ and have felt scared of knives ever since. I would like to walk to the shop near me that sells expensive, super-sharp Japanese knives and purchase one – affirm something about my heritage, feel posh and capable – but I would be too scared to use it.

At the height of the lumbersexual aesthetic, I walked into a store in Portland that sold aspirational camping equipment for tech bros. I bought a Mercator Black Cat folding knife for $45. I was in the middle of a cycling trip down the West Coast and I thought the knife would make me feel more competent on the road. I chopped and opened things with it, but the blade was never steady in my hand, and I felt frightened when I cleaned it.

I contacted a therapist, Tony, via email:

I can feel myself tipping over, due to [redacted], and [redacted]. I’ve slipped into some negative patterns, and even developed a sort of phobia / strange tinnitus reaction when cooking with other people, which is truly becoming very difficult to live with! I believe that recent events have brought up some deep-seated issues for me, and I might be suffering from a mild case of post-traumatic stress. I think I might need 4-6 sessions?

I saw Tony every week for the next nine years. The drumming in my ears is a symptom of complex PTSD.

For most of those nine years, I lived alone. Happily, the drumming doesn’t occur when on my own, and I don’t even have to use knives at all. I have created a form of cooking that suits me – I call it soft cooking. I am drawn to soft foods and stirring, folding and mashing instead of slicing and dicing. I bought a new rice cooker and learned to make tamagoyaki-inspired scrambled eggs, flavoured with soy sauce and toasted sesame oil. What I hear: the soothing sound of running water as I rinse the rice, the Zojirushi ‘mystery song’ that plays when the rice is cooked (which – if you want to be a nerd about it – is a mechanical rendition of ‘Amaryllis’, a melody from the 1581 Ballet Comique de la Reine), the light drone of a wooden spoon swirling eggs in a pan, the crinkle of a plastic salad bag, which, to be honest, I could still do without. I arrange the leaves on the side, then cover it all with a shake of wasabi-flavoured furikake. If I am feeling up to it, I’ll graduate to a butter knife to split open an avocado and tease out the stone. Sometimes I use the same friendly knife (all curved edges – hard to kill someone with a butter knife) to work through a block of smoked tofu.

My current partner is a fantastic cook. At first, I rallied to match him, looked up recipes on NYT Cooking and Feast. But soon that fell away; I could not prepare a delicious meal in that gap between work ending and his arrival without stress sitting on my chest. I would stop the day an hour early, spend two hours in slow preparation, only to serve him an oversalted stew with a thump in my ears. I made him the scrambled eggs once and felt embarrassed. They are tasty and nutritious, but they do not have the sheen of a Meera Sodha or Anna Jones, of someone who was taught how to cook. He is now Head of Cooking, and I am Head of Washing-Up.

I told him that we need to find strategies for dealing with the drumming if he will be here more, cooking. We have experimented with dancing every time it begins, bopping from side to side in an effort to distract me, to remind me that I am in a different reality: one where I can leave if I need to. I bought a KitchenAid mini chopper, which is hands down the best thing I have purchased in the last decade – it whizzes up herbs and nuts and onions in seconds, minus the thudding sound of a blade against a board. That has made things easier. Lately, music has been the thing that works, especially Sade. Cherish the day / I won’t go astray / I won’t be afraid / You won’t catch me running. Lately, he has been doing the chopping while I make muffins. And when he is not here, I stick to my soft ways.

Tamagoyaki-inspired Scrambled Eggs with Rice and Salad

The following is adapted from Eric Kim’s original recipe.

Serves 1
Time 30–45 mins (depending on your rice cooker)

Ingredients

100g short-grain sushi rice
1 bag pre-washed salad
1 tbsp miso and sesame dressing (I use this pre-mixed one, but see here for a recipe)
2 eggs
2 garlic cloves, crushed
½ tsp soy sauce
¾ tsp sugar
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
1 tbsp furikake

Method

1. Place the rice in a bowl and add water. Gently swirl the grains with your hand and tip the starchy water away. Repeat around three times, or until the water runs clear.

2. Add the rice and 125ml fresh water to your rice cooker and cook on the ‘sushi rice’ or ‘white rice’ setting.

3. Open the bag of salad and plate. Pour over the dressing.

4. When the rice is done, keep warm in the cooker while you whisk the eggs, garlic, soy sauce and sugar together.

5. Heat the toasted sesame oil in a pan and scramble the eggs, using a rubber spatula to create large, soft curds. This should only take a minute or two.

6. Plate the rice and eggs. Top with the furikake.

7. Eat. Enjoy the silence.

Credits

Hanna Thomas Uose is a British-Japanese writer. Her debut novel Who Wants to Live Forever was published in March 2025 by Brazen / Hachette and picked for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club and the Good Housekeeping Good Books Spring Collection. She has an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia and, in 2022, won the Morley Prize for Unpublished Writers of Colour. Hanna is also a co-founder of Align, a strategic consultancy for the progressive movement.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. In Issue 1 of our magazine, Robin Craig wrote about the role of hospices and food at the end of his father’s life. Today’s article by Robin is a sequel of sorts, on the limitations of cooking your way out of a mental health crisis.

We highly recommend you read the original, which you can find in the magazine and online here:

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Disaster Cooking

On the limitations of cooking your way out of a mental health crisis, plus a recipe for a raspberry and lemon sponge cake. Words and images by Robin Craig. 

Six months ago, when my life was falling apart, I decided to make a horrible cake.

Now, you must understand that I did not intend for the cake to be horrible. I was desperate to make something impressive – a showstopper that, when posted to Instagram, would prompt my friends to tell me that I was doing so well, despite the circumstances (i.e. being signed off work because of a mental health crisis). That way, I wouldn’t have to face up to the fact that I was experiencing increasingly severe PTSD after the death of my father. The cake had to be good because I had to be good. If I could make an enormous cake, that had to mean that I was fine, actually, even if I couldn’t sleep without nightmares and I couldn’t go outside without having a panic attack.

Even when I am in good mental health, I am not a baker, so this mission was always going to be a struggle. My lack of interest in baking also meant that I did not have many ingredients, and because I couldn’t leave my flat without panicking, I was restricted to whatever was in the cupboards (most of which belonged to my far-more-baking-proficient housemate). I asked ChatGPT for a cake recipe – a critical sign of unwellness – and it presented me with a two-tier sugarless chocolate sponge cake. It did not at any point cross my mind that ChatGPT was not a reliable recipe source, or that the recipe it spat out sounded horrendous. I dutifully began to bake.

The cake took three gruelling hours to make, an absurdly long time. This is partly because I mixed everything by hand, partly because I unknowingly put the oven on the wrong function and spent a long time watching the cake slowly grill. When it was finished, it sat dense and uneven on the cooling rack like a slab of volcanic rock. I spread the sugarless buttercream filling on without waiting for the cake to cool and it was immediately absorbed, rendering the cake even denser. Still, I took some photos and uploaded them to Instagram, but the post was politely ignored. Nobody told me I was doing well. After forcing myself to eat two sandy, flavourless slices, I put the rest of the cake in the bin. I had wanted to prove to myself and to others that I was still competent. The cake’s failure was an unwelcome reminder that I was not. 

Although in retrospect it’s obvious that a cake, any cake, could never have done the hard work of getting me through a crisis, I hadn’t known what else to try. Attempting to get help from the health service had only compounded my feelings of chaos. I was unwell enough to require urgent help, but not so unwell that I needed admission to an inpatient ward. My GP signed me off work without speaking to me. I requested – and was given – antidepressants, which prompted a referral to a mental health nurse, but both times the nurse was scheduled to call, I was forgotten. When I finally spoke to someone about my issues, I was directed to charities like Mind for support (perhaps unsurprising, given that demand for mental health services is at an all-time high, according to a 2024 report from NHS England, with bed occupancy routinely above 95% in mental health wards). Eventually I gave up and relied on the antidepressants and my long-term (and reduced-cost) therapy to get me through. 

The feeling of being lost in the system and begging for help was profound. With seemingly few other options available, it felt only natural to attempt something like my baking project in order to restore a sense of agency. There’s a sense of control that doing something difficult in already difficult circumstances can offer, a way to prove to yourself that whatever else is happening, at least you’ve got things somewhat together. I’m not alone in this compulsion: when I opened up to my friends about how much I was struggling, many of them told me about their own responses to crises, and more than one revealed that they also made complicated meals to prove that they were in the process of rebuilding their lives: boeuf bourguignon, Sunday roasts, and what one termed a ‘mental illness lasagne’. 

Ultimately, my friends helped me to realise that I did not have any power over what was happening to me, and that a cake could not fix things. I stopped trying to prove to myself that I was fine and began seeking their support. Most importantly, I gave myself time and space to be ill – and to let myself try to get better, and fail, and then try again. This process would have been quicker with appropriate mental health support, but in the face of systemic failures, it was the communities around me that kept me going. Slowly and painstakingly, I began to recover. Life returned to its usual rhythms, despite it all.

Recently, I asked a friend for help again. I wanted to make an enormous cake, a purifying ritual to cleanse myself of my previous chaos and close off this chapter of my life. She suggested the below lemon and raspberry sponge, based on her nan’s legendary lemon sponge cake, a stalwart that has been made again and again in her family. We added raspberry icing and decorative sugar flowers to make it our own, as this was a cake for spring and a cake for fresh starts. I accidentally cooked the first two sponges on the grill setting again and we laughed to the point of tears, and then started over. The end result was enormous and distinctly homemade, but far more delicious and impressive than anything I could make on my own – and, crucially, its recipe did not come from ChatGPT. We ate it together, sat on the balcony in the sun.

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Lemon and raspberry sponge cake

This recipe makes a four-tier mega cake, but you can easily halve the recipe if you would prefer a humbler, two-tier cake (or if you don’t have enough tins). This recipe is significantly easier to make if you have an electric whisk.

Cuts into 8 enormous slices
Time 1½ hrs

Ingredients

For the cake

450g margarine or butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
450g caster sugar
zest of 2 lemons
8 eggs
450g self-raising flour, sieved
2 heaped tsp (~13g) baking powder
a pinch of salt
a smear of shop-bought lemon curd (optional)

For the raspberry buttercream

226g raspberries
226g butter, softened
500g icing sugar

Method

1. Add all the raspberries to a pan, mash them a little, then simmer over a medium heat for 10 mins until reduced a little. Sieve into a bowl – you’re looking to get around 100g of purée and juice in total. Discard what’s left in the sieve and set the juice aside to cool (or chill in the fridge) while you make the sponges.

2. Heat the oven to 180°c fan. Grease and line four 20cm cake tins with baking paper.

3. Chop the margarine or butter into rough chunks, then add the lemon zest and caster sugar and beat in a large bowl until light and fluffy (this should take around 8–10 mins with a mixer). Add the eggs one by one and beat until just combined, scraping down the sides of the bowl with each addition. 

4. Mix the flour with the baking powder, then fold into the egg mixture, a few tablespoons at a time, until completely combined. 

5. Divide the mixture evenly between the cake tins, then bake for 18–20 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. Do not open the oven door when baking or the sponges will deflate. If your oven is small, bake the sponges in two batches. Once cooked, set the sponges aside to cool for at least 30 mins.

6. To make the buttercream, chop the butter into rough chunks and whisk until fluffy. Add the sugar, then beat for another few minutes until pale and fluffy. Finally, mix in the reduced raspberry juice.

7. Once the sponges have cooled, place the first one on a cake stand or plate. Dollop a generous spoonful of icing in the centre, then spread the icing out to the edges. Top with a smear of lemon curd, if you like. Add the second cake on top of the first, and repeat until you have four tiers, finishing the top with a generous layer of buttercream only.

8. If you have any remaining buttercream, spread it over the sides of the cake. Decorate however you feel.

Remember, if all else fails, ask your friends for help.

Notes

• The cake keeps well – particularly if wrapped and stored in the fridge – for up to three days. Allow to cool to room temperature before serving.

Credits

Robin Craig writes about sex, death, and disaster. He is currently working on his first book, Perverts: A History, which will be published with John Murray Press. He has previously written for a range of publications, such as VICE, Huck Magazine, i-D, and Vittles. He also maintains a Substack called Looking At Porn, which delves into taboo sexualities and what they say about the culture we live in. 

This recipe was tested by Katie Smith.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. Cooking from Life is a strand of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world; cooking as refusal, heritage, messiness, routine. This week’s Cooking from Life is by Huw Lemmey. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

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Vittles contributor Jack Thompson worked on the newly released podcast series Fuel to Fork, which exposes the hidden role of fossil fuels in the food we eat, ‘revealing how food accounts for 15% of global fossil fuel use.’ Listen here.

‘If you don’t like it, you know what you can do’

When I read writing about food, even good, compelling writing, a shiver of panic runs across my skin. Writing around food – its social context, infrastructure and immigration, kitchens, class, and restaurants – is fine. But when writing concerns the stuff itself – its taste, texture, and colours on the plate – I can feel my heart rate picking up, a slight sweat on my forehead. And when people talk about glugging wine with their probably gorgeous young friends as they swirl sizzling anchovies in olive oil, the tender, salty flesh breaking apart as easily as their liaisons with probably handsome men … I don’t know, it gives me the ick. Living well, and without shame – it feels deeply suspicious. It goes against everything I was raised to believe in.

I’m only half joking. Like most people, I suspect, I was taught to cook by my mum. Her culinary style was utilitarian to say the least – influenced more by home economics than Nigella, with priority given to meeting the calorific demands of three growing lads and a husband, all while on a limited budget. Dishes like spaghetti bolognese, shepherd’s pie, baked potatoes, and Irish stew with fat dumplings were supplemented by store-cupboard improvisations like ‘eggy-beany-stuff’ – plus her dictionary of maxims that were intended to toughen us up, like spiritual calcium. ‘If you’re hungry, there’s always bread’, ‘If you don’t like it, you know what you can do’, and, ‘Well, life isn’t fair’ were, like cooking, tough lessons that we were only ever going to learn from her.

Life isn’t fair. When I was eleven or twelve, my mum was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease). This is a neurodegenerative illness of unusual barbarity, slowly robbing sufferers of their movement but often leaving their cognitive functions fully intact. Death is inevitable, and its overture anguishing. Following her diagnosis, Mum’s educational strategy was turbocharged, as she set about teaching me all the base skills I would require to cook and feed myself while she still could. A curriculum of white sauce, perfect roasties, custard from scratch, Victoria sponge, Yorkshire puddings, indeterminate curry, bread, honey-roast ham, and poached eggs raced against a prognosis that we counted in months rather than years. As the illness progressed, my brothers and I took on more of the cooking responsibilities, trying to match our mum’s recipes as closely as possible to provide decent meals.

This was our teenaged attempt to repay care with care, love with love. I may have so far given the impression that my mum was a practitioner of tough love, but that was just a fraction of the types of love she gave – all of it, like her food, unfussy, nourishing, and missed. It was a love of absolute, expansive, and simple solidity, borne of her own socialist, Quaker, and Methodist upbringing. At the top of the stairs in our house there was a framed list of even more maxims, titled ‘RULES TO BE FOLLOWED BY THIS FAMILY’, which had hung in the room where her grandmother had been born. ‘Waste not; want not. Study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your hands. Never spend money before you have it. Never buy what you don’t want because it is cheap. Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.’ But also: ‘Take all things by the smooth handle. Be obliging and kind to another. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.’ She lived by these mottos, which formed a sort of no-nonsense attitude that stood up to bullies, put every thing in its proper place, and spoke kindly but honestly.

When my mum died, a couple of weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I suddenly found myself without my lifelong teacher. In the messy years that followed, trying to make sense of what was left of her in the world, I realised that occasionally you have to unlearn what your parents taught you. I sometimes take pleasure in knowing what advice Mum would have given me and ignoring it. And I feel heavily what she missed out on: not just seeing her grandchildren be born, or sharing in our lives as we grow older, but what she missed out on while alive, when she was teaching me these lessons. I wish she had given us less and taken more for herself. Perhaps my memory is skewed by those terrible last few years, but I wish I had more memories of my mum enjoying food, not just cooking it. I’m not trying to paint her as a martyr – I know she had those moments; I know she laughed and cheersed and savoured with the best of them. I just wish she had had more.

Friends have taught me plenty about how to cook since then. Cracking open crabs on the countertop with Noela for the first time, or baking a turbot stuffed with lemons with Dr Valli, or filleting yellowtail snappers on the back of the boat with Eddie and Frank, are lessons about more than just food. I’ve balanced the stoic Protestant maxims at the top of the stairs with some I’ve figured out on my own: enjoy the cooking as well as the dish; take more than you need of anything that’s joyful; spend your pleasure today and do not save it for tomorrow, which, for you, might not come. In this spirit, here is a recipe I picked up a few years ago in Asturias, on a long weekend with friends, overindulging without consequences from God. I like it and I think my mum would like it too; while it’s hearty and wholesome, it takes time to prepare and feels special to serve. It requires a little fuss at first, but then you can just hang around in your kitchen, chatting. You’ve got to learn to enjoy the glugging wine and the sizzling fat and the beautiful young friends too, without shame.

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Stuffed Onions, Asturian Style

Serves 2–3 as part of a lunch with french fries or rice
Time 2 hr 30 mins 

Ingredients

4 large onions
2 medium eggs, hard boiled
3 roasted red peppers from a jar
250g Bonito tuna fillets in olive oil (net weight) or good-quality tinned tuna in olive oil
500g passata
salt and pepper
plenty of olive oil
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 bottle of Asturian cider (Trabanco is what I used – it’s dry and flat)
1 bay leaf
1 tbsp plain flour

to serve

french fries or rice

Method

1. Peel the onions then trim the root, being careful not to cut through the skin – this will allow the onion to sit flat. Slice 1cm off the top and set aside. Use a paring knife and a teaspoon to scoop out the centre, being careful to leave a few layers. Chop what you’ve removed, and put to one side.

