Good morning. The summer holidays are starting to sag, and my office is empty of people to bake for. So too, for the most part, is my kitchen: finding people to come for dinner each week is harder when everyone is dipping down to Margate or catching a flight to Lisbon. But we’re over halfway through this year’s resolution to host once a week, and that is the theme of today’s belated, special edition of Ten Items or Fewer - a mid-year review of sorts for the plan I set out here.

For the Johnny-Come-Latelies, let me bring you up to speed. At the start of this year, I resolved to host people every week of 2026. Seven and a half months in, the project’s on track: I’ve hosted at least once every week I’ve been in London, and I’ve also cooked for people a few times when away as well. All told, I reckon I’ve hosted on 30 different occasions for about 60 different people, with ages spanning from eleven months to 67 years and tables ranging from solo diners to groups of twenty. In this special edition of Ten Items or Fewer, I want to talk about the things I’ve learned across the first half of this project.

1. What ‘hosting’ means on social media feels further away now. At the start of this project, I spoke about how my previous efforts to host had been infrequent, tiring events. By having fewer people over more regularly for lower-key events, I hoped to establish a pattern of looking after my friends that I could sustain and that would make me a better cook in the process. I’ll talk a bit more about whether that’s worked later, but what I’ve observed in the meantime is that while I’ve been ticking along, ‘hosting’ seems to have undergone a sort of semantic inflation on this and other platforms. Far from having people over for dinner, ‘hosting’ on Instagram and TikTok resembles a sort of culinary dressage event. Birthdays, dinners and cocktail parties feature spectacular themes, huge cast lists, immaculate catered spreads and corporate partnerships. I can’t do that. Since January, I’ve just about stretched as far as a new tablecloth and some frames for prints I got at the V&A. I still use the plastic pepper grinder my Sainsbury’s peppercorns came in two years ago. My grease traps are a war zone. In short, when I have people over for dinner, it is a scruffy and haphazard affair. Having my mates over is a huge joy, but it feels like the hosting that feels realistic to me and the implications of ‘hosting’ as a genre or trope on social media are increasingly distant.

2. People want to be perceived as hosts more than they care about being hospitable. When I think of the great hosts I saw on telly as a child, figures like Ina Garten and Nigella Lawson spring to mind - wealthy white housewives of a certain age using the considerable means at their disposal to make themselves into tasteful centres of social and aesthetic gravity. Retirees laughing over lunch in Long Island gardens, faux-home videos of Chelsea children’s birthday parties and soft-focus candlelit suppers were what we grew up watching. Since then, I think the standards for hosting have remained high, but the resources underpinning them have become scarcer, resulting in a tension between aspiration and reality.

   

   What early-noughties food shows (and the books that accompanied them) sold was a version of hosting that relied on ample time and money Think of the fridge space and niche ingredients necessary to make three Ottolenghi salads ahead of time, or recipes that take a pricey stand mixer or food processor for granted. It’s no secret that young adults are relatively poorer and less well-housed today than they were when Nigella Bites and Barefoot Contessa came out, but the blueprint they set hasn’t really changed, and competition in the space has gone up. Even as hosting influencers pay lip service to costs with videos bearing names like ‘half-price hosting’ or ‘hosting on a budget’, the aesthetic bar for hosting content remains astronomically high. And as Timi Sotire has recently argued, the nature of social media means that even as influencers are at pains to claim authenticity and relatability, these seemingly homespun hosting efforts become more and more inscrutable: we can’t see the powerful lights that give the steak crust its gleam, or keep track of how many of the immaculate kitchen appliances are gifted. In many cases, we don’t even know which guests have paid to be there. It’s hard to establish how much genuine hospitality is taking place. In hosting, just as across the rest of social media, there’s a premium on appearances, but authenticity and appetite are getting harder to gauge. Being a host is desirable, but providing hospitality is difficult and costly. It’s the ‘everyone is hot but no-one is horny’ phenomenon but for dinners.

3. I’m glad I chose Substack (rather than Instagram or TikTok) to document this project. I think Substack is a good medium from which to tackle this mismatch between the style and substance of hosting. When I look at how people talk about hosting on social media, a lot of it stems from a backlash against two things: first, the cost of eating out, and second, a loss of connection within (and across) communities. There are countless thinkpieces about how everyone wants to be a village, but nobody wants to be a villager - hosting is often positioned as a tonic against this - and the subtext of a lot of hosting content is that investing in your own skills and equipment is a savvier way to spend time and money than the one-off delight of a restaurant meal. I don’t disagree with any of this. The problem is that the vast majority of hosting content comes from visual platforms, like Instagram and TikTok. This fundamentally undermines the ability of the content to substantiate its claims about the community benefit of hosting, because you’re optimising for something that looks and/or sounds good rather than something that actually nourishes and builds community (in other words, being hospitable). I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all with having a beautiful tablescape or gorgeous birthday party. I just think that looking after whatever you think of as your ‘village’ is a messy, haphazard affair where aesthetic curation can and should take a back seat. The village can’t sustain itself on the spectacle of feast days alone. As this recent Ikea ad makes plain, when you gear your hospitality around appearances, you limit your ability to meet hungry loved ones’ needs.

   

   It’s this that has made Substack a really fun way to record this project. For one thing, the photos I take of my food are pants, and by dinnertime I’m generally too hungry to bother making my meals look gorgeous. As a result, if I tried to document my hosting on Instagram or TikTok, it would bomb. But on Substack, you can still write something fun/interesting/self-deprecating about stuff that looks wonky or didn’t turn out quite right. You can also flesh out the characters of the people you host and their reason for coming for dinner, rather than just taking a one-second video of them in their carefully-chosen outfit. People with kids seem to be really good at doing this: Tim Hayward, Rebecca May Johnson, Emily Cuddeford and Rukmini Iyer all spring to mind as writers who I read as much for the warmth with which they describe those they cook for as for their accounts of the good, bad and indifferent food they make. Perhaps the joke’s on me, and I should be taking pictures of heritage tomatoes in their varied hues while I’m without hungry little mouths to feed. But I think there’s humour and joy to be found in writing about good, bad and ugly dishes (and dinner companions) rather than just pointing a camera at them after hours of fussing. Put another way, I’d love to read a kind of kitchen-table equivalent of Bridget Jones’s Diary, and I think there’s ample space for that sort of writing here.

4. I love having people over for dinner, but hate ‘dinner parties’. For a show I’ve never watched an episode of in full, Come Dine With Me occupies quite a lot of my headspace. In common with other Noughties classics like The Office, Peep Show and Big Brother, it puts the hubris and schadenfreude of the English under a pitiless microscope. Come Dine With Me’s particular genius is to throw in early-noughties British culinary instincts into the mix: being sniffy about a near-stranger’s hotpot looks even more risible if you then take a break from prepping pudding to deep-throat a whisk. As a nation, we have never had a particularly easy relationship with Martha Stewart-style dinner parties. Turning an everyday occurrence like dinner into a ‘party’ is the sort of thing that animates small children and New Yorkers, and Come Dine With Me is an opportunity for British viewers to gawk at the delusional few who’ll place such a carry-on in their own homes in the public eye. When someone describes what I do each week as ‘throwing a dinner party’, then, the thought brings me out in hives. All that performance and pressure! All that self-belief lodged in the wobble of a pannacotta! I’m sure there are some who are thrilled by the thought, but my hospitality tends to involve spilling at least one crucial ingredient and candles that are mismatched but not in a cute way. I love having people over for dinner, but I can’t think of much worse than a dinner party.

5. Co-hosting is exponentially easier than a solo effort. I can claim almost no credit for my hosting efforts progressing from Spartan to merely shabby. My lovely girlfriend has poured vast reserves of time, money and kindness into this project; the linen, the patience and the wine on these occasions are usually her work, as are almost all the pictures of the meals that appear on this page. Having someone you love and trust to help you in the kitchen is worth more than just the extra pair of hands they offer. They act as an extension of your brain, anticipating what the next step needs to be or (no less crucially) whose needs aren’t being met. This has a sort of multiplier effect: having that additional presence helps me relax, which makes me think more clearly, which makes me work more quickly, and so the process accelerates. Based on the intensity and intimacy that characterises professional cooks’ descriptions of a restaurant crew flying through a busy service, I wonder if the causality works in the other direction as well. If you find someone who acts as a perfect foil for you in such a febrile environment, maybe it’s impossible not to love them a little bit.

6. Most people don’t care much about food (and that’s a good thing). One of the things that has surprised me most about this hosting project is how little some people want to think about food. I spend huge amounts of time thinking about what I’ll cook, planning it, talking about it with others and trying new things. I love this game. Having said that, I think one of the reasons I’ve found it easy to keep the diary full of people who want to come round is because for a lot of people, thinking about getting oneself fed every day is no fun at all. Maybe they work long hours. Maybe they’ve got no good shops near them. Maybe they don’t trust their technique, or food just doesn’t bring them much sensory joy. Whatever the reason, I think that people are happy to be hosted because the anticipated relief of not having to feed themselves kicks in long before they (or I) know whether what I’m making is any good. As a host, this is a great position to be in, because I get to cook whatever the hell I like as a starting-point, but it’s also helpful and fun for guests to tell me something they haven’t had in a while. For example, my friend Hetty put in a request for duck, which I’d never normally buy and which turned out to be a huge success. Another friend asked for a massive chocolate cake, which kept me busy for hours and produced enough leftovers to feed our respective offices for a week. Guests are often tentative at first to make suggestions, but once they realise that even vague parameters are useful and that I’ll have a go at pretty much anything, they’ll happily give me a steer. I get to make new stuff; they get to eat what they like. Everybody wins.

