New Year New Name: Introducing Vittles Cooking
A new direction for our cooking and recipe content, for which we are now accepting pitches
Happy New Year, and welcome back to Vittles! In our first post of 2025, we are announcing a change in focus for our cooking content. Read on for more information about this new direction, including a call for pitches. Note that for the next couple of weeks we will continue to post recipes from our current roster of columnists before these changes come into effect.
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New Year New Name: Introducing Vittles Cooking
A new direction for our cooking and recipe content, for which we are now accepting pitches.
When Vittles started to publish regular recipes at the end of 2023, we wanted to expand the boundaries of recipe writing. We particularly wanted to centre writers and cuisines who have long been overlooked by mainstream food publishing and to open up the genre for experimentation – to explore how recipes could be vehicles for discussion of broader concepts and ideas outside the usual limits of palatability.
Over the past year or so, we’ve published an incredible array of recipes that have done just that. Our roster of columnists – Fozia Ismail, Melek Erdal, Songsoo Kim, Nick Bramham, Chloe-Rose Crabtree, and Archana Pidathala – has navigated the inter-relations between food and language in resistance movements, explored the unexpected synergies between contemporary Mediterranean cooking and iconic Mumbai restaurant dishes, and mused on how cooking shapes identity (and vice versa), all while offering advice on how to cook delicious food, whatever your skill level. We are particularly proud that Melek Erdal’s Living Etymology of Cooking was one of the essays that won her the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Award for Cookery Writer of the Year 2024.
This year (in which Vittles turns five!), we want to broaden the remit of what we do with cookery writing even further, so we are announcing a subtle but important rebrand: Vittles Recipes will now be called Vittles Cooking. This name change reflects a shift away from exclusively publishing structured recipes to instead embrace the joyfully anarchic possibilities of home cooking, a space in which the ‘rules’ of cooking so often collapse.
Vittles Cooking will continue to publish recipes – including some by our previous columnists. But we also want to more fully reflect the fun and innovation that home cooking can offer – think of Vittles Cooking as a sandbox for recipe writing, allowing for experimentation with new forms and ideas that might not fit the structure of a typical recipe column. Additionally, we want to lean into the smaller, crucial details of what makes a plate of food possible: a quick tempering of oil and spices to create a snack from shelf staples for teatime, a simple but delicious dessert whipped up for the unexpected arrival of a friend, a perfect, secret marinade to keep on rotation, a set of easy tray-bake desserts, a South Asian toastie recipe for lunch on a busy day. At the same time, we remained attuned to the context in which such home cooking is taking place, and also want to publish writing that engages with the challenges of feeding yourself in the increasingly precarious contemporary era.
In acknowledgment of this new focus, we are opening the cooking section for pitches for the first time. Although there are no restrictions on what you can pitch – beyond the need to be related to home cooking in one way or another – here are some things we’re interested in:
The rules don’t matter … on the pleasures of ignoring the ‘right’ way of doing things, whether out of necessity, innovation, or just plain laziness. We’re particularly interested in cooking that subverts ideas about ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’, offering new perspectives on home cooking. Maybe you have a genius hack that cuts ten steps out of a traditional recipe, or you think that viewing recipes as purely instructive devices limits creativity, or you’re a professional chef who enthusiastically disregards the sanctity of classical cookery outside the restaurant kitchen. Tell us about it.
… or maybe they do: techniques and approaches that will transform your cooking life, from guidance on the optimum way to prepare produce, to combinations of ingredients that can form the base of how you cook on a daily basis. One of our favourite cookbooks, Giorgio Locatelli’s Made in Italy, is one we never turn to for recipes, but his technique for making a risotto is something that has stayed with us for life. Equally, the best ‘cooking advice’ is often that which is informally passed between family members, friends, and communities – if you want to share some with Vittles readers, we would love to hear from you.
Cooking and work: How does cooking fit into daily life? How do you feed yourself on a busy work day? What is your go-to sandwich, dal, stew? What would you cook for your colleagues for a work potluck, or if they came around for a meal?
Cooking and the climate crisis: the impact of ecological disasters and seasonal disruptions in markets and the kitchen, from the increasing unaffordability or unavailability of specific ingredients to the practical challenges of cooking in sweltering kitchens. Here, we’d especially like to hear from writers from the global majority and food-producing regions of the world to see how the hierarchies of food production have impacted climate shifts, and accessibility to certain produce.
Recipe sets: collections of recipes united by a single theme – four ways to treat an ingredient, groups of dishes that use the same three or four base ingredients, menus defined by a shared link with art or culture or history or politics.
Cooking under duress: what does it take to feed yourself and/or others during periods of illness, grief, or turmoil? How do disability, economic precarity, and conflict shape life in the kitchen? Writing about cooking is too often defined by positivity – sometimes stiflingly so. We would like to hear alternative perspectives that engage with the realities of cooking in times of crisis.
For first time pitchers, our main advice is that there is no one way to pitch, but we value passion, intimacy with a subject, and lived knowledge over writing experience and bylines. A good way to figure out whether your pitch might work for Vittles is to check out previously published work – not just our recipe columns but also our Cooking from Life essays and the broader archive of feature pieces and restaurant writing.
As with everything we publish, we’re particularly interested in hearing from people whose work challenges the traditional European- and/or American-centred perspective of mainstream food writing. If you don’t consider yourself a ‘food writer’, please still pitch!
To Pitch Vittles Cooking
Email vittlespitches@gmail.com with the subject heading ‘COOKING PITCH’. Include a concise introduction to your idea and how you might approach it, and explain why you’re the best person to write it. While clips are not necessary, please feel free to include links to previous relevant pieces you’ve written. Due to demand, it may take four to six weeks to get back to you, but we strive to answer every pitch we receive.
For recipe columns – an introductory essay of 500–800 words plus a previously unpublished recipe – we pay £500 (note that this fee also covers the provision of photos of the dish). For shorter contributions – tips, compilation entries, etc – we pay £150 or around 40p a word. Essays tend to go through three rounds of edits before publication. We offer 50% kill fees if the piece goes into edits but is not published for some reason, although this is rare. We also have a limited budget for expenses on occasion.
Note that all other sections of Vittles, including Cooking from Life, are also open for pitches: click here for details of what we’re looking for.