The Forgotten Pantry
It's time for something new
Phew, it’s good to be here, hello.
You’re getting this newsletter because you signed up to my mailing list via The Forgotten Pantry. After a long hiatus I’m writing and publishing again. You can now read my blog here on Substack, with monthly-ish updates to your inbox. If you don’t want to receive these newsletters anymore, click unsubscribe at the bottom of this email.
What to expect. You’ll get stories, essays, recordings and interviews collected over many years of sitting in kitchens abroad and at home. It is building on what The Forgotten Pantry was and still is to some extent: namely stories about the resourcefulness and creativity with which our grandmothers cooked. Like this interview with Dee from South Wales or this mother-daughter duo from Albania.
But it is also evolving into a looser, more experimental, more personal enquiry into cooking, and the agency, power and magic involved in the conjuring of a meal. It is about people – often women – who engage in that daily, resourceful, expansive action, which can teach us so much about ourselves, our world and where we come from.
I’m just a home cook is a phrase I have heard repeated too often. It is rooted in the outdated belief that cooking and specifically, cooking at home, is not of value and the people who do it are not of value either. I want to question those narratives and the complicated spaces that kitchens can be.
To explore how cooking can help us to retell the story, to stay alive, to speak to the collective, to remember the beginning, to honour a life and to preserve it.
It is – I believe – where life and all its small mysteries can be found.
The first instalment, via Braulia’s kitchen in the Oaxacan mountains of Mexico, is coming this weekend.