7. I’m eating out less and enjoying it more. I don’t make vast amounts of money, and London is not a cheap place. Last year, things reached a tipping point: for the first time, I was going out to eat and resenting how much it was costing. Almost none of this resentment was directed at the restaurants themselves - most London hospitality staff are lovely (though you can still rely on some Notting Hill FOH staff to make you feel like you’re something nasty on their shoe). Going out for a meal is always a gamble, and that’s part of the fun: you put down your money with varying degrees of certainty about what your return will be. Last year it felt like the table stakes (ha, ha) had got too high for me to enjoy regularly. I couldn’t afford to eat out as often, I was enjoying it less when I did, and I was no fun to be around during the process. It was a real lose-lose.

   

   In my initial post on this project, I said that I was hoping to save money by hosting rather than going out with friends. I haven’t kept close tabs on it, but I don’t think I’ll have saved a huge amount: part of the joy of hosting is going and finding really good ingredients, which don’t come cheap. There’s a streak of irony to this. Even though it’s impossible for me to achieve the sort of economies of scale or scope that professional kitchens do, meaning that I cannot hope to replicate anything like restaurant cooking at the prices they set, cooking more at home means that I’m in control of way more of the process. As a result, cooking fancy meals for myself and guests feels like better value for money than going out to eat, even though it often isn’t. When I do go out, I’m more mindful about how I do it: I look forward to it for longer, I choose restaurants more carefully and savour the experience slightly more. Rather than spending weekends worrying that I’ll feel unreasonably let down by a meal out, I now go into restaurants feeling like I’ll either have a great time, or I’ll learn something about what I want to prioritise or avoid when I’m back in my kitchen.

8. Hosting is great for kitchen confidence and terrible for recipe development. Getting a lot of practice turning out decent meals for friends means that I’m now moving around the kitchen much more efficiently. This extends beyond just cooking: I’m now a much better judge of whether I can get a load of laundry on before a soffritto burns, and I can transfer utensils from drying rack to drawer while stirring or measuring something else. I’ve got more confident with my spicing, temperature control and timings, and it feels like I’m better at getting myself out of trouble too. The problem is that I still haven’t written down any bloody recipes. The urge to keep trying new dishes each week, during which I would rather do little jobs alongside the cooking than keep careful notes, means that I’ve now got a few base dishes that I can make and freestyle on reasonably well but haven’t perfected, a few dishes I return to when I need a get-out-of-jail-free card, and a few dishes that I’ll remember months from now as being really good without having a clue how I made them. If I wanted to write a recipe book, this hosting project would be a terrible way to do it, because I’m pursuing breadth of repertoire rather than the depth and reliability that comes with repetition. I think a good compromise would be to start writing down one recipe a fortnight - not necessarily a new one - that I can then go back to and edit as time goes by and I come back to it.

   

9. Cooking for guests is good, but cooking with guests around is a pain. Taking shortcuts when hosting feels like cheating. There are definitely store-bought puddings and marinades that are as good as anything I could churn out, if not better, but something about inviting people for dinner and then serving something I haven’t made (other than crisps and dips, because I’m not a complete masochist) smacks of dishonesty. There’s an element of selfishness in this too: I try harder with the food I make for guests than I do with my own food because they’ve taken the trouble to be there, and they back my cooking to be worth the trip. I want to hoard the joy that good food creates. This approach generally means that I can’t avoid doing some element of cooking after my guests have arrived. It’s invariably the worst bit of the evening. There I stand, the extractor fan roaring around my sweat-drenched ears to render my guests’ offers of help a faint murmur, trying to remember what I’ve forgotten about (it’s always the tenderstem broccoli). Drinks go unreplenished, the table goes unlaid, the candles remain unlit. On one occasion I spent so long deep-frying fish for tacos that I didn’t sit down until well after 10. I’ve started to get better at planning menus so I’ve got most things squared away well ahead of time, but it still feels inevitable that at some point I’ll be torn between paying attention to guests and paying attention to what I’m making them.

10. I want to cast the net wider for guests. Lots of other hosting projects (especially American ones, such as this terrifying piece about ‘the apex predators of hosting’) feature accounts of inviting total strangers over for dinner and having a marvellous time. I don’t feel comfortable doing this. A combination of British cultural milieu and realism about how attractive my offer of a fine-but-unremarkable dinner off the Uxbridge Road can be means that I’ve mostly limited invitations to friends and family to date. But I think there’s a middle ground I can find here. Between the two poles of close personal friends and complete strangers lie plenty of people who I think might enjoy coming for dinner, and who might end up as closer friends if I offer to cook for them. I’m still just not quite confident enough to bring it up unprompted. I think this would be a good aim for the second half of the project.

I’m always chuffed by how many people read about these things and engage, so thank you for being here. If you want to come for dinner, do get in touch. I’d love to have you.

It is August. It hasn’t rained in weeks, and the view from my kitchen window feels like it’s getting browner and dustier every day. Westminster has emptied out for recess. Closer to home, I’ve been getting stuck into some new recipes and restaurants. Welcome back to Ten Items or Fewer.

As a reminder, in these fortnightly columns I do about five bits free and put the rest below the paywall. This means that this column is going out in its entirety to a club that is currently very exclusive and very influential. Should you wish to join their ranks, you can do so here:

Anyway. On with this edition’s items.

1. When I arrived at Toklas for The Goal Is To Eat’s ‘Where Are All The Women Restauranteurs 2.0’, the first thing I noticed was the jet-black slick of Nick Cave’s hair about ten feet away. By coincidence, I’d been reading the lyrics to his song ‘More News From Nowhere’ earlier that day, which transports The Odyssey’s images of hospitality (and abuses thereof) to something like a sprawling house party:

I turn another corner

I go down a corridor and I see this guy

He must be about one hundred foot tall

And he only has one eye

He asks me for my autograph

I write nobody and then

I wrap myself up in my woolly coat

And I blind him with my pen

‘Cause someone must have stuck something in my drink

Everything’s getting strange lookin’

Half the people have turned into squealing pigs

The other half are cooking

Having seen The Odyssey a couple of days prior, the evening made me think about what hospitality means and how it’s changed. What Nolan dubs ‘the law of Zeus’ - an approximation of xenia - speaks to an understanding of hospitality that treats uncertainty as a given. You can’t be sure who’ll show up, when, or why, so it’s best to give them the benefit of the doubt and cater accordingly. In some ways, we’re a long way from that world, as the panel alluded to: the modern world of professional hospitality rests on mountains of data, painstaking business plans and thoughtful judgements about exactly who we’re catering to (Anna said that she knew she’d found a plausible home for Quince Bakery when she saw a butcher and a wine bar on the same street). But in other respects, the instinct to be hospitable is barely less shot through with contingency and chance than it was for Homer. People still come through the door claiming to be Billy Big-spuds and saying all sorts of mad stuff, just as Odysseus does with the Phaeacians. It was a shame to see that particular episode left out, not least because it’s where he tells a huge chunk of his story and he obtains the means to reach home at last. In this way, arguably the poem’s most transformative display of xenia conveys the impact that hospitality had then, and can still have through what Boutheina described as ‘cultural transmission’. As it was, Emily Wilson was right about Nolan’s version of hospitality - all the food looked horrible.

2. The other thing that struck me upon arrival at TGITE was when Panayiotas Soutis came and said a very kind and warm hello and how pleased she was that ‘the other man on the guest list had shown up’. I am very bad at starting conversations, so it was great to be able to sit quietly nibbling fried cheese and listen to her chat about TGITE before hearing Cynthia, Boutheina and Anna talk about their experiences opening up restaurants in London. Others have done more thorough write-ups of the event, but the biggest takeaway for me was the sheer bloody-mindedness and nerve needed to open up a food establishment of any sort, let alone the three absolute worldies the panellists run. When they were talking about what a pleasure it is to see their visions come to life, and to cultivate a local, discerning clientele who will back them, I wrote down in my notes ‘would it be mad to open up a spot on [road near me]?’. They then talked about how funding restaurants required them to call in every favour they’d ever earned and as much family capital as they could find, only to face arsehole customers, demanding influencers and the miseries of small-business management, all while being incredibly skilled cooks facing appalling hours and conditions. I quickly added ‘Yes. Not your skillset.’ to my notes.

3. Two other experiences in the last two weeks have served to reinforce this sense that being a professional in a kitchen is something I could never do. First, I’ve spent the last two weeks locked in a battle with shortcrust pastry. Two Fridays ago I tried to make Felicity Cloake’s perfect apricot tart for my friends James and Anita, the pastry for which has an unusually high fat-to-flour ratio. Attempting a new (and very buttery) pastry recipe on a hot day was a bad idea. Doing so as a sweaty-palmed man with no pastry cutter or food processor was a worse one. The pastry fell apart in my hands, and I bodged it into the tin, only to pour in blind baking beads without lining it first, before spilling them all over the floor while picking them out of the shell later. To make matters worse, the tart was delicious. The apricots were perfect, and the pastry was so good that Anita’s extremely discerning Parisian flatmate complimented it for days afterwards. Try again; fail again; fail better.