2. Roughly chop the eggs and the roasted red peppers. Put in a mixing bowl along with the tuna and 1 tbsp of its preserving oil. Use a fork to roughly break up the tuna, then add 3–4 tbsp of passata and mix to combine. Season to taste.

3. Fit the onions as snugly as possible in a small pan or casserole. Pour in enough oil to reach halfway up the onions. Gently fry the onions over a medium heat until they begin to brown but retain some shape. Turn the onions to cook both sides, then remove them from the pan and set aside to cool. Fry the little onion “hats” too until lightly golden and set aside.

4. Remove all but a few tablespoons of the oil from the pan, then add the chopped onion and the garlic. Sauté for 8–12 mins, until translucent. Add the rest of the passata, a good glug or two of cider, and the bay leaf. Mix the flour with 2 tbsp of cold water to make a paste and then stir that into the sauce too. Bring everything to the boil and give it a good stir, then reduce the heat to low.

5. When the onions are cool enough to handle, spoon the tuna mixture into them, then put their little hats back on top. Gently lower the stuffed onions into the pan – they should be nearly covered by the sauce. If the onions threaten to sink, remove any excess sauce with a ladle and reserve for later.

6. Half cover the pan with a lid and cook on a very low heat for 2 hrs. The sauce should cook down and reduce by half, but if it’s looking too dry, add a little of the excess sauce or a splash of cider. Season 1 hr into cooking.

7. When you’re ready to eat, serve the onions along with spoonfuls of the tomato sauce and the traditional accompaniments of french fries or rice. Drink the rest of the cider, finish the bottle, enjoy it.

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Credits

Huw Lemmey is a writer living in Barcelona. He is the author of four books, including Bad Gays: A Homosexual History and Unknown Language. His debut film, Ungentle, was released in 2022. He writes the regular essay series “Utopian Drivel” at huw.substack.com.

This recipe was tested by Georgia Rudd. The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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Cooking from Life is a strand of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world; cooking as refusal, heritage, messiness, routine. 

This week’s Cooking from Life is by Noreen Masud. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Hard and Round

An essay on not-knowing, and a recipe for kala chana. Words and photographs by Noreen Masud.

In the house in Lahore where I grew up, my grandmother lived on her bed. Sitting or lying. Everything happened there. She directed, shouted, swore, and fed my cousin whatever meat there was by hand, because he was a boy and very special. She smelled intensely of herself, but sweetly. All of this is in the past tense, but it shouldn’t be. My grandmother is alive, still in Lahore. We don’t speak.

Sometimes you reach back and all you find to touch is not-knowing: hard and round as any memory. I don’t even know what my grandmother’s first language is. She’s from Kashmir, born pre-Partition: married at seventeen, she was living in Lahore by the mid-eighties, but I don’t know what happened in the years between. She understood perhaps a quarter of my English. I understood perhaps half of her jumbly mostly-Urdu. But she cooked kala chana for me, the third of four girls in the house, because she knew I loved them. It filled the uncomprehending gap between us, more or less.

Hard and round. Kala chana – small, black chickpeas – grow across South Asia. Overwhelmingly, only Indians and Pakistanis seem to eat them. Australia grows kala chana for export, and for stacking the shelves of South Asian shops. I think, but I’m not sure, that they’re most popular in Punjab. I never asked questions, you see; I just ate. They’re intensely savoury: full of fibre and tannins. Cooked, they’re not black but deep brown, tight and shiny as polished wood.

What do kala chana taste like? I’ve heard people say they’re meaty. I don’t remember what meat tastes like. Again the ball of not-knowing rolls in.

All I know is that I can stand over the stove in a trance and spoon kala chana into my mouth; that I find myself going back to the pot again and again ‘just to check on the flavours’; that kala chana is good when the chickpeas are small and bullet-y and darting around the spoon, or when they’re big and soft and indolently splitting to show golden insides. I know I can eat a bowl of kala chana without anything else, like dry cereal, and I have. Other pulses melt into a kind of nourishing background noise. Cooked down into dal, the outlines of masoor and mung vanish into a single flowing mass; white chickpeas blandly give way at the touch of a tooth. But kala chana resist, like tiny clenched fists.

The kala chana dish I love and remember has a very thin sauce: dark brown, with windows of orange oil sailing over the surface. You don’t have to spoon the lot straight into your mouth. You can eat them with rice or chapati, of course. That much I do remember. You can drain the sauce off the chickpeas and eat them one by one, very slowly, like I did when I was fourteen and my uncle called me fat. I remember that too. Or you can drink just the broth, like a queen, and feel fire spreading through your face and fingertips. It’s the heat of deep nourishment: your body getting exactly what it wants and needs.

I never see kala chana on a restaurant menu in the UK. But when I lived in Oxford, the curry house near me was unusual: it served Punjabi food, specifically.  You could order a dhansak, but the very kind, gentle owner would give you a sad look as he wrote it down. He found out I’d grown up in Lahore and, after some probing about my favourites, I admitted I missed kala chana. After that, every time he cooked it off-menu he’d send me a message on Facebook. And I’d go, half angry-shy and half hungry. Our shared Pakistani-ness was a painful hole I couldn’t name: the things I should have known but didn’t. If I let him get too close, we’d fall into that hole together. Last time I went, five years after I moved away from Oxford, he recognised me and put his hand up as if to give me a hug. Instead we just smiled helplessly, tense shoulders, a little apart.

Now I live in Bristol and can buy 69p tins of kala chana from any of the Easton shops. I always have a tin in my cupboard, superstitiously. But I don’t cook them often. When I do, my white friends eat them with polite, horrified expressions. This, you see, is my official excuse for not using kala chana: no one likes them but me. This aloneness makes me feel hollow and special. But it’s not the only reason I leave the tin in the cupboard. Mostly I live on frozen potato waffles and fried eggs and microwaved broccoli; I only cook when I want to forget. And I only cook kala chana when I want to hate myself.

Every time I buy a tin of kala chana, I think I should try to make hummus, or shockingly brown-grey vegan meringues with their sludgy aquafaba. I should break their spell on me by mixing it up and cooking new things with the same ingredient: by taking another path. One where there’s nothing to not-know. So far, my courage has failed. I leave the tin in the cupboard till I want to cry. Then I make kala chana the Punjabi way, peering at some recipe on the internet, and eat it by myself. It tastes good. I eat it, as I say, in tablespoonfuls from the pot. It also never tastes right.

For this column, though, I decided to have one big go at getting it right. I tested three recipes that I found at random online, making changes based on my instincts. One tasted of nothing but heat: I wasn’t sure if it was me or the chana that was numb. The second tasted of the vinegar I sloshed in at the end, in a panic, and of a workaday masala base: the standard tomato-cumin-coriander that I put in red lentil dal. It was strange, like a celebrity spotted wearing a McDonald’s uniform.

It was the third recipe that worked, sort of. It’s still not right, but the black cardamom and star anise open up a deep door at the back of the flavour. The door goes all the way down, to the place where memory should be.

Kala chana

This recipe is an adapted version of one from Hebbars Kitchen (all credit to them). And if you’re ever in Oxford, go to Currydor on the Botley Road, and order something good.

Ingredients like kala chana, amchur, and black cardamom are available in larger South Asian stories across the UK.

Serves 2
Time 1 hr

Ingredients

1 tin cooked kala chana
3 tbsp vegetable, or any neutral oil
kala namak (black salt) or regular salt, to taste
1 bay leaf
½  cinnamon stick
1 black cardamom pod (these can be hard to find, but I really recommend them)
2 cardamom pods (or 3 if they’re old, like mine)
1 star anise
4 cloves
1 tsp cumin seeds
2 onions or one very large onion, finely chopped (if in doubt, go with more rather than less)
2.5cm ginger, finely chopped (or a big spoonful of ginger paste)
6 garlic cloves, finely chopped (or a big spoonful of garlic paste)
½ tsp ground turmeric
1 tbsp chilli powder
1 tsp ground coriander
½ tsp ground cumin
½ tsp garam masala
1 tsp amchur
a pinch of hing (asafoetida), or one sharp shake of the plastic tub with a hole pierced in it
half a tin of peeled plum tomatoes, puréed
a big squeeze of tomato purée (around 1 tbsp)
¾ tsp salt, or to taste
3 tbsp fresh coriander, leaves and stems chopped
2 green finger chillies
1 tsp ghee, or extra if you’d like
1 tbsp kasuri methi (dried fenugreek leaves)
fresh ginger, to garnish
lemon juice, to taste

Method

1      Drain and wash the chickpeas. Keep the aquafaba, if you’re braver than me, and use it for something interesting.

2      Heat the oil in your biggest pot over a low heat. Fry the bay leaf, cinnamon, black and regular cardamom, star anise, cloves, and cumin seeds for a few minutes until you start to smell the cumin.

3      Add the onions and cook, low and slow, until they are soft, golden, and almost brown (around 10 mins). Then add the ginger and garlic, and cook for another 1–2 mins until the raw smell goes.

4      Add the turmeric, chilli powder, ground coriander, ground cumin, garam masala, amchur (if using), and the hing, and continue frying until you start to smell the spices (perhaps a minute), then add the tinned tomatoes, the tomato purée, and kala namak or salt to taste. Continue to cook for a few minutes, until the mixture is dryer and browner, and the oil starts to leave an orange greasy smear behind on the pan when you stir. At this point, I think it might be good to blend the whole base to make the sauce thinner, but I didn’t bother.

5      Stir in the chickpeas and around 1 cup of water. Cover the pot with a lid, bring to a boil, and simmer for 10 mins or more. It gets better and better with time, but at some point you’ll get hungry.

6      Right before serving, stir through the fresh coriander, whole chillies, ghee, kasuri methi, and some fresh ginger and lemon juice to taste if it needs brightness.

Notes

• Eat the kala chana with chapati, boiled potatoes, rice, or salad, or by itself. Pick out the aromatics as you go, to stop your teeth freezing.

• Kala chana keeps well in the fridge, but I recommend removing the aromatics after the first couple of days, or they start to dominate. Add more water as you need when reheating. Freeze some for when you’re sad.

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Credits

Noreen Masud is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her academic monograph, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (2022) won the MSA First Book Award 2023 and the University English Prize in 2024. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (2023), was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction; The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year; the Jhalak Prize; and the RSL Ondaatje Prize.

This recipe was tested by Maryam Jillani. The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also…

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All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

Subscribe now

Cooking from Life is a strand of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world; cooking as refusal, heritage, messiness, routine. 

This week’s Cooking from Life is by Gurpreet Jivan. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Companions in Sadness, Companions in Joy

On cooking Punjabi food for new friends in Berlin. Plus a recipe for Mooli Paranthas. Words and photographs by Gurpreet Jivan.

It was October last year, the blazing oranges of autumn receding and giving way to winter. I rattled around, looking in my bag for my keys outside the Berlin building complex where my girlfriend and I had just moved. Behind me, I heard the ringing, familiar sound of Punjabi. I turned around to meet the bright eyes of a man speaking into a headset, a Wolt food delivery bag stuffed under his arm. I smiled, comforted by the thick sounds of the language that made up my private world – the one spoken behind English front doors, or shared with my sister when we wanted to gossip on the bus. Hearing Punjabi that way soothed me – unlike German, which made me alert. I smiled and let the man in.

Back in the warmth of my apartment, I called my dad, who lives in Birmingham. I call him often – not as often as he would like, but I’ve learnt to accept that, to him, no number of calls will be enough. He spends his days driving around the city, visiting people’s houses and offering them blinds, curtains, and shutters – a vast number of options to upkeep British decorum, isolating families behind veiled windows. When we speak, he doesn’t relay funny anecdotes from his day, like clients serving him pakoras or too-sweet tea, but instead tells me of his pains, his anxieties – of poor health, money and age. 

On that particular day, he asked me about Berlin. ‘Tera dil lagiyah?’, he said – Had my heart grown fond of this new place? ‘There are Punjabis here!’, I responded, not knowing how to answer his question, but recounting my earlier interaction. ‘That’s good’, he said.

Our home in Birmingham was the culmination of a journey my grandparents made from Jalandhar, Punjab to the UK in the 1960s. My nana had tried his hand as a bus driver before joining my nani in the textile factories of the city’s bustling industrial scene. He was, and still is, a restless man, and it wasn’t long before he set up his own manufacturing business. In the open yards of Handsworth, he would make anything that was fashionable: kagools, wax and bomber jackets, and, naturally, shell-suits. My nani was key to his success: she mustered an endless network of bibis and aunties, who would stitch fleeces through the night. Like many Punjabis of his time, my nana placed little value on education; this was brought about in part by a deep mistrust of British-influenced Indian upper classes, whose ideas of life were unachievable and alien to the farmers of Punjab. Instead, he believed in entrepreneurship, which granted access to the kind of capital and power that could buy freedom and respect.  It offered the chance to make one’s own life. 

My own move to Berlin came at the end of summer last year, which I had made to be with my girlfriend. While it was not for the same reasons as my grandparents’ journey to the UK all those years ago, my experience shared some similarities with theirs – especially with my nani, who left her home for a life in England with a new husband. I’d lived in other European cities before, on the cold streets of Munich rich with money and tall monasteries-cum-beer-halls, and in the prickly, still heat of Madrid through a summer that lasted too long. But each time I found myself achingly homesick, romanticising the UK in ways that I never do when I am there. I found myself thinking about my commute home from work in East London; my favourite rawa dosa in Tooting, the way its lace melted into my fingers. I missed how the bus would be littered with groups of schoolkids holding chicken and chips and laughing egregiously, teasing out every minute of their freedom before finally trudging on home.

In Berlin, I found that old-world European hostility dehumanises and excludes migrants from public spaces, higher education, work, and politics. While the UK is desperately trying to breed this level of discrimination within its borders, there’s a specific kind of racialising and aggression that I’ve experienced here. In Germany, there is a general consensus that a country built for white Germans should only be enjoyed by white Germans. People talk about Germany as practically socialist – but for whom, exactly?  Here is a city where people are an extension of the police, where, since 7 October, pro-Palestinian protestors have been violently attacked and suppressed, where Black and brown people routinely suffer racist attacks. Racism is familiar to me – it has been pervasive in my career, my relationships, my friendships, and in my own mind’s eye. But in Berlin I am more foreign, more religiously profiled. The city unravels in its hypocrisy of liberalism, and living here feels like walking into a fresh unknown.

During my first few months in Berlin, I applied to more jobs than ever before, receiving unwavering silence in response. In January, I was finally offered a part-time gig as a pastry chef at a bakery in Charlottenburg and accepted without hesitation. On my first day, I made my way to the bakery while the day was still covered in night. When I got into the bakery, it was alive: bakers were finishing their night shifts, the yeasty, sweet smell of fresh bread clung to the ovens, and I awaited days spent in the rhythms of cooking.

I looked at the roster and noticed the name ‘Maninder Kaur’. Seeing a Punjabi name on the list, I felt a feeling of safety, of community, a bit like how my dad must when he nods at every Singh he sees when we are on holiday, how he would have nodded at the Wolt driver outside my apartment in Berlin. Later, as I was weighing out 1050g of sourdough for shaping, Maninder marched up to me and pointed at my tattoo, which reads ‘Jivan’ in Gurmukhi. ‘Punjabi!’ she said, before any hellos were exchanged. ‘Hanji’, I replied, smiling. In our later conversations, her instinct was to speak to me in Punjabi, whereas mine was to default to English, and we would talk in a mixture of the two.

Maninder is from Jalandhar, like my grandparents, and she came to Berlin to study IT Management, with encouragement from her father to attain the kind of insulation that only a middle-class life can bring. Like many Punjabis in Europe, Maninder is a lone migrant – her family, including her husband, are at home in Punjab. After her studies, she was unable to find a job in IT (not for want of trying), which is how she ended up working as a kitchen porter in the bakery.

In our first week at work, we talked about our favourite foods, our families, British visas, relatives we both had in Canada. Maninder was playful and silly with everyone in the bakery, and I was goofy in the way I only find myself being when I feel safe. She showed me photos of her parents. Her dad looked just like some of my uncles in Birmingham: flat pink turban, thick grey beard hanging loose, and wide suit jacket stiffened, hanging off slim shoulders. We talked about Punjabis in Berlin: I told her about how I had once seen at least six Punjabis go by on delivery bikes in one direction, and at least five more the other way. ‘Cooking, too,’ she noted, telling me that many Punjabis worked in commercial kitchens. I started to notice them, heads popping out of hot kitchens across the city, brown hands skilfully preparing food.

For centuries, Europe has been built on the labour of immigrants, and since World War Two, and the upheaval following the newly independent and partitioned nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947, Punjabis and other South-Asians have been spread across countries like Italy, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Finland, Poland, and the UK. While these nations boast self-sufficiency and stability, there are millions of people being exploited in their hallmarks of leisure, their stories in every sweet orange, juicy burger, coffee cup, and sushi roll.

Recently, the fabric of capitalist idealisation has been unravelling for new migrants in the West. The barriers to entry for businesses are higher than ever; independent businesses, restaurants, and corner shops are pushed out by conglomerates; and the intolerance for Black and brown faces and bodies has escalated. In April last year, I read about the rampant exploitation of Punjabi migrants on Italy’s kiwi farms, while in Germany, delivery riders – most of whom were immigrants, with many Punjabis among the workforce – went on strike against a subcontracting system at Wolt, in which their wages were withheld for months. Even as Europe continues to build itself on labour from elsewhere, it has continued to other the same people, denying them dignity, spaces for homemaking, and the soft joys promised by contemporary life.

I have now worked at the bakery for five months. In that time, Maninder and I have ventured around the city together, including to the outlets at Dong Xuan Centre to buy her new trousers – loose, so she can feel the spring breeze on her legs. Life in Berlin has been hard for her, her appetite lost in cooking and eating alone.