4. To this end, I made a broccoli and cheese quiche for my friends’ tenth wedding anniversary. I’d consulted my mum for advice beforehand, because her pastry tekkers is spoken of in hushed tones by relatives on both sides of the family. Wary of a dry dough, I scoured YouTube for visual cues of what a successful shortcrust should look like, eventually adding juuuust enough water to bring a fat-to-flour ratio of about 11:20 together. After chilling, I set about rolling out the dough and found it cracking all over the gaff. Efforts to lift the dough into the tin were risible, and the patched-up case cracked further upon baking. As a result, the custard formed a sort of delicious vulcanised seal between the pastry and the pie tin, leaving a rubble of shortcrust shards all over the tray when I tried to take it out. Again, the truly galling thing was how much better it tasted than shop-bought. I can’t go back. While the coffee cake I made was a little easier, the stress and frustration involved with turning out barely acceptable products reminded me that hobby cooking and professional cooking are leagues apart. Keelin’s brutal recent piece on the demands of the lifestyle is well worth a read, and Sonali’s piece on what goes into creating a pastry menu demonstrates that there really are levels to this game.

5. As if to press the point further home still, my girlfriend A and I went for dinner at a new local spot that reminded me how shot through with luck opening a restaurant is. Having been on the receiving end of strays from Angus Colwell recently, Chiswick has found itself with a smart new neighbourhood restaurant in the form of the North Mexican-leaning Mirtala, opened by husband-and-wife team Benaisha and Rishad . We were running late, so DMed them on Instagram to let them know (what with them not having a phone number visible). They said this was fine - the later the better, actually. When we got there, we were offered seats at the bar, despite having reserved a table. At this point Rishad turned to us quite tersely and said, ‘there’s physically nothing I can do’. Somewhat foxed by this, we pointed to the vacant table outside the front, whereupon he dashed to the pizza spot next door to grab a spare chair for me.

From that point on, service and food couldn’t have been lovelier. The bluefin aguachile had real punch; the wagyu barbacoa taco was every bit as dark and unctuous as the wild cod option was crisp and delicate; the pudding of roast pineapple, cinnamon helado and lime crema was an unexpected joy, all spice and sharp and warmth and richness. Benaisha and A had a chat about whether Chiswick is ready for orange wine (conclusion: possibly, but only the less agricultural stuff), and our waitress apologised profusely for a delay to our snack course that wasn’t bothering us in the slightest. Overall, we had a great time. But the Saturday-mandatory £65 feasting menu came to £110 a head with food after a slightly grumpy start, and it reminded me of the terrifying lack of margin for error that exists within the hospitality industry. Chiswick rent isn’t cheap, and they’re getting amazing produce in. They must be barely breaking even. And they’ve got a fourteen-month-old baby at home. All that it took for Rishad’s stress to become visible to customers was some Chiswick dads taking their time over their mezcalitas, bipedal ruminants in Paul Smith shirts throwing off their nascent and finely-balanced booking matrix. I’m not pissed off with Mirtala - it’s a brilliant addition to the area, and I’d come back in an instant. I’m just astonished, and slightly saddened, by how hard the business environment is for people like Benaisha and Rishad, who clearly care a huge amount about creating something great, and how little it takes to nudge things off course even in the midst of success.

Below the paywall: did the hosting streak survive? What is going on with restaurant openings on the Uxbridge Road? And why do small children make the best food critics?

Read more

Hello! Having spent large chunks of the previous month away, I am now Back in the Jug Agane, and Westminster is abuzz with gossip and change. I have no thoughts on this. What I do have plenty of thoughts about, however, is the stuff I’ve consumed over the last couple of weeks. Welcome back to another edition of Ten Items or Fewer.

1. Everyone knows that the terrace at Toklas is delightful. Having gone there for lunch for the first time last week, the most charming aspect was how thoughtfully service ran: they rolled down the blinds at just the right time to protect diners’ pasty napes from the early afternoon sun, and the acoustics are such that you can hear your companions perfectly while the roadworks on the Strand and Victoria Embankment fade away. This also means that you can hear others’ conversations almost equally well. For the second time in as many months, I was distracted from something delicious involving tomatoes and lots of olive oil by the man seated one table to the left choosing to make a tit of himself.

   

   Not content with this astonishingly unedifying display, at one point he swizzled his chair round 90 degrees so he was in the sunlight, splayed his thighs, and started cheerfully sunning his crotch through his chino shorts.
   

   The problem is probably me. To suffer one poor dining neighbour may be regarded as unfortunate; to suffer two begins to look like carelessness. In any case, provided you don’t get sat next to this tool, you should definitely go to Toklas for a sunny summer holiday lunch.
   

2. Drinking is fun, and I agree with the argument put forward in this piece. Having said that, becoming a boring old fart means that I now do it with less reckless and greedy abandon than I once did. The problem is that I still like a silly little refreshment, but my quality of sleep and mediocre running times are too precious to me to allow for pints or G&Ts several times a week, so I’ve been trying to find some nice low-and-mid-strength alternatives. The satsuma sour I had on the aforementioned visit to Toklas was delicious, with much more complexity than I expected from what amounts to Orangina shaken with egg whites, but paying double-digit sums for mocktails feels daft. Small Beer do a 2.5% IPA, which feels very reasonable for a Wednesday evening, but which dodges the common 0-0.5% trap of beer that tastes like fizzy water with some hop extract floating in it. But my favourite of late has been a midweek Campari soda. Such a fun colour! So light and refreshing! Camp but luxe! Chic!!

3. You will pry stone fruit season from my autumn-chilled fingers. As well as another roast peach salad, last week I went rogue and gave a peach and raspberry cobbler a go. I think it works better as a summery baked pudding than crumble because the scone-like topping is constructed with gaps, bringing the juices of the fruit to the surface. My mum comprehensively cobblermogged me at dinner this evening, producing a peach number with a much lighter dough and golden fruit beneath. I think she used this recipe.

   
   Being unable to deviate too far from my roots, though, I also made a tray of cherry crumble squares to sustain my colleagues through this week’s political changes. These worked beautifully (recipe here - doubled it and did it in a 13x9 pan, threw some raspberries in to bulk it out but would have done two big punnets of cherries otherwise, added some sugar and vanilla to the fruit mix and a sprinkle of cinnamon to the dough). Having said that, I will be asking for a cherry pitter for my birthday, as my kitchen looked like a Seneca production while I did the mise en place.

   

4. I mostly host people in ones or twos at the moment, so cooking for six - and on a weeknight - was a bit more of a stretch. I was lucky to do so after a day where I could work from home and sneak out to the shops during my lunchbreak, during which I got the ingredients sorted for a trio of puff pastry sheet tarts: caramelised tomato and guanciale (had a jar of the former that I’d made ages ago in the fridge), pesto and mozzarella (soggy!) and courgette and ricotta with basil, pine nuts and lemon (pick of the bunch). We had big salads and a nice bottle of wine, my mum brought over a cheesecake and it was all surprisingly relaxed.

   

5. Looking for a quick dinner before going to a gig, last week I went to Coyo Taco on Victoria Street. It’s a Mexican place with a bar attached that seems to have a cult following in Miami. The pacy redevelopment of Victoria Street is a topic for another time, but somewhere boasting tequila lockers for regulars may not tempt dorky civil servants from their Farmer J lunches and pints at the Old Star. The paloma was nice enough (though it could have been served in a glass rather than a plastic cup), but my fish tacos were preventably rubbish: the batter was underseasoned and underfried, and the salsas were ordinary. Mexican places do well in the US because the ingredients and expertise are close at hand. The absence of these two critical factors has made the UK’s Mexican scene weaker across the board, and this is no exception. Coyo Taco’s confidence in their new location might have grown, and I’m sure that the slow-cooked options like the birria and pibil would have been more forgiving, but for now it sticks out like an avocado thumb.
   

6. I think picnics are much better in theory than they are in practice. Either you leave things like seating, shade, dry ground and bins up to chance, or you’re tasked with hauling vast amounts of baggage from the tube/car park/fourth-floor flat to make it enjoyable. My preferred arrangement is the hybrid picnic, where you bring some constituent parts but make a plan to pick up other bits near an identified picnic spot. I did this last week with friend of Slapdash Benjy, for whom I made falafel and halloumi wraps that we ate at the end of a walk down the riverside from Hammersmith. We stopped for a drink and a sit down at the newly-opened Fulham Pier, which is full of the very worst people in the world but where you can get drinks that you can go and enjoy looking out over the river on the wall at Stevenage Park. It was a fine way to end the working week.
   

7. Niloufar Haidari’s Vittles on proteinmaxxing formed a striking juxtaposition with my slow chug through Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which features lots of episodes centred on food (and lack thereof). One of the things I think lots of manosphere discourse misses is its spiritual, or even religious, quality. As Haidari points out, eating shitloads of protein is framed as a route to self-actualisation in a world where other means of doing so feel unattainable:

   Masculinity has been in crisis throughout history – mostly because it’s incredibly fragile, definable primarily through what it is not. And in our current cultural moment, it is not vegan, it is not liberal, it is not weak, it is not feminine and it is most certainly not ordering oat milk in its coffee. As masculinity enters its latest and most online flop era, protein-maxxing is being offered to men as a shortcut to regain lost metaphorical testosterone.

   Proteinmaxxing goes hand-in-hand with alt-right thinking that ostensibly champions the masculine individual’s heroic efforts to swim against a degenerate, modernising current. What its MLM schemes and chatrooms speak to, however, is a hunger for community and belonging with a gaping hole at its centre where meaning should be. Proteinmaxxing is surrendering to a higher authority. Its memes and catchphrases act like catechisms and refrains; there’s even the imagery of communion as a ritual of shared experience, sacrifice and belonging (‘take the red pill’). Living in a time and place of relative abundance means the search for discipline becomes noisier, cloudier. Having a strapping bloke yelling at you to eat more protein and giant labels on all your food boasting their protein loads gives you one less thing to think about, so you surrender to it. The discipline proteinmaxxers say they must strive for in order to escape the world’s decline and degeneracy is facilitated by the logistical miracles of cold supply chains and on-demand delivery. The snake eats itself.
   

8. [SPOILERS FOR ‘THE ROAD’ AHEAD] The reason I’ve been thinking about abundance as a precondition for surrender and discipline in eating is because of how McCarthy treats food in The Road. His North American landscape is sparse, stark and grey, and abundance is a distant memory. The moment the father bites into a shrivelled apple comes after a horrific encounter with cannibals in a basement feels like a photographic negative of Genesis 3: knowledge of good and evil has atrophied in the post-apocalyptic landscape, and with survival all that’s left, the apple is a symbol of providence rather than sin. It’s only after this, under conditions of relative bounty - the discovery of an abandoned bunker stuffed with dry and canned goods - that food becomes a moment for ritual, submission and self-awareness. This is summed up in the boy spontaneously suggesting something like grace before the meal they prepare with what they find:

He dragged a footlocker across the floor between the bunks and covered it with a towel and set out the plates and cups and plastic utensils. He set out a bowl of biscuits covered with a handtowel and a plate of butter and a can of condensed milk. Salt and pepper. He looked at the boy. The boy looked drugged. He brought the frying pan from the stove and forked a piece of browned ham onto the boy’s plate and scooped scrambled eggs from the other pan and ladled out spoonfuls of baked beans and poured coffee into their cups. The boy looked up at him.

Go ahead, he said. Dont let it get cold.

What do I eat first?

Whatever you like.

Is this coffee?

Yes. Here. You put the butter on your biscuits. Like this.

Okay.

Are you all right?

I dont know.

Do you feel okay?

Yes.

What is it?

Do you think we should thank the people?

The people?

The people who gave us all this.

Well. Yes, I guess we could do that.

Will you do it? Why dont you?

I dont know how.

Yes you do. You know how to say thank you.

The boy sat staring at his plate. He seemed lost. The man was about to speak when he said:

Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we were and we’re sorry that you didnt get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God.

He looked up. Is that okay? he said. Yes. I think that’s okay.

9. Having gone out of my way to slag off Chiswick’s shawarma game, I was on the bus to the High Street the other day and saw our long-standing Turkish place on Turnham Green boasting none other than Big Zuu as a customer. Perhaps I was wrong to dismiss our kebab credentials. I’ve only eaten there when absolutely starving and getting home late with no other supper options, a condition that tends to make the free bread taste especially good. Free bread is much more of a US thing than a UK thing, and it’s the subject of one of the best pieces I’ve read this year - a funny, poignant deep dive into the best free restaurant bread in America. You can read it here.
   

10. I come from a family of doctors, and every so often I go home and discover that a grateful patient’s family has given my parents something to say thank you for their efforts. This is rarely more than a nice bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates, but when families go off-script, the results can be marvellous. With this in mind, if anyone has a hankering for Uzbek mare’s milk, apparently a multipurpose remedy and tremendous muscular supplement when consumed 3-5 times a day, let me know.

That’s all for this week! As a reminder, from next time Ten Items or Fewer will be paywalled about halfway down. If you want to dodge this unceremonious wrench from your reverie, you can do so for less than the price of a pint per month below.

Subscribe now

New big piece coming soonish too. Until next time!

Hello! I wasn’t expecting to be publishing again so soon after the screed I put out ten days ago, but something unexpected happened last week. I got my first paid subscriber.

It happened entirely by accident. I publish what I want, when I want, and if work or other stuff is getting in the way, or I don’t have anything useful to say on a given topic, I can simply keep schtum. This is a great position to be in, but it also means that I have never had any ambition to charge people for my newsletter. Someone just decided to do it.

HOWEVER. The existence of one (1) paid subscriber implies the possibility of others, and if people are prepared to commit their hard-earned shekels to my stuff on a recurrent basis, then I should probably do something about it.

With that in mind, I’m going to have a go at writing a column called Ten Items or Fewer. Every other week, I’ll send out a list of between five and ten things I’ve eaten, drunk, seen, read, made or noticed over the last fortnight or so. The first three items will be free, and the rest of the list will be behind the paywall. Sometimes it might be a longer, less detailed list. Sometimes I might do a recipe. You get the idea.

As well as creating a more regular flow of content, I’m hoping that this structure will also encourage me to write tighter, more engaging prose. Because it’s just a collection of thoughts and remarks, I can write it in short bursts rather than trying to articulate some overwrought thesis for weeks on end (which I will still be doing regardless). In any case, I spend so much of my week thinking about food that I’m hoping it will be hard to keep it to ten items, rather than tricky to drum up ideas.

As you may well have spotted by now, this first edition is free, and the next one will be too. I should stress, however, that having only one paid subscriber puts all my other subscribers in a truly perilous position, as I am at present entirely beholden to the nefarious whims of my sole munificent benefactor. For all you know, they could have commissioned me to write a five-part series on the best places to drink Huel in Clapham.

In order to prevent such disastrous possibilities from materialising, you’d better upgrade to a paid subscription.

While you consider those lilies, here are my ten items or fewer for the last couple of weeks.

1. The ten days I spent in Provence and Marseille were great for all sorts of reasons, but the best bit was that we did the majority of our cooking outside. When it was my turn to cook dinner, I seared two enormous legs of lamb studded with anchovies, garlic and rosemary on a high heat on the barbecue, then roasted them at a lower temperature over some potatoes for a little over an hour. My mother calls this dish ‘lamb that cries onto potatoes’. The trick to avoiding the potatoes turning into squelchy nonsense is to drain most of the juices from the pan when you take the lamb out, then put the potatoes back into a hot oven (or barbecue) so that they dry out and crisp up in the residual lamb fat. This worked much better than the duck skewers we did the next day, whose fat sent the whole barbecue up in a flaming vortex when I turned my back for a second.

2. The most delicious side we ate was my girlfriend’s barbecued nectarine and burrata salad. Stone fruits and mild, soft cheeses are brilliant summer options both as sides and puddings, so I repeated the trick for dinner last week, but made it a pudding by serving the roast fruit with a whipped vanilla mascarpone. In retrospect, folding vanilla seeds into mascarpone and roasting the pods with the fruit was a bit much for a Wednesday, and it lacked a crunchy element (some toasted flaked almonds would have been fine), but my guests were licking the bowl clean, so I can’t complain.

   

3. Tuba Club is a very silly place to stay. The setting is spectacular, and the fish we had was lovely and fresh, but lunch cost an absolute fortune and you couldn’t move for phones at tables. I disgraced myself at breakfast by absentmindedly dolloping yoghurt into a vessel I presumed was a bowl without bothering to check, leading to the less-than-dignified sight of me trying to scrape yoghurt from the flawless edges of a very sleek designer plate.

   

   While we were in Les Goudes, I thought the better-value option was La Marine, which did a delicious tuna and tomato salad and was much more restrained than Tuba Club. It’s also right next door to a summer pop-up from Cecile, which does good sandwiches, and just down the road from an ice cream place that did a fantastic lemon and basil sorbet.

4. Marseille is every bit as intense as everyone says it is, and stomping about in a heatwave wasn’t the best way to give it a fair hearing, but we had some stunning stuff all the same. Rue d’Aubagne was a real highlight. Maison Empereur is easily the best kitchen shop I’ve ever been in, but it’s also a fully-functioning hardware and homeware store, with sales assistants whose blue half-aprons and brisk demeanour give them the vibe of St John waiters staffing a wood-panelled Robert Dyas. After shopping there we went for lunch at Chez Yassine, washing down Tunisian stews with gulps of house lemonade, and the following night we went for drinks up the road at Yuzu followed by dinner at La Mercerie, which was a total joy. Just don’t try and park an enormous rental car in the vicinity.

5. Closer to home, I had great food recently at Vesper, Jackson Boxer’s newest opening. The staff couldn’t have been more tolerant of me showing up sweating bullets and lumbering through their bar with an enormous cricket bag on my back. They were equally tolerant of the middle-aged couple next to us, who I thought behaved appallingly. Perhaps I’ll have more sympathy when my eyes weaken in years to come, but using your phone torch at max brightness to pore over the menu AND THEN TURNING IT ON AND OFF THROUGHOUT THE MEAL, MENU LONG SINCE DISPENSED WITH, seems to me an egregious way to behave. To make matters worse, this unsmiling pair got arsey at the staff because they’d misheard what the special was, turning up their noses at a piece of blushing beef rib I would have been delighted to see arrive at my table, surprise or no. Anyway, assuming you don’t get sat next to such joyless freaks as these, it’s a fantastic addition to Exmouth Market.