When we met, I had thought about cooking for Maninder, but I was nervous. She was a ‘real’ Punjabi, her language fluent, her Punjabi film, music, and TV references vivid. Meanwhile, I felt an imposter, I had rejected my Punjabi culture for so long in order to know my own desires and interests away from those cultivated within me when I was raised as woman in a Punjabi household. But when Maninder said that she missed eating in company, I shrugged off my insecurities and started bringing meals into work for both of us. I cooked bharta made from aubergines, stuffed green pepper sabzi, mac and cheese replete with green chillies, and of course, milky sweet semiyan. She joyfully ate my food, asking how I prepared my tarkas, enjoying the new tastes of soy instead of cow’s milk, which I often substitute. When we ate, I thought amusedly of how I was hesitant to cook for her before. 

‘Dukh-sukh’ is a common expression across Punjab and other parts of South Asia. In my family, we use it to express a sense of company found in sadness, tiredness, or stress: a companion who is not there to fix your worries, but to share in the feeling and ultimately soothe it, making way for something pleasurable and easier to endure. When Maninder and I eat together, I thank her for making me cook more, for giving me a chance to feed us both. Having a friend to share in the joys of the distinct flavours of Punjabi home-cooked food, who understands Punjabi swear words and who knows the isolation of being a lone brown woman in a new country – has watered a part of me that was unkempt. I’ve since made more friends here, tending to different parts of me, but before meeting Maninder, I was lonely in this place, too.

One day at work, Maninder and I both craved paranthas. I missed eating them with my family and the lazy freedom of the weekend, the dish being a call to come together, to eat, and to rest. We sat at the table for two in my flat, smearing butter across the tops of steaming mooli paranthas, and she told me that her husband had started teasing her for the way she had been using English words mixed in with her Punjabi. I think about how my girlfriend has noticed my gestures changing and becoming more animated, about how it took no time at all for me and Maninder to rub off on one another. Maninder’s company already revealing itself in my lexicon, and my life in Berlin.

Mooli Paranthas for Maninder

Stuffed paranthas have a special ability to stretch an ingredient into a meal: unused potatoes; cauliflower left over from sabzi; daal caught just before it’s on its way to the bin. But Maninder’s favourite are mooli or radish, so that’s what we’ll make. 

Don’t be precious about the fillings. If you use daal, drain any water before you mix it in with the rest of the spices. If you use paneer, cut it into small chunks first. Whatever you use, I’d suggest including at least one boiled potato, roughly chopped or smashed up: it’s the best way to ensure the filling is soft and substantial. 

You will start to become aware of when the dough is ready by the way it feels in your hands, something you can only experience once you’ve committed to making paranthas a few times over. My mum’s tip for kneading is, ‘Don’t stop until your knuckles are red.’

Serves 2
Time 1 hr 30 minutes

Ingredients

oil or melted butter, for frying

for the filling

1 medium potato
½ large mooli (daikon), coarsely grated
2 tsp salt 
30g fresh coriander, finely chopped
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp garam masala
1 tsp red chilli powder
1 Thai green chilli, finely chopped
¼ white onion, finely diced 

for the dough

225g atta, or a mix of 100g wholemeal flour and 125g strong white bread flour, plus extra for dusting
110 ml water
1 tsp salt

to serve

butter
pickles
plain yoghurt
brown sugar

Method

1. Put the potato into a pot, and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil over a medium heat, then reduce the heat, cover, and cook for 10–15 mins until you can slice a knife clean through it. Run the cooked potato under cold water – the skin should come right off. Leave to cool a little, then roughly smash or chop the potato.

2. Put the grated mooli in a bowl, add 1 tsp salt, then set aside for 5–7 mins to draw out some of the water. Transfer to a sieve or colander to drain, scrunching the mooli into small balls to squeeze out as much water as possible.

3. Add the mooli and the potato to a mixing bowl, then add in the rest of the filling ingredients (including the other 1 tsp salt) and mix to combine evenly. Set aside.

4. To make the dough, pour three-quarters of the water into the atta or flour mix, add 1 tsp salt, and leave to sit for 10 mins. After 10 mins, use the tips of your fingers to mix in the water and start to form a dough. Slowly add the rest of the water, using your palm to combine the dough – don’t be put off by the stickiness – and then knead for 5 mins. The dough should feel soft, light, and supple, and shouldn’t stick to the bowl. If it is sticking to the sides of the bowl, add a little flour. If it feels tough, add a drop of water. 

5. Now it’s time to assemble the paranthas. Divide the dough into four roughly equal balls. Dust the counter top with some flour. Transfer a ball of dough onto the counter, and start rolling it out into a circle. Rolling out roti dough is like painting: you can’t apply pressure all at once. Roll gently while rotating the dough – if you keep rotating, it will be less likely to stick to the surface and you won’t need to add too much extra flour, which would make the dough heavier. (An example of this method can be seen here.) Aim for a circle around 8cm in diameter. Repeat with the remaining dough balls. 

6. Put a heaped tablespoon of the filling mixture into the centre of each dough circle. Gather up the corners of the dough around the filling and bring together to form parcels. Pinch the edges together tightly and twist off any excess dough, before flattening each parcel into a disc. Dust with flour and gently roll out into a circle again. Keep moving and turning, adding flour as necessary, until your dough is around 10cm in diameter. 

7. Pace a flat plan over a medium-high heat. Shake as much flour as you can from the paranthas. Once you can feel heat coming off the pan, you’re ready to start frying. Cook the paranthas one by one. Flip the paratha after around 2 mins – by this point, the dough should be starting to look dry, more taupe than the pale of uncooked dough. Pour 1 tsp of oil or melted butter onto the brown spots on the dough, then after 3 mins flip again and pour another 1 tsp of oil or butter onto the other side. After 90 seconds, flip again and cook for a final 90 seconds – the oil should crisp the dough on each side, and it should look shiny, slightly hardened, and laminated.

8. Serve the paranthas with cold butter, pickles, and yoghurt. A friend suggested putting a teaspoon of brown sugar into the yoghurt with this dish, and I haven’t been able to eat it without since. 

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Credits

Gurpreet Jivan is a writer, playwright, and chef based in Birmingham and Berlin. She is currently working independently at the intersections of theatre, audio, and food. Her works often concern cultural and social identity in Europe and South Asia. Her first play, Rituals, was performed in Birmingham as part of Kali Theatre Writer’s Discovery Programme in March 2024, and was recently shortlisted for Bold Elephant Playwrights. You can find her on Twitter (@jivangurpreet) and Instagram (@jivan.gurpreet).

This recipe was tested by Luke Churchill.

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Cooking from Life is a strand of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world; cooking as refusal, heritage, messiness, routine. 

This week’s Cooking from Life is by Marianne Brooker. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Midnight Crumble

The neo-feudal reality of life in a ‘commune’. Words by Marianne Brooker. Photographs by Marianne Brooker and Georgia Rudd.

We ate together on Mondays. Around twelve of us – gardeners, carpenters, builders, foresters, chefs, musicians, and those of us with less singular vocations – gathered around two farmhouse dining tables pushed together in the shape of a T. We took it in turns to cook, each of us dropping £2 into a porcelain chicken to pay for the next week’s ingredients. An ageing aristocrat in shabby clothes and a beaten-up hat sat at the head of the table. Every week, he dropped in £2 of his own and totted up our ‘hours’, a crude exchange of time for space. The house was his, and the rest of us occupied a shifting position, somewhere between worker and guest, tenant and friend. 

The aristocrat had inherited the Devon estate from an aunt years before. By the time I moved in, it mixed baroque architecture and Italianate terraced gardens with didgeridoos and tattered banners warning against the harms of genetically modified food. The kitchen walls were papered with photographs – smiling faces and wide eyes, weddings and festivals, activists pushing against police lines. This fading grandeur held a radical promise.

The estate was an experiment in alternative living, sustainable horticulture, and renewable energy. Its grounds were split into distinct quarters, each with its own pattern and character: ornate lawns bordered with exotic flowers, a walled kitchen garden with uniform, stoically separate beds, a permaculture garden in which tall fruit and nut trees nourished a tangle of shrubs and salads below. Each space embodied a particular way of living: decorative, disciplined, diverse.   

You could draw a line clean through the middle of the house: half was lived in – shared between the aristocrat and those of us he indiscriminately referred to as ‘the hippies’ – while the other half was for show, set up as it would’ve been one hundred years previously. On weekends, tourists peered through the windows to find me sitting on top of the Aga, warming my feet in its gentlest compartment as if they were loaves of bread. We lived between layers of history, squatting in some period drama of new-age feudalism – still beholden, despite the utopian frills, to landed gentry. ‘Landed’: meaning to inherit and own land and live off its rental income; meaning to have landed, feet on solid ground.

We grew food mostly to feed ourselves and to sell in the estate’s café, which was open to the public. There was a pecking order: the aristocrat got first pick, gardeners the next; the rest of us would share what remained – generally a lot of potatoes, courgettes, and squash. In summer, the salads were the most plentiful: plump tomatoes, cucumbers with thick skins, nasturtiums with bright, edible petals – oranges, yellows, and flecks of purple. What I thought of as the most prized of our fruits – raspberries – were grown in cages (protected from peckish birds, tourists, and residents).

Locals referred to the house as a commune, but there was a tacit distinction between landlord and labourer, however eccentric our practices of shared living and sharing food. The aristocrat’s family owned a raft of local beaches, businesses, and houses. Most of us living on the estate didn’t pay rent, but neither (for the most part) were we paid wages; our work guaranteed our tenancy, week by tentative week. We lived in outbuildings, caravans, cabins, annexes, or rooms in the main house (there were around twenty bedrooms, although not all of them were habitable). Exactly where you ended up was decided through sheer luck – or its opposite. Some people were long-term residents, raising young families or growing older together; others stayed for a season, coming and going with the swallows.

My mum, sister, and I arrived at our first Monday meal in the winter of 2010, equal parts hopeful and awkward. Our previous landlord wouldn’t renew our tenancy because my mum – who had recently been made redundant and diagnosed with multiple sclerosis – would need to sign on to Housing Benefit. The council was unresponsive, and friends could only take one or two of us together. Our options were becoming fewer and further between; soon we’d have to split ourselves across other people’s homes, like three points of a triangle pulled out of joint.

I’d seen the aristocrat at a nightclub, and a friend had told me that people lived on his estate for free. Later that night, perched tipsily on the kitchen counter, I told my mum and, ever resourceful, she emailed the estate office the next day. We arrived for dinner the following Monday and moved in that same week. No contract, no deposit: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Officially, we were guests with no official address – makeshift kings in a land beyond our rule, homeless in a house steeped in age-old wealth. We weren’t the first people, or the last, to arrive in such a whirlwind. Two months in, as was customary, the group of residents voted to let us stay. 

We lived in a small flat at the top of a narrow staircase, which was ominously referred to as Jacob’s Ladder. The rooms were the old servants’ quarters, with windows positioned just above head height so that you could see only treetops. The first morning I woke up there, a February chill had topped the glass of water by my bed with a thin sheet of ice. Undeterred, we painted the walls as if they were our own – purple, pink, white – proud that we’d kept the wolf from the door. In spring, the smell of wild garlic clung to every surface and white flowers flecked the grass. At solstice, we stretched the day thin, drank ourselves dizzy, and danced into the night, disguising our debt.

I learned to cook by working in the café at weekends, using its industrial kitchen equipment to make feasts for the Monday meals. We prepared food in vast quantities. Me: lasagnes with roasted vegetables, fresh pasta, and goat’s cheese, enchiladas heavy with broad beans and hot with chilli, and homemade pizza with a base that never stretched but grew thick and puffy in the oven. My mum: cakes upon cakes – wedges of lusty red velvet slathered in buttercream, dark chocolate brownies richer than banks. Cooking gave me a sense of purpose and place, and I discovered new tastes and textures: the sharp arrow of asparagus, the tough petals of artichokes, the zesty tang of cucamelons.

The motley crew of housemates became an extended family: generous, raucous, fractious. But after a year or so, I moved away to university. Around the same time, my mum, less and less able to manage the stairs and the work, started renting a small cottage owned by the same estate for just below market rent. From there, she baked cakes to sell to the café or to gift to friends for birthdays, crafting novelty scenes from sheets of coloured icing. Always industrious, she welcomed me home with enormous vegetarian dinners, their portions served up in slabs, each teetering plate liable to collapse. No stranger to bulk and budget cooking, she intended for food to be shared.

One year, for her birthday, I printed out all my mum’s favourite BBC Good Food recipes and fastened them in a light blue plastic folder. She kept it stuffed behind the kettle, adding in new recipes she’d scrawled on the back of envelopes or torn from supermarket magazines. Mostly we just made it up. Our family recipes are an improvised legacy, whipped up more from memory than measure. My mum’s favourite was for apple crumble, which I later supplemented with raspberries, as if finally freed from their garden cage. Cheap but sumptuous, it’s a dish of contrasts: sharp and sweet, soft and hard.

After we left the estate, we swapped the tradition of Monday meals for midnight meals, fresh vegetables for frozen, hippie dals for hearty casseroles. My mum was poor, barely surviving on benefits – the greater portion of which didn’t go to her, but to her landlord: the aristocrat. Despite this, she never lost her taste for variety and experimentation. On late nights, after my coach home from London had lurched to the bottom of her road, we’d stay up digging into seconds, talking long into the night.

As much as she could, my mum made the place her own. From her cottage, she tended to her garden and planted flowers, and even rescued a clutch of scrawny ex-battery hens, feeding them up until they were fat and happy. The aristocrat visited periodically with gossip and bags of bolting spinach. She still regarded him and his big house with cap-doffing fondness, but I grew cynical. Let it crumble, I often thought.

Midnight crumble 

Serves 6 (or fewer, if you keep going back for more)
Time 40–45 mins

Ingredients

for the filling

3 Bramley apples (or another similarly sharp variety; around 600g in total)
350g frozen raspberries
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2.5cm piece of ginger, grated
½ lemon, juiced
3–4 tsp light soft brown sugar, to taste

for the topping

170g plain flour
100g fridge-cold margarine (the butter-like blocks are best)
75g light soft brown sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
25g rolled oats and/or 25g chopped nuts (whatever you have or prefer)

to serve

ice cream

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 190°C/170°C fan. Peel, core, and quarter the apples, then chop them into thin slices (around 2cm). Transfer the slices to a wide, deep baking dish and mix in the rest of the filling ingredients.

   

2. To make the topping, put the flour into a mixing bowl. Chop the margarine into chunks, then add to the bowl. Use your fingers to rub the flour into the margarine, trying not to let the margarine melt, until the mixture has a breadcrumb-like consistency.

3. Stir in the sugar, cinnamon, and oats or nuts (or both), then sprinkle the topping over the apple and raspberry filling.

4. Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 25–30 mins, turning halfway through, until the topping is golden-brown and the fruit is bubbling.

5. Serve, still hot, with ice cream. 

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Credits

Marianne Brooker is a writer based in Bristol, where she works for a charity campaigning on climate and social justice. Her first book, Intervals, won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and was longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. She’s interested in craft, feminist and abolitionist approaches to care, and the connections between nature, storytelling, and social transformation. She’s working on a novel. 

This recipe was tested by Georgia Rudd.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our twentieth writer for Cooking from Life is Orphée You. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Le canard à l’orange: three generations of French home cooking

An essay and recipe for canard à l’orange. Words and photographs by Orphée You.

1937, Loire region of France: my great-grandmother is twelve years old, working as a housemaid for a bourgeois family in the countryside. Her name is Esther. Born in a house with a single room, she has been raised surrounded by her five brothers and sisters. Her father works in a factory; her mother takes care of the kids. For the first time in her life, she’s eating something different to potatoes and soup.

I started thinking about this when I was twenty-three years old myself, living in the Paris suburbs and rendered unable to taste thanks to Covid-19. I realised my sense of taste wasn’t just a functioning tongue. It was old, older than me, like an object that each generation of women before me had adjusted to suit their ideals.

The story starts with Esther, who had two daughters; one of them (my grandmother) had two of her own. One of those children had one daughter: me. Easy pattern to follow. Needless to say, France had certain ways of raising working- and middle-class women in the twentieth century; for instance, their obsession with commensalité – the idea of sharing a meal around a table. In my family, as was common, this would take place at 8pm. No matter how tired we may have been, no matter how irritated we were by one another, this rule was completely inflexible. France, as I mentioned, has certain ways – full stop.

Esther

Esther was born in 1925. I was lucky enough to get to know her for the first ten years of my life. She was smart. Her first husband was a factory worker whom she had married for love. He was crushed by a machine and died just after their wedding. She remarried the son of the village delicatessen, probably the biggest bon vivant in western France. He was a giant man with very wide shoulders and a limitless love of food.

As a young boy growing up between the wars, he had never known hunger. Esther liked to describe him as a ‘spoiled kid’, but she pretty well spoiled him too: meals were a luxurious chain of several starters, mains, and desserts. As a maid, she cooked every single sauce, every fish, every kind of meat: beurre blanc, blanquette de veau, canard à l’orange. As a wife, she did exactly the same. She spent hours cooking each day, with dinner always served at 8pm precisely. There wasn’t one recipe she’d mess up, and she knew them all by heart. Even after supermarkets became the norm in France, she never went to one – all her food was homemade, so buying pre-prepared stuff would have been an insult to her skills. Vegetables would come from the garden; dairy, fish and meat from tiny local shops.

As a mother and a grandmother, Esther embodied a kind of perfection. Cooking was her capital: her education started when she was a housemaid and that was all she had. She copied everything she saw – how her employers spoke, dressed, styled their hair – and decided she’d be like them. She never had another job, nor did she ever employ a maid. Cooking was one of the precious few aspects of family life that was truly hers – it was how she expressed her own formidable personality so it could be appreciated by others.