6. In other restaurant news, I thought this piece was a masterstroke of self-aggrandising bullshit, so I was very tickled when my girlfriend described the chef-proprietor of the Yellow Bittern as ‘the foodie version of Caroline Calloway’.

7. It’s too hot to bake, so I’ve not had much in the way of pudding in the last few weeks. However, while cleaning out a picnic bag this weekend I stumbled upon most of a pack of Jelly Babies. Decanting these into a Kilner jar that lives above my sink has been the best thing I’ve done for my Men’s Mental Health^TM this month. I have one before starting the washing up and one when I finish.

8. Speaking of washing up burdens, last night’s dinner was an aubergine panzanella. I got a few things wrong with this one - trying to blast the tomatoes in a hot oven actually just made them wet, and the baby aubergines left in big Tesco were an imperfect substitute for big chunks of the full-sized thing. Nevertheless, roasting the croutons in some leftover guanciale fat and adding some capers to the vinaigrette, along with some basil leaves and toasted pine nuts for crunch, made for a solid Monday night dinner.

   

9. I’m as partial to a chic little long black as the next guy. If it’s made by a barista with lots of very small tattoos and a name like a premium detergent brand, so much the better. Come summer, however, I’m a complete slag for a Starbucks cold brew. On a hot day, I know that I can be sucking down something that tastes like fruity diesel and is barely lower octane within five minutes of leaving my desk. To stave off financial ruin and this particularly guilty pleasure, this week I plan on getting myself into gear and making enough cold brew concentrate to keep some at home and some at work (dead easy - 1:8 ratio of coarsely-ground coffee to water steeped in a jam jar at room temperature for 24hrs, then strained through a J-cloth and diluted over ice in about a 1:2 ratio). I will be necking it by the pint as London swelters.

10. My mum and dad don’t know what Substack is, but my mum loves messing about with pastry almost as much as she loves puns. When I told them that I was writing a bit on here, she quietly set these two plates down on the table and said, ‘Actually, I reckon yours is a stack and your dad’s is more of a sub-stack’.

That’s it for now! Let me know what you want to see more of (or less of) in weeks to come.

Dear Charlie,

It’s been a couple of months since we spoke - I hope your post-uni, pre-grad-scheme gap yah trip to Australia is going well. London is baking in the sort of heat it has waited eight months for, and as the weather settled in overnight you could feel the city uncoil slightly. I’ve got some alphonso mango sorbet setting in the freezer and a prawn curry bubbling away for dinner with a friend.

Seven years ago, you came to stay with me while you did a week of work experience in London during weather like this. You were just finishing your GCSEs; I’d moved out of my mum and dad’s place into a postage-stamp flat on Shepherd’s Bush Green a few months prior. From what I remember, I made a great fuss of cooking you fish finger bhorta on the first night. A few days later, you made some sausages for us on a flame-spitting 70s grill that a horrified gas engineer would rip from the wall shortly afterwards. Today you’re a couple of weeks away from moving from your parents’ farm in Pembrokeshire to London and into your first big-boy corporate job, and I imagine you’re looking forward to exactly the sort of early-twenties foolishness that summer in London invites. Meanwhile, I’m two years into owning my first home and nearly six months into hosting every weekend I’m around. As you and thousands of your peers prepare to strike out on your own, I thought I might write to you to tell you what I learned about food in my twenties.

The gulf between precedent and possibility has never been wider than it is for the modern twentysomething moving away from home. Grad jobs are poorly paid and hard to find. Eating out is expensive, going for a pint seems undesirable, getting high is illegal and travelling feels impossible. Boomers are probably right to say that they too experienced being precarious and broke in their youth, but at least they had the good fortune to do so in an age of reasonable wage-to-asset ratios underpinning their carefree fun and without smartphones frying their dopamine receptors. They were also blissfully unburdened by comparison: at worst, your parents had glossy magazines and some nostalgic paperbacks convincing them their early adult lives were a bit dull, rather than endless doom scrolls of gorgeous, happy contemporaries. In other words, being about twenty-two and moving out certainly feels worse in 2026 than it did for basically everyone older than you, and it doesn’t feel like there’s much you can do about it.

But one of the few areas where you have outsized agency, to an often exhausting extent, is in how you feed yourself. The choices we make over food seem so low-stakes and repetitive that we don’t realise how early we start developing this sense of agency. Children vote with their stomachs on what they will and won’t eat from a very young age, and family rhythms often bend to their preferences. As we get older, unrestricted choice over what we consume is one of our first brushes with freedom and its consequences - the dinner-ruining jumbo box of cinema popcorn, the blue-tinged heave after misadventures with VKs. Among the things we do that reflect who we are, we get more agency with food, more often, sooner, and for longer, than anything else. We get more choice, more often, with food than with the clothes we wear, the homes we inhabit, the jobs we do or the people we fall for. It’s why so much of the advertising we see is for food and drink. It’s also why it’s such a sensitive subject for so many people - because the choices they’ve made around it are, relative to many others they make, both ongoing and pretty unconstrained. I can’t think of something we do with as much frequency or agency that has such a huge cumulative impact on our lives. Along with exercise, I think the recent explosion in food-related online content from Gen Z is partly about a genuine enthusiasm for cooking and eating, but much more about food being one of a pretty small set of things where people your age can just do stuff.

Now that you’re moving out, doing that stuff is up to you. The fridge is yours to fill; the hob is yours to keep clean. You’re the boss. By the time you get to my age, any number of things - a job, a family, a side quest - could make it really important for you to be able to keep body and soul together, ideally in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you’re rotting from the inside out or the top down.

So there are five things at work here:

1. Lots of your twenties, including big, non-negotiable bits like jobs and housing, will have you feeling pretty helpless and hopeless.

2. This means that almost all the freewheeling agency you have will get crammed into other outlets. These are where you will learn most about yourself and have the most fun.

3. By the time you get to your thirties, you’ll probably have a bunch of responsibilities that impinge upon your time and energy, meaning that the time to get good at stuff is now.

4. There’s nothing you will do with as much frequency or choice in your twenties as feeding yourself.

5. The floor on feeding yourself is very low indeed (literally just keeping yourself alive, preferably without puking your guts out), but you can push the ceiling as high as you like (dunno, maybe you’ll get really into sashimi-grade fish or something).

The internet is not short of places for you to find helpful recipe videos promising you spadefuls of protein or garlic-peeling hacks. If you go looking, there are also plenty of ‘thirty things I learned about food before I was thirty’ listicles. The nostalgic aphorisms in these articles contain valuable advice, but they tend not to set out an overarching argument about how you should think about the way you feed yourself and others. So that’s what I’m going to try to do.

Fast habits, slow consequences

My prevailing memory of being in my early twenties is a sort of cheerful, blasé assumption that I was more or less bulletproof. Habits formed fast, but consequences were slow to arrive. Sleep, diet, workload, travel and illness were all things I could mess about with routinely while appearing to suffer few lasting effects. This early-twenties physical resilience can be pushed in two directions. If you want to, you can roll out of bed on six hours’ sleep (or fewer), flog yourself half to death with work and workouts, get by on corporate-card Deliveroos and drink like a fish while basically being pretty functional. These habits form fast, but the consequences from such habits take a while to show up. Nevertheless, show up they surely will - your ten-year school reunion is the starkest place you’ll see them.

On the other hand, the returns on treating your body with a bit of respect are outsized. Getting into a routine that involves enough sleep, eating the odd green leafy vegetable and drinking enough water feels dull to start with, but will keep your elders marvelling at the hale and healthful glow with which you are blessed long into your third decade. It’s why Nora Ephron said that thing about spending the entire year you’re 26 in your swimming costume. By the time you get to thirty, the habits - good or bad - that you picked up in your early twenties are nailed down, but their effects will only just be visible. Put another way, you won’t use the phrase ‘gut biome’ regularly in conversations until your age begins with a 3, at which point you’ll realise you should have been paying attention to it for the last decade. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I say all this because I think it makes a compelling case not for fanatical health optimisation or heedless self-abasement, but for pushing the boundaries of what you eat and drink laterally. As long as you’re vaguely realistic, you can be really adventurous with where, when, what and how you eat with relatively few competing demands on your time or risks to your physical health. Sure, you could go to Dishoom for a curry, or you could spend the time you’d spend queueing there on the train to Namak Mandi or Royal Nawaab instead. Maybe your parents never let you have McCoy’s growing up because of the MSG. Congratulations! MSG is now stocked on the shelves of your nearest Asian supermarket and makes everything taste delicious. And if you ask questions, people are generally keen to help you make the most of your curiosity: one of my favourite food memories of lockdown was strolling down to Albertine (RIP), being upsold an enormous globe artichoke by the lovely manager and him explaining how to prepare it. Regardless of what you eat, being in your twenties means you’re probably in better physical nick than you will be for the rest of your adult life. You might as well make the most of it by being adventurous.

If I were starting from scratch trying to contend with the vastness of London’s food landscape, I’d do two things. First, I’d start a colour-coded list on Google Maps listing stockists, bakeries, cafes, bars, restaurants and so on, with a couple of notes on each about what’s good and (no less crucially) what was a letdown. If you do this for ten years, you’ll not only have a pretty good working geography of London within the first year (you are rarely more laser-focused on where you are than when you’re hungry), you’ll also be able to sort yourself and others out with good food or drink wherever you end up. The more detailed your mental map of what you like to eat and drink, the shorter the distance between you and satisfaction. It’s also far, far better to visit these places than to get them delivered via The Apps, which always cost you more in self-respect and cash than they save you in time and effort.

The second thing I’d do is start writing down some bloody recipes. I have spent the last ten years trying to cook stuff I think is tasty and interesting, drawing from all sorts of websites, recipe books, videos, weekend supplements and social media posts. Have I written any of it down? Have I even got a functioning recipe bookmark system on my phone? Have I fuck. Irrespective of how elastic and brilliant your graduate brain is, it’s not sharp enough to memorise chapter and verse of all the things you’ll cook over the next decade. If you make something really good, write it down.

Eating for (and with) yourself

The first person you have to please is yourself. That sounds trite, but the flip side of all the stuff I was saying about agency is that a lot of your twenties is spent feeling like you’re dancing to someone else’s tune. Food is one arena in which this is emphatically not true. Not keen on broccoli? Fine. Don’t buy it. Move along. Want to eat your lunch at your desk before 12? Nobody’s stopping you. Got that coriander-tastes-like-soap gene? No problem, just tell the person who invited you over for tacos. Having a beautiful plate of homemade food or name-checking the hottest new restaurant or chef in conversation is cool, I guess, but it’s not as good as being pleased with what you’ve eaten. Use the horizontal leeway I’ve described to work out what really makes you feel good (in the broadest sense) when you eat it.

Of course, things can make you feel good about eating them for different reasons. Some days the satisfaction will derive from remembering you have some spinach in the freezer as you stare down your third evening of microwaved lasagne leftovers. Some days it will come from not making a complete mess of the delicious piece of fillet your dad got you for your birthday. Sometimes it’ll be from halving the time it takes to roast a chicken out of the oven because you watched a YouTube tutorial on spatchcocking. Sometimes it’ll be because you bought a bottle of wine on the manager’s recommendation and it really did make the pasta arrabiata taste completely different. Working out what you really want from a meal and making decisions you think will get you there is a skill worth practising. Prioritising one goal relentlessly - minimal ingredients, maximum health, shortest preparation time, cheapest weekly shop - is a sure-fire route to misery. There are no hacks or rankings, far less any great secrets. The grown-ups were right: a change is as good as a rest, enough is as good as a feast, and you’re either winning or learning.

In terms of how I cooked for myself across my twenties, I think three things made the biggest difference.

1. Kit. If you’re really, really bootstrapping it, you can run a functional kitchen off a Kitchen Utensil First XI:

   1. Chef’s knife

   2. Breadknife

   3. Microplane

   4. Veg peeler

   5. Rubber spatula

   6. Fish slice

   7. Wooden spoon

   8. Whisk

   9. Tongs

   10. Pyrex jug

   11. Measuring spoons¹

-plus whatever pots and pans you can scrounge off downsizing relatives. Name-brand kitchen paper, foil, clingfilm and bin bags are worth it; name-brand tomato paste probably isn’t. Don’t buy ANY flashy gadgets off Instagram or TikTok - no, the influencer you fancy has not magically overcome the trade-off between non-stick and longevity - but the charity shops and Facebook Marketplace offerings of e.g. Highgate and Marylebone can be goldmines as boomers refresh their Le Creuset collections. Speaking of which, the second you can get your hands on a good enamel casserole, cast-iron skillet, or robust stand mixer (if you’re into baking), do it. Keep things clean, dry, sharp, and stored. That’s it.

2. Ingredients. Keep it simple. Don’t buy reduced-sugar marmalade or low-fat creme fraiche - just eat the good stuff slightly less often. If good-quality meat or veg is cheap, then it’s either in season and therefore abundant, or it needs some combination of time, technique or supplementary ingredients to make it taste good. Make use of your local Middle Eastern and Asian supermarkets and actually talk to the staff, because being enthusiastic about hummus or pad thai does not exempt you from Pasty White Boy Congenital Ignorance Syndrome. Work out what ingredients need what treatment and buy accordingly (short rib is not, for instance, a quick midweek option). Freeze your chicken carcasses, but don’t refrigerate your tomatoes. Cheap ready meals kept in the fridge are a fast-track to misery; posh ones bought with a yellow sticker and shoved in the freezer are a barren Tuesday-night godsend. Do a condiment audit of your fridge twice a year. When you move flats, get your mum to take you to the big M&S on the way to the new place.

3. Technique. I’ve slagged off food influencers before, but hours watching videos on social media of people dicing onions, deglazing a pan, kneading dough or emulsifying a sauce definitely made me more knowledgeable. Understanding these techniques visually was insufficient, though; for all of them, there’s a mandatory period of being mediocre as you learn how they work in practice. It took me ages to realise how all-encompassing a sensory experience learning proper technique is: how the sound of meat browning changes to a sharper crackle as it starts to crisp in its own rendered fat, how different caramel looks and smells just a few degrees apart. There are no shortcuts; mastery brings its own joy. The things that make the biggest difference to how easy you find cooking are probably knife skills, heat control and seasoning - everything else is pretty negotiable. Baking, however, is a science and should be treated as such. Go ask your aunt Jane about that.

The great unspoken deal of cooking for yourself is that it just has to be worth the effort. Most of the time, the food I made for myself in my twenties was kind of fine. My curries weren’t perfectly balanced. My cheap cut of steak should have been pinker. There’s a finite amount anyone can do to make spinach interesting. But I tried slightly harder than I needed to, slightly more often than was necessary, and kept the wolf from the door for the most part. Caring about kit, ingredients, and technique enough to stick at them meant that over time, my standard for kind-of-fine for myself drifted upwards until it became kind-of-good. This process - of using your tolerance for your own uselessness as a means to improve a skill to the benefit of yourself and others - is something that you do in all aspects of your life in your twenties. I’d argue that doing so with food is one of the most enjoyable variations on this theme that you can find.

Eating with others

The other reason to care about how you feed yourself in your twenties is because it makes cooking and eating with others less fraught. That Simone Weil quotation about good and evil applies, in a gentler way, to group meals: each individual one is good for different reasons, but the common link between the bad ones tends to be very dull: people are generally unhappy with how much control they had. Your dining companion is tiresome. Malaysian isn’t what you’d have chosen. It’s too expensive. Far worse than making us go off a restaurant or meal, the great risk of eating with others lies in our tendency to pin the experience’s negative aspects on the poor judgement of others.

Nowhere will you see this more in evidence than in the group chats that spring up before a birthday or barbecue. The paradoxical effect of a total lack of constraint is to make choices seem impossible (“I’m easy! Don’t worry - book wherever!”), meaning that you end up with a subpar lowest common denominator (“yeah, Franco Manca was the only place that could fit 12 people at 7pm on three days’ notice”). The problem is that the moment someone places a constraint on the arrangement (“Ben’s coming from Crystal Palace, so maybe we should choose somewhere south of the river”), everyone else feels their constraints are fair game too (“my girlfriend says she’s around after all - do they have a gluten-free menu?”) until the whole thing is suffused with unvoiced resentment. A lack of parameters feels terrifying, but introducing one feels unfair until everyone does it, and then you’re trapped.

There’s good news and bad news on this front. The bad news is that you will have some duff meals with other people and there’s nothing you can do about it. Someone disagreeable will take you to SushiSamba. At some point, you’ll queue hours for a really ordinary sandwich because a friend saw a reel about it. Bottomless brunch will happen to you. These are all frustrating in different ways.

Fortunately, the good news outweighs the bad. First, what I said about the frequency of meals holds - one meal literally isn’t that deep. You’re doing it all over again in a few hours. Didn’t like what your friends made for dinner the other night? I have fantastic news about who’s in charge of your dinner for the rest of the week. If you can confidently make something that will satisfy yourself, then going with someone else’s suggestion is less risky, because you’re not reliant on their idea of a good time for a satisfying meal.

But more importantly, eating widely and adventurously means you’re more likely to be game for a wider array of stuff, which makes you an easier and more fun companion. By the time you’re my age, you will know people who have pronounced opinions on high street posh salad options after years of eating them every day at their desks. Obviously you don’t want to be that guy, but neither do you want to be the person who insists on making your party of eight queue for the latest viral opening. What you want to be able to do is make your friends feel understood.

Anyone can pick an eye-catching restaurant off an online list. It takes deep knowledge of your city, and of your companions, to pick somewhere that prioritises the thing they’ll really value - a short commute home, a set lunch deal, Instagram-friendly lighting, hot bar staff. It’s knowing that ‘casual Italian somewhere in town’ means Bocca di Lupo to your godfather and Ciao Bella to your girlfriend’s sister. In other words, you end up avoiding both the horror of unrestricted choice and the claustrophobia of competing demands, because you pick one thing to prioritise on behalf of others. If you start from the position that you’re in total control of the vast majority of meals you eat, then losing a bit of agency when eating out with others - and using the agency you do have to their benefit - means that eating with others becomes not just an act of joy, but one of love as well.