Claude

Esther’s daughter Claude was born in 1947. Like many post-war children, her ideals were grounded in trends imported from America: supermarkets, industry and relentless work culture. Even today, she uses the word ‘modernity’ as a mark of quality and distinction. She married at nineteen, but decided to work with her husband in order to grow their business. She worked like hell establishing the family’s home-fixtures trade. Having kids in the 1970s seemed more a duty than an aspiration, and maybe having such an ideal housewife-mum – so hard to equal – helped her to imagine something different for herself.

Modern as she was, she believed every dinner should be at 8pm, even though there was almost no time for her to cook. Her daughters had to sit down and eat at the table with her and her husband, no matter how exhausted and fed up they were.

So, what kind of food did she make for her children? It was the 1970s and 80s. Supermarkets had started to sell industrial foods. Claude fed my mother canned raviolis; cassoulet; the first frozen pizzas or lasagnes, every single day of the week. Plastic charcuterie plates. Industrial sauces. Industrial starter-main-dessert. Most vegetables were tinned. Nothing was homemade, except on Sundays, birthdays, and big family occasions.

The quality of the food was forever a secondary concern. But every canned or frozen meal would still be ritualised as a seated dinner around the kitchen table, with silent kids sometimes asked about school, her grumpy husband talking about the business. In this way, they looked like a normal family, and could still act out the stereotypical roles to which they aspired.

Marie-Estelle

My mum was born in 1968, the year France erupted in revolt. The protests that took place deeply shook many traditional assumptions and attitudes. As far as my mother’s generation was concerned, the spirit of 68 meant acting in direct opposition to what they had been told. My mum never did drugs and never killed anyone. But she did leave her tiny country village for Paris when she was eighteen, in 1986. (No one else in the family did.) She had one ultimate goal: putting her upbringing as far behind her as she could.

She had hated the processed food of her youth. She remembers sad textures and flavours, painful digestion of strange, unpronounceable additives. She remembers cutting weird recipes from magazines as a promise that one day things would taste like fun. She likes to remember the first time she heard about macrobiotic food. She saw people going to very tiny specialised shops to buy spirulina. When I ask her what kind of people they were, she says, ‘They were not always hippies. They looked educated. People who travelled. An open-minded kind of people. International people.’ She realised eating that kind of food was the best way to be part of this new social layer, to escape from what she liked to call ‘the mentality of the countryside’.

Though my mother might have associated industrial food consumption with ‘rural’ thinking, there is a parallel between the way she consumed food and the way her grandparents did. Like them, she rejected mainstream supermarkets and processed food completely. Was it because of Esther that she associated sophistication and social ascension with the way she ate?

Orphée

I was born in 1997. My mum was single, and for the first time in our family there was no man around the table needing to be satisfied. (Even my grandmother used to buy red meat for my grandfather, but hated it herself.) My mum had no need to adjust the meals to anyone’s taste but her own. Because it was just the two of us, I was asked to talk around the table. Aged three, I was asked what I thought about alfalfa, tofu and almond spread. What about this spice – isn’t it weird with that vegetable? I was told to cook whatever I wanted. Everything could be experienced and mixed, as long as it was organic. The main differences were that, like modern urban working people, we ate a bit late, and we only ate one course, not three. But there was still a sense of ritual to it. Food was central, and meals were the most important thing we shared during the week, when she worked long hours.

Maybe it was because there was no father at the table – because the family structure was unbalanced – that the seated meal persisted, despite all of my mum’s efforts to distance herself from the customs she hated. When I ask her today, she says it was only when her mother cooked for her from scratch that she felt her love, as she felt it when she went to eat at Esther’s table. For instance, Esther would make a sweet dish composed of leftover mashed potatoes, shaped into galettes then browned in a pan with sugar and butter. Esther would always make a bit too much mashed potato, so that there was something left over to make my mother’s favourite foods. My mother said that, as a working single parent, she had to prove to me that I mattered. It was through cooking that she felt she could. It took me a lot of time to understand that what we were doing at the table was her way to prevent me from feeling neglected.

–

It's strange that you can sometimes guess what people eat from the way they speak, the way they dress. Because I was fed this very contemporary idea of organic, healthy food, I feel legitimate around people from higher social backgrounds. Esther brought the idea that food was a vector of class and sophistication to her daughters. My grandmother decided this was an ideal she wouldn’t try to perform, because she thought financial independence and work was the answer. My mother combined both of these values. And here I am, writing about cooking, because none of these women explained their attitude in terms of politics. They didn’t put words to what I have just described, and their silence almost fooled me.

To this end, I asked both my mother and my grandmother what the best thing their respective mothers ever cooked for them was. Both of them replied: canard à l’orange. As an homage to independence and pragmatic, little-involved cooking, here is Claude’s interpretation of the recipe.

A recipe for canard à l’orange

Ingredients:

1 duck 
½ bottle cheap orange juice from the nearest supermarket
5 cheap oranges from the nearest supermarket
1 clove garlic
1 pack cheap biscottes (melba toasts, or something similar) from the nearest supermarket
If you have a husband (my grandmother’s words), whatever brown liquor they’ve left in the cupboard. Whisky, Cognac, Calvados… whatever
Salt
Black pepper
Butter

You need an oven pre-heated to its hottest temperature, a roasting tin, a frying pan and some matches

Instructions:

Take the whole duck and put it in the roasting tin, then place into a very hot oven. It shouldn’t be long until the skin starts to look a bit crispy. Meanwhile, cut the oranges into slices.

Take the duck out of the oven. Turn the oven down to 180°. Grab the liquor bottle and spread some on the duck. Light a match to the duck and let it burn for a minute.

Stuff the duck with the oranges and garlic clove. Salt it on the outside.

Pour half the bottle of orange juice around the duck.

Put the duck back in the oven for about an hour on 180°. (It takes roughly 50 minutes per kilogram.)

Put some biscottes in a pan with some butter. Make them even more golden than their industrial gold. If you burn them, forget about it: grab new ones from the pack and just put them as they are on a plate.

Ask someone to cut the duck for you.

Arrange a slice of duck and a slice of orange on the biscotte and pour over some of the cooking juices. Add black pepper.

Serve hot!

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Credits

Orphée You is a writer and musician from Montreuil, in the suburbs of Paris. She is currently studying social sciences at Paris VIII university, where she is writing a study of La Plaine Commune, an area of the Seine-Saint-Denis département. She is interested in French food and its place in relation to women’s social aspirations through history, and its place in the wider culture. She also writes music for film. You can contact her at orphee.you@outlook.fr

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our nineteenth writer for Cooking from Life is Rajkamal M, whose essay has been translated from the Tamil by Niranjana R. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Eat, play, protest: A life with prawns

An essay and recipe for Bittersweet prawns. Words by Rajkamal M, and photographs by Niranjana R and Palanikumar M.

(This essay was originally written by Rajkamal in Tamil, as உணவு விளையாட்டு, போராட்டம்: இறாலும், வாழ்வியலும். You can read the Tamil version and its corresponding recipe here. This essay is part of a Neidhal Kaimanam, an upcoming coastal community cookbook compiled by Niranjana and Bhagath Singh in collaboration with the fishing community on India's Coromandel Coast, to be released in January 2024. For further information on it, please visit this website.)

When I was growing up, prawns were both food and playmates. I used to sit next to my mother as she peeled and de-veined them before cooking a meal, and was delighted to see them swim backwards when we went boating in the vast, brackish Pazhaverkadu lake. Our home is in the lake’s eponymous town and is just a stone’s throw away from the water, beside a historic lighthouse which is separated from the sea by only a strip of thick, white sand. Most people in my hometown are fishers who work in the lake, estuary and sea, and our household – like many others’ here – runs on an economy of prawns.

Once I started school, I could hardly wait to get home so I could join my father on his evening fishing trip. He would navigate to the site, drop his anchor and get into the muddy water, and I would stay on the boat and fetch him things – net, poles, stakes, and rope. He would set this up perpendicular to the shore, the net unfurled like a barrier as he stood neck-deep in water. He would then dip in and out, weaving the net under the poles and laying it partly on the lake bed.  

‘When the prawns swim in, we need to move faster than them and secure the nets,’ he would explain to me, occasionally emerging with his feet pierced by the sharp underwater shells, his body trained to function despite the injuries that he incurred every day. I would watch as he went all in, irrevocably entangled and intertwined with the wetland; the marine, amphibious, aquatic life around him.

Some days it rained, so we would stay in the boat, my father telling me stories about Buddha and other saints we believed were anti-caste and therefore on our side. On better days my father taught me to swim. The water made me greedy, and I asked him to teach me to swim underwater, to swim without using my hands (which he called ‘crow swimming’). In time, I occasionally joined my father in the water, helping him in his work. But he never really taught me the skills and tricks of his trade. I knew what he was thinking: if I learned to fish for prawns, then I may stop going to school. So he kept me as his faithful assistant, and I never became a fisher in my own right.

Pazhaverkadu lake is part of an incredibly complex wetland system, created by the convergence of two river estuaries and the Indian Ocean. Dutch colonisers weren’t so impressed with its name, so they referred to it as ‘Pulicat’ – which is now also its English name. When the British ruled, they built a navigation canal that linked it to the rest of the Coromandel Coast and the city of Chennai (which is an hour south of Pazhaverkadu), and they also built the first major port in Chennai. The city now has three ports; one of them was constructed in 2008, very close to Pazhaverkadu, and today it slowly inches closer to the town as it expands.

When we first heard about this port, it was only intended to be a shipyard, constructed on the Kattupalli barrier island which was formed between Pazhaverkadu and Chennai. A few years later, when opened for operation, it was classified a ‘minor port’ by the Government of India. But its effect was by no means minor – its breakwaters set off erosion, not only of the sand to its north, but also the fabric of our social life and economy.

We were already far from a perfect society, battling patriarchy, caste and capitalism. But the port project split us into two camps – supposedly pro- and anti-‘development’. Did those of us opposing it not want jobs in the modern economy?, we were asked when we organised against the port project – even though the jobs that did materialise were few, poorly paid and contracted. Did we not want to see our town develop?

In 2018, the port was acquired by the Adani conglomerate (owned by the billionaire and India’s second-richest man Gautam Adani) who announced plans to expand it from its current size of 330 acres to over 6000 acres. This was to be done through extensive dredging, extracting land from sea and building more breakwaters. Things now got existential for Pazhaverkadu – if the sea was to be filled with sand to make a port to our south, water would have to flow somewhere, and every assessment showed that this ‘somewhere’ would be our town. With these developments, our lives would be changed for good. Pazhaverkadu would soon be submerged.

Coastal life isn’t all blue seas, open skies and a fresh breeze; for fishers like those in my community, it is also hard work.  And for us in Pazhaverkadu, prawns aren’t just our catch – they are a key part of the elaborate wetland system we call home. The prawns thrive in mangroves and muddy waters, feeding, cleaning up the water and becoming food for the bigger fish out in the sea. When our town was mobilising against the port project, women cooked up a seafood feast and invited local authorities to eat – an attempt to make them reconsider if it was worth losing all this for the port. If only they – who had the power to decide on these matters – knew the sheer bounty of taste, sustenance, and joy that we experience from our food and surroundings, would they reconsider? In this way, prawns became an ally in our protests.

Much like our beloved prawns, today we are feed for someone else’s big plans, so-called ‘development’. From Pazhaverkadu, we can already see the shore eroding away, the waves lapping dangerously close to palm trees that sway and bend without sufficient support at their roots. If the strip of sand separating the sea from the lake was eroded, there would be no lake and no naturally caught prawns. Perhaps then fishers like my father would take up work in the burgeoning ‘shrimp farms’ that have begun to emerge – complicit in polluting groundwater and paddy fields with farm residue, all for inferior-quality prawns.

If this goes on, the incredible balance between lake, sea and sand would soon disappear. The ecosystem that nurtured the prawns I ate and played with growing up would no longer exist.

In my three decades of living in Pazhaverkadu, the winter rains have always brought a fantastic catch of prawns. The rains muddy the waters so much that prawns surface all over the lake. Buyers know this, so the prices they offer during these periods are nearly ten times less. During the monsoons, my father would just bring the prawns he had caught (sometimes with me accompanying him) home. My mother would have a blue canvas sheet prepared at the paved entrance, and we would empty our baskets onto this canvas, pouring out the prawns.

My siblings and I would pick which ones we wanted for kulambu, to go with our breakfast idlis that day. More prawns would be set aside to be fried for lunch. The rest would be carried, on the canvas, to the terrace, to be dried as they were under the sun. When the prawns had dried, my siblings and I would each pick a handful, dredge them in our favourite blend of spice powders, and hand them to our mother to be fried in hot oil. Bittersweet as they were, nothing else I’ve eaten has ever come close.

I now live in Chennai, but I visit Pazhaverkadu every week to pick up seafood for my two-year-old son to enjoy. This summer, there were unseasonal rains there, and on one of the days when I was visiting my parents, sure enough, I found my mother chasing crows away from the prawns that were drying on the terrace. When I saw her, I wished I had brought my son along. But no matter, I thought, and I bent down and gathered a handful of prawns. I went to the kitchen and fried some in spices, onions and tomatoes for a snack, to eat while we stood guard on the terrace that afternoon.

A recipe for Bittersweet prawns

Dried prawns are an absolute delicacy, concentrated with flavour, even at the cost of the juiciness of fresh ones.  Prawns are best dried straight off the net and onto your scalding rooftop. But, I appreciate this is not possible outside Pazhaverkadu. You will likely be using store-bought dried prawns, which are great too.

While purchasing, choose kind that remains firm and whole – these are good for frying. The flaky ones you may find in stores are meant for soup stock or porridge, not suitable here. Both ‘baby shrimp’ and regular sized ones are fine and available in South & East Asian stores in the UK. If they’re encrusted with salt or taste salty (you can try eating one raw, no harm), it would help to soak them in water for about 10 minutes and drain. But don’t soak for too long.

Serves: 2-3

Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

1 tbsp neutral flavoured oil or fat  

½ tsp cumin seeds

½ tsp fennel seeds

1 red onion, thinly sliced

2 green chillies, thinly sliced

1 tomato, thinly sliced

½ tsp ginger-garlic paste

½ tsp turmeric powder

1 tsp chilli powder

1 tsp ground coriander

A handful of dried prawns (about 1 cup or 50g-80g)

Salt, to taste, this depends on whether the dried prawns are already salted

Method

1. Warm the oil in a frying pan or saucepan set over a medium heat. Add the cumin and fennel seeds, fry for 30 seconds and once they start to sputter, add the onion, chilli and a pinch of salt. Cook for about 10 minutes, until golden. 

2.  Stir in the tomatoes, ginger-garlic paste and turmeric, and cook for a minute or so, until fragrant.

3. Next, add the chilli powder, ground coriander and dried prawns. Sprinkle in about 100ml water to help the process along. Season to taste, being mindful that the dried prawns may already be salted. The delicious fried prawns are ready once they have absorbed all the flavour and take on a golden glow. (At this point, you could add more water and let it simmer for about 10 minutes to make a dried prawn Thokku. This can be bottled and used as a condiment for a few days.)

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Credits

Rajkamal M is a filmmaker and social activist based in Chennai and Pazhaverkadu. He holds a Masters degree in Journalism & Mass Communication from Madras University, where he is now pursuing a PhD. He has written and directed several short films and is now making a feature length film as part of a Filmmakers’ Collective in Chennai. When he’s not making films, he organises young people in his town towards progressive environmental and social causes, which, for him, go together. At other times, he goes on deep dives into the history of Pazhaverkadu, its waterways and mangroves.

Niranjana R is a journalist turned urban geographer; writing about the city of Chennai and its surrounds has been a big part of her work in both these roles. She is interested in the many lives lived around water in its myriad forms in the city – sea, river, marsh, lake, canal, groundwater and rainwater. Along with her colleague Bhagath Singh, she is putting together a coastal community cookbook in collaboration with fishers along the Coromandel coast. Niranjana teaches Geography at Queen Mary University of London.

Palanikumar M is an award winning photo journalist and visual ethnographer documenting land, labour and life amidst the waterways. He reports for PARI (People’s Archive of Rural India) and has trained young photographers which led to an exhibition titled North Chennai, Reframed in Chennai.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. These recipes were tested by Joanna Jackson.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our seventeenth writer for Cooking from Life is Nyla Ahmad. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Vulnerability, Death and Dinner

An essay and recipe for soy and lime salmon with sticky rice, broccoli and miso soup. Words and photographs by Nyla Ahmad.

Growing up, I’d often come home from school to my mother lying on her bedroom floor. Dropping my backpack next to her, I’d ask how her day was and try to cajole her into getting up before settling on the question hovering between us: ‘What’s for dinner?’ Sometimes the answer would come in the form of a takeaway, which would be over-ordered so the meal could stretch a few days. Other days it would be pasta sloshing in a watery sauce, my mum choosing to prioritise a quick meal on the table over simmering to reach the desired consistency. My mum loved cooking in theory, but didn’t have the base knowledge to love it in practice. She never quite found the time to hone her skills and become the domestic goddess that so many women –  especially mothers – are expected to be. She often made meals bone-tired. They were an obstacle standing between her and the end of the day.

What my mum lacked in culinary skills she more than made up for with appetite. When we had the budget we would try new restaurants, order the strangest thing on a menu, and revel in the small pleasure of a sweet treat. She instilled in me a deep love of Japanese food, and how to savour the temperature contrast of hot fudge sauce on bite-cold mint choc chip ice cream. Seconds were requested with glee.

My mother did not moralise about what we ate, and thanks to her I never saw my appetite as a negative or something that could make my body softer and less desirable. Food was a source of joy, and had to be treated as such. She refused to keep scales in the house, telling me weight was not a metric I needed to measure myself by – a gift I didn’t fully understand until my friends began starving themselves and pinching their stomachs with disgust when changing for PE.

When my mum was in the last few months of her life, her illness robbed her frame of its softness. As I held her protruding shoulders, I’d reminisce about falling asleep on the bed of her stomach, lulled by her steady breathing.

Some parents wait for their children to become adults before showing vulnerability, but my mother did not have that liberty. As a teenager, I sometimes wished I didn’t need to bear the emotional brunt of getting her off the bedroom floor, but when she became ill in my twenties I was thankful for it. It meant we already had an established dynamic, and it was easy for me to take charge of her care in the last few months of her life. I have an older brother, but growing up it was my role to cheer our mum up and hold her hair back when she was sick. I felt the gear change into fully fledged carer keenly only because I knew she was dying, not because I needed to look after her.

In the last few months of my mum’s life, cooking became a way for me to show my love and care for her, the same way her joy of food provided pleasure and built resilience in me as a child. To say, ‘I want you to enjoy this’, and ‘I love you just the way you are’. Making her meals allowed me to say things that were hard to utter in words because it would be acknowledging our time was limited. Instead I’d spoon my care onto the plate; I’d say ‘Eat what you can’ and hope she’d hear ‘There’s no shame in me seeing your bones. I will love you forever, long after you’re gone’ I’d hope a small serving of roast potatoes, which she half-ate but still savoured, would remind her of Christmas dinners past. I’d pin my hopes on a salmon fillet, trying to conjure memories of us eating together at her favourite restaurant. I was using food to revel in the life we had lived together, to bring the good times to her when she was too ill to sit at the table.

I was told by my mum’s doctor that I should prioritise lean meat, fish and protein in her meals. I had taught myself to cook after becoming a vegetarian at university, so cooking in this way was new for me, as was cooking for someone with a stoma. My recollection of dates is hazy now, but I believe my mum’s stoma surgery occurred in Spring – maybe July at the latest. She died at the end of September, with the nub poking out of her abdomen still freshly raw and red.

To prepare her meals, I pored over the materials from the hospital telling me which foods were allowed, and began watching cooking programmes that featured meat and fish recipes. I also turned to YouTubers, finding those with stomas and watching their ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos. It seemed I needed to cook proteins, with carbs as a supporting cast member. Lots of salt. No dried fruits.

The first dish I cooked for my mum was soy and lime salmon with a small serving of sticky rice and broccoli. I made miso soup for the side, in case she couldn’t stomach much solid food. One of my favourite memories is going to a restaurant called Ichiban with my mum when I was about ten. With her encouragement, I ordered a Kaisen Bento, which included salmon, scallops and prawns. I hadn’t been sure if I really liked fish before then. I certainly had no idea if I liked scallops. I loved most of what was in the meal but couldn’t stomach the texture of prawns, passing them on to her to finish. Ichiban became my mum’s favourite restaurant, and I wanted her to feel like she was there when I made this meal.

I am a better cook than my mum ever got to be. With the luxury of time on my side, time she never had, I have been able to teach myself how to get the right consistency of sauce, how to crisp the skin of a salmon fillet, how to make mashed potatoes smooth, buttery and light. I was able to capture the magic she never quite managed. I remember my mum’s sullen eyes lighting up when she tasted my cooking for the first time. I think she was genuinely surprised it wasn’t shit. A beat passed and she smiled. ‘You’re a good cook. You get that from me.’

Recipe: Soy and lime salmon with sticky rice, broccoli and miso soup

Serves: 2
Time: 30 minutes, plus 30 minutes marinading

Ingredients:

For the salmon –

·      2 cups sushi rice, about 120g
·      2 tablespoons light soy sauce, plus extra to serve
·      2 tablespoons sesame oil, plus extra to serve
·      1 tablespoon white miso paste
·      2 cloves of garlic, crushed or grated
·      1 teaspoon lazy ginger or 2cm fresh ginger, grated
·      1 lime, juiced
·      2 salmon fillets, skin on
·      ½ head broccoli, about 200g, cut into small florets
·      A handful of sesame seeds, to serve
·      2 spring onions, thinly sliced (optional)

For the miso soup –

·      2 tablespoons Dashi miso paste (or use 2 instant miso soup sachets)
·      3 pinches of dried seaweed
·      500ml boiling water
·      150g pressed  or silken tofu (silken tofu is easy to find in supermarkets)

Method:

1.     First, soak the rice in a bowl of cold water and set aside whilst you prepare the remaining ingredients, about half an hour.

2.     Next, tip the soy sauce, sesame oil, miso, garlic, ginger and lime juice into a container or sandwich bag and stir to combine. Pat the salmon fillets dry with a paper towel and add to the marinade. Pop into the fridge to marinate; overnight is best if you have time, but if not half an hour will do.

3.     Drain the rice and pour into a rice cooker (or a small saucepan if you don’t have a rice cooker). For both methods, cover the rice with water so that the water above the rice comes to the joint of your first knuckle on your pointer finger. To cook on the hob, add a big pinch of salt, bring to boil, then reduce the heat to its lowest setting, cover with a lid and cook for 10 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and set aside (with the lid on) until you are ready to serve.

4.     Whilst the rice is cooking, warm half the oil in a large frying pan set over a high heat. Place the salmon fillets skin side-down in the pan, immediately lower the heat to medium, and cook for 4-5 minutes, until the skin is crisp. Flip the fillets (they will release from the pan when they are ready, don’t force it) and cook for another 4-5 minutes, until just cooked. Remove from the pan and set aside.

5.     Because you are tired and have told yourself that the leftover marinade is a gift, or at the very least, better to have than another pan to wash, add the remaining oil to the pan, followed by the broccoli and garlic. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until tender, then season with a splash of soy sauce. You might like to add a splash of hot water to the pan to speed up the cooking process. Whilst the broccoli is cooking boil the kettle.

6.     To make the miso soup, add the miso, seaweed and boiling water to a large mug or bowl, stir to combine and drop in the tofu. When cooking for someone who is ill, a gentle soup may be the only part of the meal they can handle so it is a good option to have available.

7.     Assemble a bed of hot sticky rice with broccoli lining the sides. Place the salmon fillet on top. Garnish with sesame seeds and chopped spring onions if, unlike me, your stomach can handle them. Serve with miso soup on the side. Ask for seconds with glee, life is too short not to.

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Credits

Nyla Ahmad is a writer and musician from Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, now living in Glasgow. Her writing has appeared in SINK #11, The Drouth and various zines. She is part of the team behind literary magazine Extra Teeth and currently works in the Scottish literary sector, leading on programming Book Week Scotland. She serves on the Society of Authors Comics Creators Network Steering Committee and the Glasgow Zine Library Board of Trustees. She has played bass in punk bands since she was fifteen and performs mononamously as a singer-songwriter. She lives with her big ginger rescue cat, Oscar. 
Twitter: @nylanylanyla Instagram: @nylanylanylanylabatman

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. These recipes were tested by Joanna Jackson.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our sixteenth writer for Cooking from Life is Hannah Turner. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Cooking in Crip Time

An essay and recipe for spiced chickpea puffs. Words and photograph by Hannah Turner.

On Friday afternoons I make a meal plan: I scour a photo album on my phone labelled ‘favourite meals’; I consult the list on my notes app titled ‘safe foods’. I fill a sheet of paper with missing ingredients as my boyfriend feigns shock that, once again, we must decide on six whole days’ worth of eating. It is a laborious part of the process, but we are fuelled by the desire to eat good all week long. Once the final meal is decided, he is sent packing, list in hand, to procure all we need for the cooking ahead. 

On Sundays my boyfriend consults the meal plan and makes two to three different dishes – always things that keep well in the fridge, or even taste better with time. We cook the meal we eat on Sunday evening with enough leftovers to feed us on Monday and Tuesday. We make something for lunches, and then one more dish that ages gracefully in the fridge to fill the in-betweens.   

We recently bought one of those vegetable-chopping devices, so I can perch on my kitchen stool and slice courgettes and dice onions whilst he measures and organises around me. More often than not, I quickly run out of energy and hand strength, so return to my bed for yet another rest. When I wake up, confused and grouchy, the apartment smells delicious. Tupperwares line the kitchen counter, and his arms are elbow-deep in the dishwater, whilst tonight’s meal sits patiently on the stove. Cooking like this can mean an afternoon, or sometimes most of the day, is all given over to preparing for the week ahead. Maybe it sounds unnecessary, a big commitment, or just impossible to you.

I begrudge the phrase meal prep because it evokes gym bros with chicken, white rice and broccoli, or identical but tiny salads served in tiny jars that I could finish in a mouthful. My boyfriend and I are ‘live to eat’ people, not to be muddled with ‘eat to live’ people. I assume most of you reading are the former, too. There are no plain, unseasoned vegetables in our weekly concoctions, and our working hours are only sustained by the thought of a good meal in the middle of the day. So be warned, this is not a guide to efficiently feeding your household, or how to streamline your cooking in order to increase work productivity. This is how we cook because good food is a reason to get out of bed, and as a person living in perpetual sickness, I am always in need of more of those.  

In Ellen Samuels’ essay ‘Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time’, they outline the ways sickness of the chronic kind fundamentally changes your relationship to temporality. Clock time means very little to me at this point. There have been weeks and months lost to beds, hospitals and bathroom floors. I work when I can, small scraps in the middle of the day, frantic late-night writing, and then I read and I sleep. Weekends are no different, only that people around me might take the chance to rest, too. Crip time is broken time is grief time is sick time. 

My schedule for meal prepping, as well as eating, is dictated by chronic nausea, medication regimes or fasting schedules ahead of tests and surgeries. Despite feeling at war with my body a lot of the time, food remains a way I find hope. Even if breakfast is at midday and days pass when I consume only beige on beige, the immediate joy I feel when tasting something delicious, made in our tiny Dutch kitchen, reminds me of the goodness I can still grasp onto.  

Negotiating the altered temporalities of chronic sickness requires my boyfriend to do the bulk of this food prep work. I instead write the lists, keep tabs on the pantry and wrack my brain for new recipes when we are sick of the old. Perhaps you have an urge to congratulate him, ask if I know how good I have it, how lucky I am to have found this man – as if he appeared at my doorstep waiting to be given chores. We have lived together for five years now – in that time we have learnt to ride the storms of sickness, and at different points in time have divided our household duties a hundred different ways. 

Emotional labour may be a phrase overused, but it feels a useful term when rebutting the oversimplified idea that chronically ill people are beholden to non-disabled partners who physically aid them in some way. I do a lot in our relationship, and most of it isn’t immediately visible, nor do I need to name it all for you. Cooking has historically been coded as feminine, and men in heterosexual relationships who wash dishes or know how to work a hoover are still considered a cut above the rest. 

There is no such thing as 50/50 division of labour, and it isn’t what we seek, either. Instead, I know that whilst these meals are cooked with love and tenderness, the fragments of energy I use to help him solve a PhD dilemma or book train tickets back to London are received with that same thanks. It isn’t You did this for me so I must for you; feeling indebted to those around us who are not sick is a fast-track to self-hatred of one’s dysfunctional body.  

Let us not pretend that he does not also benefit from our current regime: I know he prefers a vegetable biryani with spring greens to a soggy five-euro supermarket wrap. These pre-prepared meals feel like necessity at times, but bring us both different versions of joy and relief. 

If my existence is not dictated by joyful whims or strict work schedules but instead by unknowable sickness then, by extension, so is my partner’s. We, without choice, exist in our version of crip time, peripherally for him and all-encompassing for me. Crip time dictates food time, and so we have sacrificed so-called Sundays to feed us on Mondays (and beyond).  

Recipe for spiced chickpea puffs 

I make a variation of these most weeks, we change up the fillings depending on what else we are prepping. Essentially it's a legume with a vegetable and some spices, tossed in a pan and then stuffed inside puff pastry - a bastardised cornish pasty perhaps? They are filling and easy to eat, can be packed in a box and survive my boyfriend’s cycle to work or reheated in the oven or microwave. 

Ingredients

·      2 tbsp olive oil
·      1 red onion (sub for courgette or carrot if onions don’t agree with you), diced
·      1 red pepper, diced
·      1tbsp Ras el Hanout 
·      1 tsp smoked paprika
·      1 tsp chilli flakes (optional)
·      1 x 400g tins chickpeas, drained
·      100g pitted olives of your choice, roughly chopped
·      ½  jar passata, about 350g
·      1 tsp sugar
·      2 x 320g sheets ready-made puff pastry, each sheet cut into 4 equal pieces
·      1 medium egg, beaten
·      Salt and pepper

Method

1.     First, dice the red onion and pepper. Roughly chop the olives. Drain the chickpeas and set everything to one side until needed.

2.     Warm the olive oil in a large frying pan set over a medium heat. Add the onion, pepper, Ras el Hanout, paprika, chilli flakes (if using) and a pinch of salt. Cook for 15-20 minutes, stirring frequently, until softened.

3.     Next, add the chickpeas, olives, passata, sugar and season generously with salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer and cook for 5-10 minutes, until thickened.

4.     Remove the pan from the heat and set aside to cool, at least 30 minutes – or longer if you have time. During this time remove the pastry from the fridge – this makes it easier to unroll without cracking – and preheat the oven to 200°C.

5.     Line two baking sheets, or shallow baking trays, with baking paper (you can use the paper that the pastry is wrapped in). Cut each sheet of pastry into 4 equal pieces and sit, evenly spaced out, on the baking sheets.

6.     Add a heaped spoonful of chickpea mixture to one half of a piece of pastry, fold the empty half over the top and press down with your fingers to seal. Cut three small slits in top and brush with a little egg. Repeat with the remaining mixture.

7.     Bake for 15-20 minutes, until golden. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool for 5 minutes or so before eating.

Notes from the author:

Other favourite combinations include lentils, potatoes and peas with garam masala and cumin seeds. Or black beans peppers and sweetcorn with cayenne pepper and paprika. Really the filling is just a vehicle to eat delicious buttery flaky pastry right?

– 

Please do not, under any circumstances, forward this to a sick person in your life with the message: have you tried meal prep? And do not, for a minute, sick reader, assume an ounce of guilt if your food life does not look like mine. Close down this essay, order a takeaway, and rest. 

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Credits

Hannah Turner is a disabled journalist, writer and producer. She creates work for and about her disabled community. Her work can be found in places such as Refinery29, The Wellcome Collection, Mashable and Stylist magazine. She publishes essays about books, reading habits and crip life on her substack, Sunday. Bookmarks. She likes to dress up and make silly outfit videos on her Instagram. She currently lives a quiet and joyful life in Amsterdam with her partner, Tom. 

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. These recipes were tested by Joanna Jackson.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

Subscribe now

Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our fifteenth writer for Cooking from Life is Kevin Vaughn. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

We would like to share that Chicken + bread zine (@chickenadbreadzine) is open for submissions to their third print issue on the theme ‘JOY’. Here’s a link to submit.

Empanada Mutiny

An essay and recipe for Famaillá style empanadas. Words and photographs by Kevin Vaughn.

Famaillá, a Northwest Argentine village of some 40,000 people, is an hour by bus from the nearby provincial capital of San Miguel de Tucumán, where a sizable chunk of its citizens spend their workdays. Maybe this is why, when I visited on a cold Tuesday morning in the winter of 2022, the fog sat heavy on the empty streets, as if I were walking through the recreation of another town.  

My visit took place at the start of a ten-week trip through the Northern Argentine Andes, a far cry from home in Buenos Aires. I was here to learn to make Tucumán-style empanadas in preparation for the annual National Empanada Festival, which was still two months away. I had enlisted the help of the local tourism board, surprised that a pueblo which is home to dozens of national empanada champions only had a handful of empanada shops on the map – none of which responded to my interview requests.  

For the sake of due diligence, let’s imagine you don’t know what an empanada is. In the Latin world, an empanada is a turnover. Flour, fat, and water are pressed together, rolled into small discs, and stuffed with filling – usually something savoury – before being fried golden-brown or baked until marked by char. Each nation has its own peculiarity, like Venezuela’s audibly crisp corn dough or sweet Bolivian salteñas, which are sometimes served with a spoon to scoop out a soup dumpling’s worth of broth. In Argentina, empanadas are prepared with wheat flour and categorised strictly by province: Salta-style shells must measure 10cm across; in Chaco, the onion to meat ratio is 1:1; and Buenos Aires cooks throw whole green olives into their filling. 

In Tucumán, matambre – a thin cut of meat from across the belly – is sliced into small cubes and sautéed in a chilli-powder-and-onion sofrito. Dough should be made by hand, folded with exactly thirteen crimps (for Jesus and his twelve disciples), and baked in a wood-burning oven. A single matambre weighs about two kilos, such a small percentage of the animal that several chefs across Tucumán quietly gossiped with me about which shops they suspected mixed their fillings with a common rump. But in Famaillá, mixing is inexcusable: Esta no es una empanada. 

On my first day in Famaillá, I expected to join David Acevedo, the village’s head of tourism, for an empanada crawl. But, as I drew closer to our meeting place, I spotted a young woman in a black pantsuit with the anxious air of an intern waiting for me instead. She shook my hand before leading me to a ceremony held in my honour in a restaurant dining room, which was filled with the town’s leadership and uninterested diners in the middle of lunch service.  ‘We are honoured by the visit of Mr Kevin Vaughn, distinguished North American journalist, whose work dives into the art of writing, photography and, especially, good eating’, reads the first line of Decree No. 822/2022, a framed copy of which was handed to me that day, after which it was photographed, and uploaded to the town’s social media. It also declares me an ‘illustrious visitor’, and is, to date, my highest professional honour. 