Cooking for others

And that extends into your own home as well. When I started cooking for people in my teens, I thought that hosting was a way of channelling other people’s attention into something you were good at; put another way, it was about being the person making their day slightly better. The best thing about getting older from a cooking perspective is realising that this was an unhelpful framing for two reasons. First, having people over for dinner is not an occasion that the rest of your life stops to facilitate. It’s something that you do alongside emptying the bins, replying to emails, paying the TV licence and booking trains to see your granny. Get them fed. You do not have the time (and your friends do not have the patience) to make every single dinner you make for others a massive performance.

Second, and more crucially, neither do your friends. It has taken me years of hosting on and off (and six months of doing it consistently) to realise that friends do not give up precious evenings to make conversation with your sweaty back while you stir a risotto. While I can’t emulate Olly Rowe’s excellent advice about being ready an hour ahead of time, anything you can do ahead of time to ensure you can actually make hosting about your friends, rather than about your tortured culinary efforts, is worth it. The reason that dinner parties become such a locus of stress in the popular imagination (and why shows like Come Dine With Me are so popular) is because it’s a massive over-engineering of the simple, repetitive task of feeding oneself. To make matters worse, your twenties are the time in your life when you’ve got least experience in the kitchen and your job, your horrible landlord, your overbearing parents etc. etc. all make you feel like things just happen to you and you’re powerless to resist. If you’re not careful, hosting others joins the litany of things for which you demand pity and understanding from your peers, rather than a precious opportunity to do precisely as you please and make someone else happy in the process. The house-party bores wanging on about how late they have to stay at work become dinner-host bores fretting about how the onions caught on the bottom of the pan and ruined the sauce (this was me, repeatedly, in both instances).

So what can you do to enjoy cooking for others? Well, you lay the foundations through what I’ve set out: learn what you like by exploring widely, learn what you are capable of and expand it by practising, and learn what your mates and loved ones actually care about when it comes to food. The main thing is that you recognise the choices available and make them thoughtfully. The things that make hosting easier tend to be trade-offs, not technical feats. You are more than capable of sorting out a semifreddo or lemon tart the night before, it just means saying no to the work pub trip. Maybe don’t make a flash new recipe for that person you fancy the first time they come over. If you really want warm fresh bread for a group picnic, you might have to skip parkrun. These choices are uncomfortable, rather than unmanageable, as so many early adulthood choices are. But there’s no better place to get used to them than the kitchen. If you can own your choices there, then you and your friends will eat better for it.

A worked example

I guess what I’m trying to say is the same as lots of people - Jane Austen, David Foster Wallace, Jemima Kirke - have said about being in your twenties: constant fixation on your own lack of capability is exhausting. Feeding yourself is an area of your young adult life where the control really is yours, but making the most of that is up to you. Learning what you can and will eat is something you have to put effort into learning - effort that’s not beyond you, but which does require conscious choice. By the time you get to my age, the habits you’ve built up around food will be more or less set for life, and they may well be serving others - a spouse, a child, adoring friends, a team you lead - as well. For that reason, if for no other, I think it’s worth getting stuck into learning about food now. And when you move to London in September, you can come over and I’ll show you how to make a chicken pie. In the meantime, here’s how I’m planning to sort dinner for my friend Hetty this evening.

12:30pm: It’s a work-from-home Friday, so I can sort pudding out now (though I should really have done it last night). Blend some of the delicious mangoes from my local Indian supermarket with a splash of tequila (this turned out to be too much), the zest and juice of a lime and caster sugar to taste. Pour into a tin and freeze for a sorbet.

3:15pm: Use a break between calls to text my mum for a shortbread recipe. She replies instantly. I make a bit of a Horlicks of the dough but it only takes five minutes. Chill in fridge.

5pm: Roll shortbread rounds in sugar, bake for ten mins or so, curse self for not doing so earlier.

5:45pm: Down tools and get started on a fish curry. Do my mise en place first: three shallots (could be onions - I just have these around), four or five cloves of garlic, a thumb-sized piece of finely-sliced ginger and a de-seeded chilli dug from the tub of aromatics I keep in my freezer for emergencies, and a punnet of halved cherry tomatoes. 6:05pm: Set the onions to soften in some ghee over a pretty low heat while looking up a vaguely sensible fish curry recipe, settling on this one but pulling a few more spices (garam masala, madras curry powder, kashmiri chilli) out of the cupboard. Quickly nip downstairs to take bins out. Girlfriend arrives as I’m letting myself back in; she kindly offers to change the tablecloth and lay the table. Add other aromatics once back upstairs and cook until fragrant.

6:20pm: Decide at the last minute I’m going to add a squeeze of tomato paste to the pan, which I cook off for a couple of minutes before throwing in the tomatoes and a good couple of pinches of salt, plus the spices. Realise I want to deglaze but don’t have any fish stock. Bung a veg stock pot in a mug and use that, then add the coconut milk. Bring to a boil; reduce to a simmer.

6:40pm: Friend is slightly late, so rest of stock goes in to make sure the sauce isn’t too dry. Have trimmed some green beans while waiting for her, which now go in a frying pan with a blob of ghee. Turn oven on low and shove a few plates in there. Girlfriend is sorting drinks. After green beans have had a minute, add a tiny splash of water and stick an ill-fitting lid on top so they steam, digging some crispy onions out of the cupboard to top them.

6:50pm: Hetty arrives. Plop a piece of hake in for each of us, having found them on a Nectar discount yesterday. While they’re poaching, use the green bean pan for frozen parathas. Fridge making odd buzzing sound. Resolve to sort in morning.

7: Serve up. Green beans not the most interesting or plentiful and briefly regret not sticking some rice on, but people seem happy.

7:50ish: Pudding - sorbet barely set owing to tequila, shortbread underwhelming, but Hetty is happily gossipping from her job in theatre.

9:50: Hetty leaves. Wash up, clean down, briefly contemplate hoovering but am mindful of the seven-year-old upstairs and the dog next door. Add salt to grumpy dishwasher. Check to see if fridge has sorted itself out - it hasn’t.

See, Charlie? Not that hard.

All best

W

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1. Subs’ bench:

   1. Apron

   2. Bench scraper

   3. Can opener

   4. Paring knife

   5. Knife steel

   6. Kitchen shears

   7. Masher

If you’ve spent any time looking at food on social media in the UK in the last few years, a very particular sort of creator will have clouded your algorithm at one point or another. Alongside breathless PR girlies’ reviews of London openings and regional chippies’ day-in-the-life POVs, it feels like quite a lot of the food being made and/or talked about on TikTok and Instagram falls into a category I call British Blokecore.

You know the sort of guy I’m talking about. A subset of what Clive Martin termed the Normans in 2025, they’re jocular men in their late twenties and early thirties who gurgle over noodles and pie. Their flats all seem to have huge amounts of natural light and tasteful ceramics. They wear five-panel caps indoors. They have several very small tattoos. They love Margate. Oisin Rogers seems to baptise a new cohort of them every month.

At the centre of the British Blokecore Extended Universe is a sweaty core of zillennial Default Males documenting their encounters with the hype-heavy pizza or tacos du jour and/or attempting to cook such things at home. Individually, they seem kind of harmless. It’s hard to get that vexed about any one smiley bloke’s two-minute pad thai or pork belly, even if it’s not going to set the world alight. But taken as a whole, I think they speak to something bigger and more insidious about the UK’s food landscape. They all cook and eat the same stuff, they all have the same clothes and the same shit moustache, they’re all either in Manchester or London and they all operate with unwavering, greedy enthusiasm about basically all the food and drink they encounter. In short, they don’t seem to be doing or saying anything that exciting. So why do they have so much traction?

I think British Blokecore can be pinned down to a few key characteristics that tie all these men together and explain their ubiquity. In this piece, I’m going to try to lay out some of British Blokecore’s defining features, why I think it’s got such sticking power, and why its dominance feels a bit weird.

The threat of cancellation

Amid the sea of dreck the pandemic produced, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of its more enduring content legacies have been food and exercise, particularly among male audiences. In mid-2020, plenty of young men found themselves stuck at home with more time to think about these two aspects of their lifestyles, and more energy and money (in the absence of other opportunities to splurge) to devote to them. Of course, it also brought with it endless hours to spend scrolling through reams and reams of content, including pointed critiques of more privileged parts of British society. Suddenly, these blokes had plenty of time to post, but their landing zone had shrunk dramatically. They couldn’t sound off about sport or live culture, which were either nonexistent or taking place in an uncanny valley of wipe-clean contrivance. Book reviews were reserved for swots or edgy types. So were hot takes on the news - their rent was mysteriously getting paid whether furloughed or not (more on this later), and they were basically healthy, happy and carefree, so righteous indignation wasn’t really their vibe. To tap into the captive audience scrolling at home, they needed something relatable, with low barriers to entry and a broad set of potential topics. This left fitness and food as two big fields where your average twentysomething British man could post stuff that might attract a following (or a chirpse) without being seen as courting controversy or parroting other crusty white guys’ views. The jocks started running. The dorks started cooking.