After the ceremony, we eventually retired to the home of Ana Rivadero, 2015’s National Empanada Champion, where we were joined by 2020’s runner-up, Gladys Perea, for an cooking demonstration. Both were decked out in ceremonial aprons and cloth hairnets. A long table was topped with bottles of Coke and local red wine, plus prepped dough, cumin seeds, smoked chilli powder, chopped beef, hard-boiled eggs, lemons, and scallion greens. At the National Empanada Festival, these are the ingredients permitted by a standardised ecipe ordained by the council. A panel of judges is designated to evaluate a strict set of criteria, from the number of folds to the ‘right’ amount of juiciness, which must be contained fully within the empanada, with not a drop creeping from under the seal. ‘My empanadas never open,’ Ana said proudly, when she and Gladys set the table with more than we could eat in one afternoon.

My trip through the Andes was my last big one after spending periods of 2021 and 2022 travelling around Argentina, usually for a month or two at a time. I thought travelling slowly, with an openness, would let a story find me, and entice editors towards a commission. In those years, I followed the culinary influence of migration from the Levant to the Andes Mountains; I hitched a four-hour ride in a van full of clowns to meet the only person I could find who still grinds her own corn flour with a stone mortar and pestle. 

For a moment at the peak of the pandemic, with reckonings in legacy food media and the explosion of DIY publications, it felt like we were moving towards the kinds of food stories that let people and places be represented in a more nuanced way. But journalism quickly fell back into old habits. And pitching during that trip made me feel like we were digging deeper into a standardised mould. ‘I want to read this story but there isn’t enough potential for traffic and keyword search,’ one editor wrote in response to one of my pitches.

I don’t see my romantic idealism as an encumbrance, but it isn’t exactly (to use a phrase my father liked to repeat throughout my early twenties) a ‘marketable skill’. Even if I can’t sell them, these stories have value, and they enrich me with a life of wonder in a time when it feels our days are as narrow as a phone screen, where algorithmic repetition infringes on all possibility of magical thinking. But a writer still needs to pay rent, and not knowing when the next commission would land over the years filled me with so much incertitude that, a month after I flew back from Tucumán, I gave up several side hustles for just one, accepting a job writing daily blog content for a marketing agency. 

At thirty-six, this is the first time I am formally employed. My steady paycheck is a tidal wave of relief but the financial benefits are accompanied by regularity and repetition. Each morning, I sit down at my desk, open my laptop, and follow the directions ordained by my new holy trinity: a content brief, a brand guide, and an SEO meter – horse tranquilisers to my creative thoughts. 

Travel and domesticity can both be defined by emptiness. When you are in a strange new land, there’s nothing but space to fill. And at home, nothing just happens. Every day I must fill the space myself, inventing newness and adventure. This new-found domesticity feels flung onto me like a flu in the middle of summer, and as a frustrated food writer, my remedy is to cook ferociously and read obsessively about Argentine recipes, if only to pretend that I am travelling on commission, chasing that special moment that triggers a story. 

In the last ten months, I’ve perfected Argentina’s Italo-Hispano dishes: I’ve added eggplant lasaña, five new red sauces, and a milanesa that can compete with any abuela’s to my repertoire. I repeat the recipes that so many doñas have graciously shared with me – Doña Estela’s technique to revive dry jerky for stews, Doña Ana’s bori bori, a Guarani soup that vaguely tastes like my grandfather’s chicken and dumplings. When I’m feeling nostalgic, I usually make empanadas, which are then bagged and frozen for friends. 

A lot of people talk about the transportive quality of cooking a familiar recipe. Which makes me feel like if I concentrate hard enough on crimping dozens of empanadas, I will be back in Ana’s kitchen the day all of Famaillá fawned over my interest in them. But the more frequently I cook, the less convinced I am that this process should help me escape to an idyllic memory. Maybe the act of cooking can help confront and change my present instead. 

Today, my life feels like a standardised recipe: rigid, repetitive, ‘right’. And when I cook recipes from my travels, I have to fight the urge to impose the same routine on them. I think about how when I returned to Famaillá to attend the competition, every dish tasted different, despite everyone using the same recipe. There were boisterously spiced empanadas, tamely flavoured empanadas, tightly crimped and crisp empanadas and loosely folded, sloppy empanadas. The standardised recipe couldn’t overrule the uniqueness of each cook, their personality, and experiences, which they inevitably infused into their cooking. Ana and Gladys’ empanadas were completely different, too.

I’ve begun to think that every effort to mimic a recipe is an act of betrayal, a flattening of the stories I chased. And to try and replicate them to exactitude is to betray my original experience, as if it weren’t unique and could be easily repackaged. A betrayal of the people who opened their kitchens to me in order to share their own recipes. A betrayal of my need for adventure, and a betrayal of my intention to find a space to express myself, to fill my day with pleasure, curiosity and a sense of self. When I cook those recipes, I can envision that the experiences that they stemmed from will return to my life. Even if it’s for a brief moment of mutiny over domesticity, before I return to my desk, where my framed decree proudly sits. 

Famaillá style empanadas

Note: I started by following the recipe of the Famaillá tourism board, provided to each participant of the National Empanada Festival and available to the public. The recipe leaves a lot of room for personalization. For many key directions, like how long each step takes or how hot to heat an oven, I have provided a rough guide, but these can vary as well.

In the Tucumán province of Argentina, beef empanadas are prepared with matambre, a long cut of meat that sits over the belly, or beef plate. It’s quite thin (about 2-3 cm), boneless and has strips of marbled fat. If you are unable to find mantambre, pork belly, although a sacrilegious alternative in reputable empanada circles, will get the same job done.

Serves: 6-10 / makes 20 empanadas

Time: 2 hours, plus about 2 hours chilling/resting time (or overnight)

Ingredients

For the filling

500g matambre/flank/bavette steak (refer to note above)

2.5L water

½ tbsp of salt

2 large brown onions, one quartered, one finely diced

2 tbsp cumin seeds, toasted

3 large scallions/spring onions, green part thinly sliced and white finely chopped

2 tbsp butter (about 30g)

¼ cup olive oil (about 60ml)

1 tbsp smoked paprika

1 tbsp crushexd chili flakes

3 hardboiled eggs, roughly chopped

For the pastry

2 ½ cups plain flour (about 400g)

5 tbsp room-temperature unsalted butter (about 70g), diced, plus extra for greasing

^2/3 cup reserved beef cooking broth (about 170ml)

1 tbsp and ¾ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt, or 1 tbsp table salt

To serve

4 lemons, quartered

Method

To make the filling:

1. First, trim any excess fat from the meat and set aside briefly.

2. Pour the water and salt into a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Add the beef, the quartered onion, scallion whites and half of the cumin seeds, then reduce the heat and simmer for 40 minutes.

3. Remove the pan from heat and set aside to cool, then remove the beef and strain the cooking broth into a jug. Dice the beef into 1cm pieces. 

4. Next, warm the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan or Dutch oven on medium heat. Add the diced onion, along with a pinch of salt and cook for 5 minutes, until softened and translucent.

5. Grind the remaining cumin seeds in a pestle and mortar and add to the pan along with the paprika, crushed chili flakes beef and a cupful of the reserved cooking broth/liquid, about 250ml. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 10-15 minutes, until reduced the liquid/broth has reduced by half and meat is fork tender. Taste to check the seasoning and adjust as needed.

6. Tip the mixture into a dish pan and set aside to cool. Once cool, scatter the cooked eggs and scallion greens evenly across the meat. Tip: Making the filling the day before (and adding the eggs and scallions just before filling the empanada discs) is ideal. This will make flavours more pronounced and ensure that the fat fully congeals. 

To make the dough:

1. Sift together the flour and salt in medium sized mixing bowl. Add the butter and use your hands to squeeze the butter pieces flat until the mixture resembles rough breadcrumbs. Gradually add the beef cooking liquid and mix until a slightly sticky dough forms.

2. Place the dough on a clean work surface and knead until it becomes soft and smooth, about 5 minutes. Cover the dough in a plastic bag, or clingfilm, and rest at temperature for 30 minutes to an hour.

To make the empanadas:

1. Preheat your oven to 450°F/250°C and adjust the rack to the middle position. Grease a large rimmed baking sheet with butter.

2. Cut the dough into 20 pieces, about 30g each or roughly the size of your thumb. Cover the pieces with plastic wrap or a damp cloth to prevent from drying out.

3. Working one piece at a time, use a rolling pin to shape each piece of dough into a 4”/10cm circle. Note/Tip: with a rolling pin or pasta maker, you can roll your dough out to about 2mm thick and cut with a 10cm cookie cutter. This is faster and will create evenly-sized, perfect circles. However, you’ll get less discs out of your dough. (Tip: If you are tight on space, the dough has enough butter so the discs can be stacked atop one another without sticking together. Even when they are stacked, they should be covered, so they do not dry out)

4. Holding a dough disc in the palm of one hand, place a tablespoon (approximately 30g) of meat filling in the center of the disc. Fold the dough over the filling to enclose it, forming a half-moon shape, and use your fingers to gently seal the edges together while making sure to push out any air bubbles.

5. Starting with the right corner of the empanada, pinch and fold into the center. Working from that corner, pinch and fold in, using a twisting motion to create a braid, then finish by folding the left corner in and pinching to close. Reserve the formed empanadas on baking sheet and repeat process with remaining discs and fillings. 

6. Bake the empanadas until the dough is  browned, about 15 minutes. Let cool for 10 to 15 minutes before serving. Serve with lemons, which should be generously squeezed into empanada between bites.

Credits

Kevin Vaughn is a writer, cook, and tour operator based out of Buenos Aires, Argentina, for more than a decade. He edits the magazine Matambre, a compilation of essays and reported stories about the intersectional politics of food in Buenos Aires and Argentina. All of his work connects a profound interest in the intersection of food, community, narrative, history, and the sociopolitical (and pizza). You can find him on Twitter and Instagram.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. These recipes were tested by Joanna Jackson.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our fourteenth writer for Cooking from Life is Alex Loveless. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Sex, HRT, and Lots of Meat

An essay and recipe for steak frites. Words and photographs by Alex Loveless.

Scientific literature on phenomena caused by taking cross-sex hormones, such as being really hungry all the time, is thin on the ground. But, as infamous feminist Camille Paglia writes in her anti-academic diatribe Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders, ‘If you have any doubts about the effect of hormones on emotion, libido and aggression, have a chat with a transsexual’. In finally embracing conventional wisdom, I think, of course I’m hungry and horny – I’m becoming a teenage boy.

A nutritionally scant childhood, spent subsisting on free school meals and oven chips for dinner, left me feeling alienated in my body. Going vegan at the end of my first puberty went a long way, but something still felt off – was there more to it? The difference between body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria isn’t obvious to anyone at first, especially not teenage girls. I just wanted to look fit – the way I did it was just less conventional for my assigned sex. When I tentatively began taking testosterone three years ago, I felt weird about it and kept it to myself. I was body-modding and indulging in nootropics; my somatic sci-fi exploration felt at odds with my affected, ascetic semi-vegan life of siphoning Kolymvari olive oil from work and having toast for dinner. I started getting hungry, hungry in an immediate way that I couldn’t ignore. In taking testosterone, all that was once soft became not; my stomach grew tight and bristly, like when you pick up a Jack Russell. It seemed the more I ate, the leaner I got. So I kept eating and never looked back.

Cut to second dinners, sandwiches containing whole packs of ham, puppy-dog eyes when my girlfriend was struggling to finish her Sunday roast and, of course, eating standing up over the stove. The habit that enabled the ingestion of whatever meat I was cooking at varying degrees of doneness – like a flight of wine, only with raw-to-medium Sainsbury’s basics quarter pounders. In months I’d come full circle to the person I never thought I would be; Linda McCartney sausages, my once beloved failsafe at BBQs, were now disappointing for their lack of calorific density. Was this HRT? Or just part of my increasingly camp adoption of masculinity? I have never thought so much about food but so little about my body as when I started being perceived as just some guy instead of a butch lesbian. This decreasing shift in visibility is apparent when I finish someone’s food, declare my hunger, or dare to take the last bit of antipasti from the table.

My dietary quirks have more in common with those struggling with menopause, pregnancy or being a teenager than those who happen to be male (though the masculine association with meat-eating dies hard). So, if scraps of biscuits and cheese constituted ‘girl dinner’ for TikTok, what was ‘boy dinner’ then? Something does come to mind: a low-cost yet high-protein recipe of beef mince, rice, and sriracha. Bodybuilder TikTok often riffs on this recipe of genius simplicity, perverting it with packet seasoning or low-fat cheese. ‘Boy dinner’ is sacrosanct for the days when nothing quite satiates me like a family-sized pack of mince, though more often it’s served adapted for those who don’t inhale their food, with the addition of cucumber salad and teriyaki instead of Old El Paso.

Before I fell in love it was yellow-sticker surprise, housemate scraps, or staff food in the evening and necking pints, telling myself I could eat again tomorrow. I’d be so hungry I’d eat double of everything – two meal deals, four fried eggs on four bits of toast, six biscuits with tea. Ordering in terms of calories for value, opting for those invariably wet and peeled hard-boiled eggs as my meal deal snack like some sort of transsexual Teresa d’Avila. Even right now I’m writing from my office (Stoke Newington’s Wetherspoons), eating the ‘Empire State Burger’ which is four 3oz beef patties with bacon and cheese – 1897 calories for lunch, plus the pint (vodka tonic). But with the people I love, meals become less ‘feeding time’ and more recognisable as ‘dinner’. I will cook instead of assemble (and inhale) for the sake of someone else. I feed alone, and I eat with someone else. Yet which dish would bridge my gannet-like proclivities and picky bits for tea - AKA ‘girl dinner’? No, ladies and gentlemen, it is not the non-binary dinner – it’s steak frites.

Never do I spend hours procuring, chopping, soaking, salting, freezing, frying (and then frying again) potatoes for myself. Rarely do I bother to go out of the house in my boxers and walk across the road with kitchen scissors under the cover of darkness to steal some rosemary from the neighbours for myself. Could food be a love language? Well, like any great love song, the invisible labour behind it is what casts a spell for the listener. You should cook this dish for someone you truly love – and please note, the more visceral and madly inexplicable the love (to match the sanguine nature of steak) the better.

Recipe for Steak Frites, with a Peppercorn Sauce

‘the prestige of steak evidently derives from its quasi-rawness. Full-bloodedness is the raison d’être of steak; the degrees to which it is cooked are expressed not in calorific units but in images of blood’ - Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Serves: 2

Time: 45 minutes

Ingredients:

For the steak –

400g bavette steak

A large knob of butter, about 40g

2 sprigs of rosemary

4 cloves of garlic, skin on and crushed slightly with the back of a knife

Salt and black pepper

For the frites –

4-5 Maris Piper potatoes, peeled and cut into 1cm frites

About 200ml tallow or olive oil

Salt

For the sauce –

2 shallots, thinly sliced         

2 tbsp black peppercorns, crushed, or fresh green peppercorns

100ml red wine

300ml beef stock

220ml double cream

Notes:

You bought a big piece of bavette because it is cheap, but delicious and impressive. If you bought individual steaks, they would be carved up together before serving.

Ground Rules:

1.     Prepare an aperitif

2.     Refrain from anaemic frites

3.     Season in layers, at every opportunity

4.     To cook the steak perfectly, cook it for less time than feels right

Method:

1.     Remove steak from fridge, pat dry with kitchen roll and season generously on both sides with salt. Set aside to come up to room temperature whilst you get on with the frites, about 30 minutes.

2.     Peel and slice the potatoes into frites, roughly 1cm squared. Par boiling the potatoes in salted water for 4-5 minutes, until just cooked. (saving some of the starchy water for the sauce (it helps to thicken it).

3.     Drain the potatoes, then gently return to the pan to steam dry (it just helps them cook properly) for a few minutes (you can also put them on newspaper). Carefully transfer to a baking tray and place in the freezer for about 45 minutes (if you can). You can also do this the night before.

4.     Next, pour the oil into a large, shallow frying pan and bring to a simmer. You should have about 1cm of oil, so the amount that you’ll need may vary depending on the size of your pan – olive oil. I know it’s a lot of oil, but you can get beef fat for free from the butcher and/or reuse after frying.

5.     Pop a little chip in to test if the oil is ready, it should sizzle gently around the edges. Add more potatoes, taking care not to overcrowd the pan, and cook for about 5 minutes, turning a couple of times, until blonde. Remove from the pan and set aside on some kitchen paper. Salt! Repeat with the remaining potatoes.

6.     Repeat the process again, until the chips - sorry - frites, are becoming slightly too brown, about 2-3 minutes. Salt! Keep warm in a low oven.

7.     For the steak, pat dry the meat dry with kitchen paper. Warm the frying pan over a high heat until smoking, add oil or tallow, then add the steak. Busy yourself elsewhere with the procurement of butter, rosemary and garlic. Turn when it is time, about 1-2 minutes, then add the butter, rosemary and garlic. Salt! Baste the steak in the sauce that ensues and cook for another 1-2 minutes. Remove from the pan and set aside to rest for a while.

8.     Reduce the heat to medium-low, then add the shallots and peppercorns. Cook for about 10 minutes, until softened. You might need to rescue the garlic if it looks in danger of burning.

9.     Next, add the red wine (or brandy, or at a pinch - red wine vinegar) and cook down for 1-2 minutes, until reduced. Add the beef stock (I just use the jelly ones from the shop mixed into about half a mug of the starchy water we saved from the chips) and cook down again for 3-4 minutes, until reduced. Pour in the double cream and simmer for a minute, before you taste for seasoning. If you feel the sauce is too rich, this can be combatted with the addition of mustard.

10.  Carve the steak against its grain and salt again before serving with the frites and peppercorn sauce.

Addendum:

In an ugly, unnecessary English mistranslation of Roland Barthes’ classic Mythologies, the translator refers to this dish as ‘steak and chips’ – but this dish is not overcooked pub rump doused in ketchup and served with a singular grilled mushroom and pot of peas. No, this is steak frites – the apex predator of dinner. Barthes called steak the ‘bachelor’s bohemian snack’, so it’s true: it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Credits

Alex Loveless is a multidisciplinary hack based in East London, capriciously skipping between music, advertising, fashion, nightlife, and now food writing amongst others. In the past year they have been on Radio 1, created campaigns for Balenciaga, and DJ’d the rugby at Twickenham. They have a newly launched Substack and more on Instagram.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. These recipes were tested by Joanna Jackson.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

Subscribe now

Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our thirteenth writer for Cooking from Life is Uzma Falak. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Cooking against the theft of time

An essay, and recipes for tsyot. Words and photographs by Uzma Falak.

I have my grandmother’s palate. We don’t eat chicken. Tomatoes, always. Chillies galore. As a child, I watched her mobilise marginal leafage, like radish and turnip greens, into the pièce de résistance of the meal – gently sautéing them, sometimes adding an egg or two as reinforcement.

In late autumn, my grandmother would make vaer with a sense of profound fulfilment. A laborious process unfolding over several days, vaer is made from ground red chillies, garlic, shallots, coriander seeds, fennel seeds, dried ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, salt, cockscomb, saffron, and oil, which are all ground and mixed together, then shaped into cakes and dried.  When these blood-red toroids were left for drying on sombre black-and-white newspapers in the attic of our home, they had me spellbound.

When winter approached, my grandmother led a mission to sun-dry vegetables. She would thread, using a thick darning needle, discs of turnips, bottle gourd and quince into garlands. She also laid arrays of aubergines and tomatoes onto a cloth and placed them on the balcony, leaving them to bask, leisurely, in the sun.

Growing up in Kashmir, ordinary acts of cooking and eating were rendered extraordinary. Our lives were lived from curfew to curfew, siege to siege. During cordon and search operations, military troops frisked each corner, cabinet and cupboard. They searched under the carpets and over the roofs. Our homes became battlegrounds.

The troops would overturn rice and flour canisters, sugar and spice jars; they’d spill oil, leaving the kitchen in shambles. ‘The sight of our stockpiled grains would enrage them,’ a witness from the time recalled.

Even today, people have enduring memories of their last meals before they left home, never to return. There are stories of cups of tea turning cold and best of meals left untouched, as days and nights crumbled into terror and mourning.

It was a winter evening, and I must have been three or four. Ammi had cooked haakh and tsamayn – collard greens with fresh acid-set cheese – to eat with rice. But as we sat down to eat around the dastarkhwan, there was commotion outside. We heard a chag, the sound indicating mayhem, cordons and crackdowns, with the sudden disruption marked by the arrival of military jeeps and troopers, and people running helter-skelter before an eventual, eerie quiet.

We packed our cooker with the food in folds of warm layers, like a newborn wrapped in a blanket, and abandoned our home. When we finally arrived at one of my father’s relatives’, we gathered around the dastarkhwan in their dark kitchen. In the feeble light of a candle amidst the power outage, my mother unwrapped our fugitive haakh and tsamayn.

Even today, this warm winter meal, consumed in suspension, is one of the heartiest meals I have ever eaten. I still remember the texture of the haakh in fellowship with the tenderness of the tsamayn. Years later, I found out that when we had returned home after two days, it was to desolation and mourning. That two people had been killed in a nearby neighbourhood on the evening we evacuated our home.

My grandmother and I both swear by her radish and walnut tsyot, which, even though a side dish, can easily oust the entrée. She usually made this condiment with green chillies, table radish, walnuts, coriander and mint, and with or without curd, all ground in a mortar to a radical inclusivity, rather than integration.  

Every Friday, my grandmother would walk up to the nearby greengrocer to pick up fresh ingredients for the tsyot. These short trips would also mean running into her friends and talking vivaciously about the freshness of the produce or the grocer’s temper, or complaining about the growing price of chillies and coriander, as opposed to them being complimentary with a purchase, like in the good old days.

To make tsyot, she first thoroughly washed the fresh ingredients and shelled the walnuts. Then the kitchen would resonate with the rumble of her pestling in the stone mortar, her body in sync with its rhythm, as if summoning the gestures of the stone carver who shapes these mortars out of dever chiselled from the mountains.

She used, with efficiency, the heart as well as the edges of the mortar, and one by one the ingredients – no measurements except intuition and experience – were ground. Then she added salt and red chilli powder, as per her preference. She divided this mixture into two portions – with and without curd. When she finished, usually by noon, she left with her friend for the masjid.

On my grandmother’s return, we would sit along the edges of the dastarkhwan to relish the tsyot, which was eaten with one other main dish and rice. Perhaps this tsyot, from those Fridays, was the first thing I learnt to make when I was growing up. And today, in my kitchen in Germany, it is still my go-to relish.

In fact, one evening last year, when my aunt phoned me to say that grandmother was in the hospital, I made a version of her Friday tsyot in my mini mortar. I sat by the edge of my bed, rendered immobile by my phone on its charging cable, listening to the hospital sounds on the other end of the line. I wept thinking about what my grandmother told me years ago: ‘Yours should be the first pouring (of water) in my funeral ablution.’ And more recently, ‘Come back already, I am just waiting to die.’

As I summon the memories of my childhood, I look at photographs from Kashmir in the 1990s that bear marks of violence, rescue and survival. I look at a family holding, as evidence, bullet-ridden copper kitchenware: a bushkab, a toor, a samovar without a handle which has been rescued from ruins, remnants of a charred house in the background. I look at an elderly woman sitting in the courtyard of her burnt home, with a kanz (or stone mortar) sitting at the right edge of the photo, as if a witness to her lost home.

These photographs are evidence of how our time is marked by permanent deferrals, suspension and waiting, and the constant recalibration and reconfiguring of our lives.

The everyday dastarkhwan in several households in Kashmir is adorned with floral patterns and quatrains in Urdu. One of them goes:

حق ادا جس نے کیا مہمان کا

دوںوں عالم میں رہے گا سُرخ رو

فرض یہ انسان پہ ہے انسان کا

کردے عالی ظرف دستر خوان کا

Haq ada jis ne kiya mehmaan ka

Donu alam mein rahe ga surkh ru

Farz yeh insan pe hai insan ka

Kar de aali zarf dastarkhwan ka

One who honours the obligations towards a guest

Will be exonerated in both the worlds

This is our duty towards one another

To uphold, in grace, the etiquettes of the dastarkhwan

These spreads and the Urdu verses, are also part of Muslim dining practices in India.

Over the years – with beef lynchings, mosques and libraries set on fire, homes vandalised and bulldozed – the othering of and crackdown on Indian Muslims has intensified. As I write this, biryani shops are being targeted close to India’s capital. The Urdu language, even though it originated in South Asia, is relegated as foreign, and its script one of ‘terror’ – in 2012, for instance, police used the poetry of the nineteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib found on a member of a banned student’s organisation as “evidence” against them, to vilify and implicate them further.

Even though Urdu is not among Kashmir’s native languages, dastarkhwans with poetry are commonplace in the region. The act of sitting together and sharing our meals on these colourful spreads is an enactment of refusal and affirmation.

And so are the culinary repertoires of care, survival and persistence in Kashmir, such as my grandmother’s slow process of making vaer, or tsyot – acts of reclamation against the theft of time.

Tajj Begum’s Friday Tsyot

Note: I tend to go a little overboard with walnuts and green chillies. Also, I hear my mother’s voice telling me not to throw away the coriander stalks, as these are transformative to the tsyot. Versions without fresh coriander and mint also exist, but for me, both of those things are indispensable to the dish.  

Serves: 2-3

Ingredients

1 bunch of table radishes, about 250g

A handful of walnut kernels, about 250g

5-6 (or more) green chillies, stalks removed.

A fistful of fresh coriander, about 15g

6-8 fresh mint leaves

2-4 tablespoons of curd (better if hung). Or 2-3 tablespoons of yoghurt.

Salt to taste

½ teaspoon red chilli powder (optional)

Method:

1. Chop and grind the radishes in a mortar and pestle, then use your hands to squeeze out the excess water.

2. Add walnut kernels, green chillies, coriander and mint and pestle away until you have a coarse paste. You can do this in batches or all at once — depending on how your day is going. Pestling is the best part, you will see. Almost therapeutic. You can use a food processor as well, but, the trick is to not render the mixture too runny.

3. Season to taste with salt and if you like, add a few pinches of red chilli powder.

4. Give it a final pounding then tip the mixture into a bowl. Fold in the curd or yoghurt to soften the sharpness of green chillies, or simply if you like what it brings to table.

Credits

Born and raised in Kashmir’s Srinagar, Uzma Falak is a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Heidelberg, where her research explores Kashmir women’s sonic praxis as an enactment of an alternate spatiotemporal imaginary. Her work has appeared in publications like Guernica Magazine, The Baffler, ADI Magazine, Warscapes, Al Jazeera English, The Caravan, Himal Southasian, New Internationalist, Disclaimer, Economic and Political Weekly, and several edited volumes and anthologies. In 2017, she won an honourable mention in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Poetry Award. Her film, Till Then the Roads Carry Her, exploring Kashmir women’s repertories of resistance, has been screened at the Tate Modern, Karlstorkino, Art Gallery of Guelph, University of Copenhagen and University of Warsaw, among others.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. These recipes were tested by Joanna Jackson.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our twelfth writer for Cooking from Life is Molly Pepper Steemson. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Schnitzel, Salads & Fake Meat

An essay, and recipes for schnitzel, salads and fake meat. Words and photograph by Molly Pepper Steemson.

My sister and I were raised by our gentile father, who assures us that our religious upbringing would have been the same (i.e. not religious at all) had our Jewish mother been alive to have her say in it. This was, at least in part, my grandmother’s doing. Under her roof, religious activities are verboten. If you ask her about her faith, she’ll tell you she’s an orthodox atheist. (She is also, not coincidentally, an electrical engineer.) But while she might not be religious, but she’s still very much a Jew. If you ask her where she’s from, she’ll respond:

I am a Jewish person who was born in Hungary; I am not Hungarian. They told me all my life I wasn’t Hungarian, so I’m not.

By ‘they’ she means the fascists, then the Nazis, then the Soviets. Hungarian antisemitism was one of the twentieth century’s more resilient pathogens.

By the time I was eight, the upbringing of my sister and I was solely dependent upon my father, and his version of a religious education was dependent on a single rule:

If you want to miss school for a Jewish holiday, you have to go to synagogue.

Dad knew our commitment to truancy was unwavering and, over the course of our adolescences, Tabitha and I became au fey with the holiday traditions of every Jacobs, Katz and Cohen within a three-mile radius. We’ve gone to their synagogues, broken their bread and drunk wine from their Kiddish cups.

It was only in our twenties that we decided to bring a Jewish holiday home. We hosted our first Passover at my stepmother’s house, introducing our family members to the extensive traditions of a Seder, including take-it-in-turns storytelling, the hiding (and finding) of a large cracker, and laying a place for the prophet Elijah (who is, of course, invited for dinner). Passover also has a vital culinary narrative. According to the Torah, the Jewish people were forced to leave Egypt in quite a hurry, so there was no time for their bread to rise. In remembrance of this, we do not eat leavened grains (chametz) over the eight days of Passover. We can, however, eat matzo (whose secular equivalent is actually corrugated cardboard) and its ground form, matzo meal. I do not keep kosher – I order bacon on my cheeseburgers like all the other nice atheist–Jewish girls – but, for some bewildering, guilt-addled, pseudo-spiritual reason, I would never serve chametz at a Seder.  

Hosting a Seder birthed something of a tradition for my sister and me. We established a regular invite list, made up of half, non-practicing and lapsed Jews, as well as my father, who we deemed Jewish-by-association. My sister made us our own Haggadah and I tested recipes for potato kugel. We both woke up at 5am to go to Smithfield and buy short ribs. Between making stock for soup, braising beef and baking cakes, Passover preparation could take days. It was an immense labour of love that had something of the effect of a Bat-mitzvah: we were establishing ourselves as adult Jewish women.  

This year, as Passover loomed, I was not in the mood to host a protracted dinner party. I was freshly single, newly unemployed, and the thought of ten of my closest friends and family members descending on the quiet home I had retreated to was just too much. I felt frightened of them and their boisterous Jewish love. At the very most, I thought, I could cook for two. I didn’t want the anticipation of a big Seder, or the fuss. I wanted to be able to buy everything I needed from the Waitrose on Holloway Road, morning of. I wanted something comforting and nostalgic. I wanted something fried and something pickled. I wanted schnitzel.

Schnitzel was among the regular rotation of dishes favoured by my grandmother’s five grandchildren. I don’t think we called it schnitzel, though. I don’t remember calling it anything. I do remember my grandfather teaching me to pound chicken with a meat mallet so it was the size of a plate and as thick as my thumb (Carefully, Molly! Not too hard, you’ll tear it). I remember whisking eggs and eating breadcrumbs straight from the jar.

Breadcrumbs are not kosher-for-Passover. This thought threw a spanner in the works, but only briefly; medium-ground matzo meal has an almost identical texture to Paxo breadcrumbs. I’d never eaten a matzo-breaded schnitzel before I made one, but it’s not my innovation; a favourite fish and chip shop, Nautilus, have been matzo-breading their fish for years.

One of my grandmother’s more frequently used phrases is, In my family, we do not waste food. Poverty and hunger were, along with antisemitism, the defining characteristics of her youth. When she cracks an egg, she scrapes her thumb around the inside of the shell to get the last of the whites out. The breadcrumbs we used for schnitzel were the blitzed ends of every loaf of bread that had gone stale before it’d been finished. With the beaten eggs and seasoned breadcrumbs left over from dredging her schnitzels, my grandmother would make us what she called Fake Meat.

She says, There’s no recipe for Fake Meat (though I have attempted one below). You just take the leftover breadcrumbs and eggs, clump them all together, and fry it. You couldn’t call Fake Meat a delicacy, but I think it’s delicious. It’s surprisingly foamy. I want it straight out of a hot pan, or off a sheet of kitchen roll, before we sit down to eat. My grandmother talks about Fake Meat as if it would never occur to her not to make it. Wasting good eggs is not an option. When I asked her if she’d ever make it on its own, she was alarmed, then characteristically forthright:

It is unfair to make it [Fake Meat] deliberately – it’s not right. It has to be the leftover. Fake Meat is by necessity, it’s not by design.

What follows is the recipe for the schnitzel I made on Passover, as well as recipes for the potato salad, French beans, and mildly pickled cucumbers that went with it. At my grandparents’ house we ate our schnitzel with sautéed potatoes and exceedingly steamed vegetables, but two decades and one holiday to Vienna later, I’m more inclined toward the acid crunch and sophistication of the schnitzel’s Germanic accompaniments. They can also all be made ahead of time, which is useful as schnitzel is best served fresh and hot.

Quantities are for two persons

Caperberry Vodka Martini

This is my favourite drink, I make them for everyone, all the time. It’s a brilliant start to all dinners but its pickley salinity is especially welcome here. 

Serves 2

Ingredients

·       120ml vodka

·       40ml white vermouth

·       2-3 tbsp caperberry brine, to taste

·       2 caperberries, to serve

Method

1.     Stir the vodka, vermouth and caperberry brine over ice until diluted.  Stir in one direction and for longer than you think you need to, about a minute.

2.     Strain into two very chilled glasses and garnish with caperberries. If you are drinking, follow the martini with a cold bottle of German or Austrian Riesling.

Matzo-Breaded Schnitzels

Serves: 2

Ingredients

·       2 chicken breasts

·       1-2 eggs, lightly beaten 

·       30g potato flour (I used this because it’s kosher-for-Passover, but it’s also light and does a good crispy thing. Assuming it’s not Passover, or you don’t care, normal flour is absolutely fine)

·       100g medium ground matzo meal, (you can swap for breadcrumbs, but you shouldn’t)

·       200ml vegetable oil

·       1 lemon, halved, to serve

·       Salt and pepper

Method

1.     Place each chicken breast inside a zip-lock bag or between two sheets of greaseproof paper, and hammer out with a rolling pin until flattened, about 1.5cm. The bottom of a saucepan or a wine bottle will also work if you don’t have a rolling pin. Season with salt.

2.     Lightly beat the eggs in a shallow dish that will fit one of the flattened chicken breasts. Add the potato flour to another dish and season liberally with salt. Tip the matzo meal into another and season well with salt and pepper.

3.     Take one of the chicken breasts and dip it into the potato flour, making sure both sides are covered. Shake off any excess flour and dunk the chicken into the beaten eggs, followed by the matzo meal. Do this with two hands, using one for the dry ingredients and one for the wet ones. You can double pane if you like, but in this instance it’s not actually as good.

4.     Warm the oil in a frying pan set over a medium heat. Once warm, add the chicken and cook for 2-3 minutes on each side, until golden and cooked through. Remove from the pan and rest for a few minutes on a cooling rack or on a plate covered with kitchen roll.

5.     Season with flaky sea salt and serve with half a lemon per person to squeeze over the top. Less than half a lemon is puritanical.

Fake Meat

Once you’ve dredged your schnitzels, you can go about making your Fake Meat. My grandmother is right, there’s really no recipe here: you’re just combining the leftover matzo meal and eggs (not the flour) until you have a kind of clump-able, mouldable thing. You could make them into shapes if you were feeling crafty. I wouldn’t.

Fry as you would a tiny little schnitzel. Season. Snack upon.

Potato Salad

Serves 2

Ingredients

·       500g new potatoes, any large ones cut in half

·       2 tbsp mayonnaise

·       2 tsp Dijon mustard

·       ¼ lemon, juiced, to taste

·       50g spring onions, sliced

·       A small handful of chives, chopped

·       Salt and pepper

Method

1.     Add the potatoes to a saucepan of cold salted water, bring to the boil and cook for 15-20 minutes, until tender. Drain well and set aside for a few minutes to steam dry.

2.     Whilst the potatoes are cooking, mix together the mayonnaise, mustard, a squeeze of lemon juice and season. Combine with the cooked potatoes, spring onions, chives and season to taste with salt and pepper.

French Beans

Serves 2

Ingredients

·       150g green beans, trimmed

·       1 tbsp olive oil

·       150g shallots

·       A small glass of white wine, about 100ml

·       Salt and pepper

Method

1.     Warm the oil in a frying pan set over a medium heat. Once warm, add the shallots and cook gently for 10-15 minutes, stirring often.  

2.     Whilst the shallots are cooking, add the beans to a saucepan of boiling salted water and cook for 4-5 minutes, until just tender. Drain and refresh under cold water.

3.     When the shallots are golden,  increase the heat, then add the wine and cook vigorously for 2-3 minutes, until reduced. Stir through the cooked beans and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Mildly Pickled Cucumber Salad

Serves 2

Ingredients

·       ½ cucumber or 1 small cucumber (I used a small cucumber, scraped a fork along its skin and cut it into rounds like frilly little flowers. This is unnecessary but charming. If I had a large cucumber, I would cut it lengthwise, scrape out the middle and slice it into crescent moons about the thickness of a pound coin).

·       ½ tsp salt

·       1 tbsp sugar

·       2 tbsp vinegar, basically any vinegar apart from balsamic will work

·       ½ red onion, thinly sliced

·       A small handful of dill, chopped

Method

1.     Add the sliced cucumber to a colander, stir through the salt and set aside for about half an hour, or as long as it takes to get everything else done.

2.     Meanwhile, dissolve the sugar in the vinegar, thinly slice the onion and chop the dill. Then shake off as much liquid from the cucumber as you can and combine with the vinegar mixture, onion and dill. Set aside for 10 minutes or so to gently pickle. Taste to check the season and adjust as needed.

I would be remiss not to mention that Claudia Roden’s Orange & Almond Cake is not only kosher-for-Passover but also completely delicious. It’s not really Passover without it.

Credits

Molly Pepper Steemson is a writer, editor and occasional sommelier. She is halfway through her Substack short story project, Very Short.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. These recipes were tested by Joanna Jackson.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

Subscribe now

Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our eleventh writer for Cooking from Life is Gabrielle de la Puente.

Cooking from Life will be on a break for two weeks following this essay. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

People of the Salt

An essay and snack list for people with PoTS. Words and photographs by Gabrielle de le Puente.

I want Vogue to ask me what’s in my bag. But if Vogue isn’t interested, someone else should be. Go on. You do it.

I don’t actually go outside much nowadays, so the bags in my wardrobe have become quite redundant. Shoes are practically meaningless. But if you happen to see me on the rare occasion I’ve been forced out the house and I do indeed have a bag round my shoulder, please ask what’s inside it. Ask me so that I can dramatically reveal a massive water bottle, a tiny pair of kids’ chopsticks, and as many pickled beetroots as one girl can carry.

Sometimes the baby beetroots are Babybels instead. Sometimes I have a shitload of Peperamis hidden in there. Carrot sticks, tomatoes, cornichons, a load of emergency olives. You just never know.

There are also sachets of electrolyte gel in the zip pocket, and Bounce protein balls rolling around somewhere. I have been known to carry nuts on occasion – salted cashews, almonds, saffron pistachios that taste strongly of holiday lemons. Also see: lentil crisps, char siu, anchovies. Ask what’s in my bag and I’ll ask you if you’d like one of my many boiled eggs. God, the inside of my bag must smell absolutely insane. No wonder Vogue haven’t been in touch.

But I have good reason for this mad bag strategy. I have a disease, lol.

I got Covid two-and-a-half years ago, back when we were in Delta times, and it just never went away. Long Covid is an umbrella term for post-viral misery, and the kind I have is Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, or PoTS. When a healthy person stands up, their heart rate increases for a moment to compensate for the change in blood pressure. When I try, my nervous system goes haywire. My blood is overrun with hormones that make my heart rate climb until I am dizzy, sweating, breathless and faint. I have less blood than other people now – that’s weird, isn’t it? – and the blood I have been left with is not very good at retaining salt or water. When I was diagnosed, the doctor at the Long Covid Clinic told me to consume two extra teaspoons of salt a day, which remains the only time I’ve ever smiled at a doctor.

You’ve probably already forgotten the long scientific acronym, so you’ll be happy to know that PoTS patients sometimes call themselves ‘People of the Salt’. Much catchier. A bit like Covid, I guess.

Flashback to 1 January 2021. I am a 26-year-old critic renting a beautiful flat next to the park, living alone for the first time, enjoying self-employment and all its self-affirming self-sufficiency. I am enjoying it so much that I want to feel independent in all aspects of my life. So I decide to straighten some things out. Some cooking things, to be precise.

I don’t want to be a pesto-pasta-person anymore. I don’t want to rely on my boyfriend to cook us good, complicated meals. I make a New Year’s resolution to learn a recipe every week of the year. I have bookmarked fifty-two, ready to go. Day one is already off to a good start with Nigella’s Fish Finger Bhorta. I say ‘Good start’. But I quickly think, Wow, this is boring. Step four of the recipe involves poking onions around a pan for twenty minutes. That is the length of a TV episode, and I could eat the meal in half that time. I slosh the stupid onions about until they are definitely improved and think – OK, cooking is just a stamina test. As long as I learn to stand in the kitchen for as long as humanly possible, everything is going to be OK.

Never mind! I became disabled the very next day. I woke up with Covid and – god, I remember putting a twig of fresh coriander from the bhorta in my mouth and tasting fuck all. Soon after which, I couldn’t breathe. I whispered sweet nothings down the phone to 111, who brought me to hospital. I had to leave my park-side flat to move in with my boyfriend’s family because I could no longer look after myself. I try not to dwell on that time, but sometimes I think, What I would give to be standing in a kitchen cooking something with all the tedious commitment I once gave a pan of onions. PoTS means I have bad blood now – badness between my veins, and against the Tory government for mishandling their response to a mass-disabling event.

Doting on onions is out of the question now, since I see stars waiting for my toast to pop. Those stars land me in bed a few days a week, and it’s my boyfriend who deals with the food situation – which is what it has become, A Situation. He asks me what I want to eat and I never, ever know. I’m too nauseous, I can’t think. PoTS affects memory and I forget what food even exists if it’s not there in front of me.

PoTS is a chronic illness that can be mildly irritating for some and disabling for others, and today I find myself on the disabled end. The will-anything-besides-my-own-humour-help-me end – which it turns out, yeah, sort of. Beta blockers, a support group (chat), cold weather; certain food helps as well. But very particular food. Food that doesn’t necessarily make me feel better, but that doesn’t make me feel worse. Because with those glass-half-empty veins I’m riddled with, what little blood I have gets tied up in digestion and leaves the rest of me in a fugue state if I consume anything bigger than a snack. And snacks are just as sleep-inducing if they’re high on the glycemic index; I was once KOed by onigiri.

It’s been a long process of losing independence, work, my appetite, my sanity, cake. I can’t eat cake anymore! And that’s on Boris Johnson. So I chose my 2023 New Year’s resolution very carefully. If I had to lose so much, I wanted to gain something in return. I made a list of foods I have historically not enjoyed and got started eating peanut butter every day until I liked it. That only took a month. Olives were next. They took three months, but now I get through a jar every fortnight.

It’s like Covid changed my biology for the worse and this was my small resistance. And it was this resistance that prompted me to keep going, to make an exhaustive list of snacks that don’t exhaust me. I decided to track whatever I could eat slowly, and cold, as and when the nausea would allow it – low-impact, possibly salty, small, no-prep comestibles. I wanted some independence back. I wanted to stop looking blankly at my boyfriend when he asked me what I wanted to eat. Instead, I wanted to show him an entire list.

Today, my snacks manifest in a tapas buffet I arrange on the bed tray beside me; they are foods I can parcel in Tupperware to keep me upright when I venture outside. The list grows slowly, but I’ll tell you what: it is more important to me than those long-forgotten bookmarked recipes ever were. The list is more crucial, more personal, and a lot less boring than that one time I tried to make onions good. Because it’s replacing an anxiety for all the cooking I cannot do with a collector’s enjoyment for finding food I can consume.

With this list in my hands, I don’t need to pass the kitchen stamina test anymore. With this list, I can see who I am, and I don’t even need to cook! Instead, I snack and I snack and I snack. And that way, I never see stars.

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Snacks for People of the Salt

Serves 1  

This is a reference list for people with PoTS and their carers. Please arrange a few of these in small bowls on a tray that can be kept beside the bed or on a couch, to avoid having to be up and down, and back and forth, to the kitchen. If you are going out, parcel snacks in Tupperware instead.

Tray snacks
Almond butter
Almonds
Apples
Avocado
Bananas
Basque cheesecake
Carrot sticks
Cashew butter
Cashews (salted)
Cheese (var. Babybels, Cheesestrings, halloumi sticks)
Chocolate
Cornichons
Cucumber
Edamame
Falafel
Figs
Guacamole
Hummus                    
Hummus crisps
Kimchi
Lentil crisps
Lupini beans
Miso
Nori
Olives
Oranges
Pâté
Peaches
Peanut butter
Peanuts
Pears
Peas (var. roasted wasabi)
Peppers
Pickled beetroot
Pickles
Pistachios (var. saffron)
Popcorn
Roasted chickpeas
Salsa
Sauerkraut
Strawberries
Sunflower seeds
Sweetcorn (var. toasted corn with chilli and lemon)
Tangerines
Tomatoes
Yoghurt

Protein boosts
Anchovies
Cold cuts (var. bresaola with lemon)
Corned beef
Jerky
Quorn snacks
Rotisserie chicken
Salmon (var. smoked, jerky)
Sashimi
Sausages (var. cocktail, Pepperami)
Smoked mackerel
Tempeh
Tofu (var. dried)
Tuna

Snack hacks
Electrolyte drinks
Electrolyte gels
Protein balls (var. Bounce)
Protein bars
Oral rehydration salts

Credits

Gabrielle de la Puente is a writer from, and based in Liverpool. She publishes criticism on art, games, and all the culture that gets on her nerves on The White Pube. Her website is gdlp.co.uk.

Gabrielle also made this website, called People of the Salt, which she uses to triage herself through various symptoms. Part website and part game, it has a food advice page which is where she updates the snacks list live via her phone all the time, as a way to track what works.

For people with PoTS, the website of PoTS UK can be a useful resource.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

Subscribe now

Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our tenth writer for Cooking from Life is Claire-Louise Bennett

Soaking up the juicy morsels of our lives

An essay and a recipe for fennel risotto. Words and photographs by Claire-Louise Bennett.

Carrots have very clear boundaries. You can tell that by looking at them. The same with celery. The corrugated circumference of a stick of celery announces quite emphatically that it is not an especially receptive vegetable. Carrots and celery are hardy, and hardy entities – people included – aren’t inclined to take much in or give much out. In order to get anything out of celery or a carrot you have to turn up the heat and make them sweat. Potatoes aren’t like that. It doesn’t take much for a potato to fall apart, and if you plop a few of them, raw and halved, into a tomato-based vegetable stew the starchy nubs will wallow away beautifully, thickening the glossy juice while at the same time taking on its vibrant flavour.

Indeed, spuds can take a lot. Which might well explain why they are frequently referred to as ‘humble’, and why they are renowned for their soakage skills. I know of a man who (many years ago, it should be said) horsed down a packet of Smash before heading to the pub for a rake of pints. Apparently he had nothing else in the cupboard. And so impatient was he to get down to the boozer, he neglected to prepare the potato flakes properly. Apparently they swelled up, in the intended fashion, deep inside his gut as he perched pleased as Punch on a barstool, blithely pouring pint after pint down his gullet. Apparently the flakes fluffed up and expanded so much he eventually fell from his perch and was carted off to hospital where he had his stomach pumped. The nurses couldn’t get over how much mash came out of him. Scoopful after scoopful, apparently.

Cooking risotto follows a similar principle, yet employs a very different technique (it is always advisable to hydrate the rice grains gradually in a pan rather than in the belly); though, as we will discover, beer might well have a part to play in this more refined approach. Most risotto recipes specify that cooking the rice involves adding stock ladle by ladle, stirring continuously, and takes sixteen minutes. I’ve never known risotto to be ready in sixteen minutes. And I wouldn’t want it to be ready so expeditiously, because that would spoil the fun. Risotto tastes lovely and has a comforting texture and all the rest, but the real point of making it is that it takes ages for the stubborn little arborio grains to succumb to the broth. Consequently, in the meantime, you can fill your boots with booze, smoke your head off, and embroil yourself in deeply emotional conversation, and it doesn’t matter a jot – the meal won’t spoil, or burn, or toughen or anything like that; in fact, it’ll just keep getting scrummier and creamier. That’s the real beauty of it, and it’s why I invariably end up preparing it, avec fennel, whenever I see my good friend Rose. Which isn’t that often because she lives in France, so we always have a lot of catching up to do, and the best place to catch up – properly, giddily, meaningfully – is shoved up against the kitchen counter, either side of a steaming pot of softly bubbling rice, chuffing on roll-ups smattered with olive oil and guzzling Italian white wine – something peachy from Friuli, perhaps.

A glass of wine should of course be decanted into the pan right at the beginning of proceedings – I recall, however, that on more than one occasion Rose’s impassioned protestations prevented me from going through with this crucial step: wasn’t there something less exquisite I could throw in instead, she intervened, and so actually, I must confess that, in order not to put a dent in our supply of the finest stuff, I’ve emptied a range of bog-standard beers, and even a can of lager, onto the hot hard beads of toasting rice, and can report that the risotto turned out just fine – much to our amusement, we hardly knew the difference in fact.

I can’t help but feel that what causes the rice to swell so slowly, so sumptuously, is not entirely down to the depth of the stock or the quality of the grog, but the hot air building up above it – the heated conversation between me and Rose, in other words. I think, probably, the rice deliberately holds off from softening up too soon because it wants to soak up the juicy morsels of our lives for as long as possible – and the longer we talk, the juicier it gets, naturally. There it is, in the pan right beside us, taking everything in! And what a brew! Confiding and confessing, puffing and imbibing, stirring and finessing – indeed, why would any vital element in this sultry triumvirate want the operation to be over and done with in sixteen minutes?! More often than not we don’t sit down to eat before ten o’clock. Bundles of chopped parsley are added to the mix before serving, plus some lemon zest – both brighten things up. Some Parmesan too, of course, though not as much as you might imagine – by this point the rice is already silky and butyraceous from all the time and all the stirring and all the talking. Once we’ve sat down the drinking and the talking stops. Regardless of the hijinks that accompanied its creation, those first mouthfuls of risotto at the table are a serious matter, requiring our full attention. The silence is always broken by Rose, who will declare with a groan that this is the best one yet. She says it every time, and with so much solemnity that her verdict sounds practically catastrophic. Which makes me think, fool that I am, that she means it – every time.    

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Fennel Risotto

Serves 4    

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, finely diced
3 fennel bulbs, tough outer layer removed, thinly sliced
2 or 3 garlic cloves, crushed or finely grated                         
c.300g Arborio risotto rice           
A glass of white wine or ½ bottle of Italian beer, such as Birra Moretti or Peroni
Chilli flakes, such as Kashmiri
c. 1–1.25 litres good chicken or vegetable stock
Grated zest from 1 lemon
A couple of handfuls of parsley leaves, roughly chopped
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Salt, to taste
Grated parmesan, to taste
and – imperative – a close friend you haven’t seen for a while

Optional extras:
Butter
Fennel bulb, roughly sliced and roasted
Red pepper, roughly chopped and roasted
Walnuts, toasted and roughly chopped      
Feta cheese, crumbled      

To serve
Green salad

Method

For instructions on stock, see note at the end.

1)    Add olive oil to a wide pan set over a medium heat. When it’s hot, add the chopped onion and fennel and cook gently, stirring constantly until it starts to soften     .    

2)    Once the fennel is slightly softened and the onion is golden, add the garlic and cook for a minute or so. Don’t let the garlic brown or it will taste bitter.

3)    Pour in the rice and stir, coating with the fragrant oil. Toast the rice for a couple of minutes and then pour in the wine or beer. Stir constantly until the liquid more or less disappears.

4)    Sprinkle in a few chilli flakes if you like – it adds some warmth.

5)    Turn the heat down to medium-low, and begin ladling in the stock. Pour yourself another drink, light up, launch into another unbelievable bit of news. Stir, pour, ladle, smoke, chatter. You can stop stirring from time to time, and you can turn the heat right down if you think the rice is in danger of being ready too soon.

6)    Once the rice can absorb nothing more and is tender, add lemon zest and parsley and season generously. At this point you can fold in some butter, but generally a little grated parmesan is sufficient. If I’m finishing off with optional extras – roasted fennel, roasted red pepper, walnuts, feta cheese – then I skip the parmesan. 

7)    Let it cool down a bit before serving with a green salad.  

Note

If you’d like to make your own stock, as I do: Make the stock earlier in the day. I often use home-made chicken stock, but if cooking for a vegetarian I’ll make one that is suitable for them, using carrot, celery, onions, peppercorns, bay leaf and so on. I add a couple of whole tomatoes to the pot too, and a few unwaxed or scrubbed lemon wedges, and the stems from the parsley. Let that simmer away for a while. And gently reheat it just before you start cooking the rice. It shouldn’t be boiling. 

Credits

Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Claire-Louise's fiction and essays have appeared in a number of publications including White Review, Stinging Fly, gorse, Harper's Magazine, Vogue Italia, Music & Literature, and New York Times Magazine.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. The recipes in Cooking from Life have been tested by Ruby Tandoh.

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