I think the style of British Blokecore was forged in this environment, in which the most successful posters stumbled upon a very safe topic at a febrile time and optimised their content for unimpeachable appeal. Their licence to take up space online depended on an ability to demonstrate a bit of creativity while appearing nonchalant, uncontroversial, and completely harmless. So they started exaggerating their silliness to become performatively non-threatening. They pronounced ingredients in a goofy manner, or did a dance over tasty bites, the voiceovers tinged with a boyish sense of humour but stripped of the nod-and-wink flirtatiousness of the Naked Chef for fear of appearing #problematic. They may dap up a chef as he’s putting the finishing touches on a gifted meal in a Michelin-star kitchen, but they’re far more at home eating over their sink at home or in a pub garden. In short, these guys have found a big, appealing subject, and have cottoned on to the need to be seen to be engaging with it in an easygoing, non-threatening way. And it’s as much about British Blokecore gives young men terrified of being accused of toxic masculinity a benign, meandering current to float in online and when out with their mates. Blokecore gives men of a certain age a safe and accessible set of opinions on a safe and accessible subject fed to them by safe and accessible blokes like them. It’s safety in numbers for men very serious about not being taken too seriously.

Simplicity and comfort

This please-oh-please-don’t-cancel-me attitude extends to the food these men cook and eat, which is almost uniformly comfort food. British Blokecore guys are eating huge chunks of meat with the juices running down their chin and unhitching their jaws, cobra-like, to fit them around massive handfuls of chips or pastry. Their affections extend across the adolescent male gastronomic spectrum, with sandwiches (Mondo Sandwiches, Fat Pat’s, smash burgers passim), roasts (EatingWithTod, obvs) and pubs (The Devonshire, The Marlborough with Crisp Pizza, pointless Guinness rankings) all prominent features. As far as non-Eurocentric food goes, most of what they make and eat is based on the combined menus of Wagamama, Rosa’s Thai and Dishoom, with a few blobs of gochujang smeared across for good measure. Jimi Famurewa recently argued that Manchester’s bro-food scene has got a particularly American slant, but I would disagree: the late-2010s echoes of smack barm pey wet and Onda’s viral tiramisu drawer reflect a well-rounded taste for big, comforting flavours and textures there too. Up and down the country, the tendency is clear: the boys want to be seen cooking and eating big, unfussy, satisfying dishes. This is food engineered for comfort, not refinement.

Again, this prioritisation of simplicity and comfort feels like a legacy from the pandemic, but I think it operates along two specific tracks. First, the pandemic reinforced an instinct to turn to food for comfort in desperate times. Think back to the pandemic’s viral trends: rich, homely food like sourdough loaves, banana bread and that weird baked feta pasta were everywhere. Society may have opened back up since then, but among the generations most likely to use social media, the world still seems pretty grim. In this climate, it’s no surprise that food as indulgence continues to thrive among millennials and Gen Zs (figures such as Big John the Boshfather spring to mind). Blokecore revolves around food whose sheer concentration of salt, sugar, fat and carbs means it will always seem pretty tasty, even when shoddily done, but which you’d feel absolutely sick of if you ate it for more than a day or two. It’s uncancellable cuisine, dopamine-rich food for a dopamine-rich medium. But the easy appeal of the food doesn’t explain its ubiquity in isolation.

While the food these guys are into is quite difficult to screw up, it’s also quite difficult to make it superb. Plenty of it is just mid (see my post about pub roasts). Elevating a high-floor dish like pizza or a sandwich requires quantities of time, choice ingredients, technique and judgement that it’s extremely difficult to replicate in a home kitchen and/or capture in a viral video. Jackson Boxer only does ten burgers per service at Dove because he’s the sort of sicko that refuses to compromise on a single aspect of that dish to sell more. Two-thirds of the way through a Fallow TikTok, the veal stock will go into some sort of East German torture device and out will come a demiglace you could polish your boots with. Instead of people queueing up to replicate Fergus Henderson’s Welsh rarebit, a masterpiece of craft and care, we get men chopping up giant burritos with a mail-order sword.

Since British Blokecore’s appeal rests on appearing fun and relatable, anything that centres on delicate technique or harder-to-handle ingredients risks alienating an audience hooked on the instant gratification that these men are trying to provide for their followings. So you get LagomChef chucking this and that into a curry clad in his jimjams, or Ben Lippett deep-frying something to go with beers in his back garden. To take a very simple example, you hardly ever see these guys cooking with wet fish. British Blokecore is almost like the gastronomic equivalent of AI slop, food that scans countless iterations of something recognisable and delicious to produce an approximation that’s kind of fine, but unmistakably worse than a version made with skill and patience. Born in a pandemic environment when people couldn’t go to a restaurant and eat a nice meal, British Blokecore rests on facsimiles of beloved or innovative dishes that people can consume greedily with a minimum of criticality and imagination. In fact, I’d venture that most people consume only the content and the opinions, with little interest in attempting the cooking (when did any of us last cook something from a Blokecore video?) or seeking out the groundbreaking ur-dish (shout out to Angus Colwell for doing just that at Chez Bruce). The real worry is that despite seeing more and more of this sort of self-referential content, and its inability to genuinely create beyond its training data becoming ever clearer, demand for its comforts doesn’t seem to be slowing.

It’s a class thing

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people doing all this failure-averse cooking and eating seem to be cut from similar cloth. In Lone Scherfig’s film The Riot Club, there’s a telling scene early on where a young toff’s older brother is revealed to have lost his job at Deutsche Bank. The reassurance to his aghast friends, played for laughs, is that he’s going to ‘start a business doing street food at festivals and shit. You know, ‘really good burgers’’. The food industry acting as a refuge for British failsons in search of gritty authenticity has an illustrious history, and the ubiquity of British Blokecore owes more than a little to the easy charm of men your mum would either describe as ‘well brought up’ (if they were your mates) or ‘posh’ (if they were not).

The backgrounds these guys have aren’t a huge surprise, but it does bear repeating a few of the things that make the ‘east London has got that juice’ meme feel like a slightly tragic documentary. Topjaw interviewed Rishi Sunak on Downing Street and then pretended it never happened. Thomas Straker’s dad was second-in-command of the SAS. Bad Boy Pizza Society’s founder went to Hampton. Julius Roberts often cooks on his parents’ fifty acres in Dorset. EatingWithTod’s whole schtick reeks of a bloke who was bullied at a fee-paying school. It’s no wonder that even the tough-talking Manc guys are doing collabs with Waitrose.

I think this is what puts the British in British Blokecore. For one thing, there’s been a dramatic decline in the financial margin available in Britain for mucking about with food, which makes it increasingly the preserve of a certain demographic. The financial headwinds facing the hospitality industry are brutal, particularly in London, and whether you’re cooking, eating, drinking or reviewing, the industry has got more expensive and risky in short order. In these circumstances, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that there is a particular sticking power to boys brought up with the sort of money, charm and connections that can look a lot like resilience at first glance.

What’s more, the margin for being a bolshy food guy in the post-pandemic world has shrunk not only economically, but also culturally. The FT ran a piece about ‘chef bros’, lumping British influencers like Whatwillycook in with North American cooks like Matty Matheson, Anthony Bourdain and The Bear’s fictional lead Carmy Berzatto, but I think that this is a category error. All of those guys are vocal about the fact that if it weren’t for their cooking skill, they’d be in a gutter somewhere. Kitchen Confidential is exciting to read precisely because the stage and players of Bourdain’s 1990s New York are pretty nasty. Going back thirty or forty years, this was true of British chefs too. Being desperate enough to take risks was what upstarts like Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay built their careers on, their arrogance backed by genius execution. By contrast, British Blokecore influencers are largely the sort of nice young men who know better than to stick their heads above the parapet. The food they make and eat might be ‘banging’ or ‘top scran’ or ‘dead good actually’, but they’re never the first to highlight an unheralded spot or use a technique you’ve not come across before.

It all feels like such a waste of resource. Look at Nigella: she was hardly a scrappy up-and-comer, but when she stuck a gammon in two litres of coca-cola, people sat up and took notice. By contrast, these men are loath to stick their necks out in their own kitchens, let alone anyone else’s. Unlike their foreign cousins or their less privileged predecessors, they never end up needing to stake their reputation on a recipe or an opinion, partly because of the paralysing fear of Being A Man Who Is Visibly Wrong Online, but partly because their worth’s never been in doubt. Failure is not a possibility, and therefore neither is innovation. British Blokecore is too rich to fail but too soft to sustain.

Blokecore-proofing food

It would be pointless to deny the similarities between me and some of British Blokecore’s biggest exponents (some of my best friends are pasta machines etc etc), and they don’t seem to be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. Neither do I want to disavow all the food they eat and talk about - a good pie is every bit as delicious as these guys so gleefully claim, and Tom Usher has written a great piece about how bad-mouthing these guys and their food is an exercise in self-hatred. But without going all ‘people are dying Kim’ about it, there’s something that rankles about the homogeneity of these influencers’ voices when the food culture that they dip into at leisure is under threat on multiple fronts.

There are plenty of people in British food using their platforms to stick up for the youngest, the worst paid and those with least job security at a time of hardship within the industry. In general, they’re doing so with more skin in the game than the Blokecore lot. In so doing, they risk the sort of censure, isolation and jeopardy that these men tend to swerve. It’s not like these guys are using their clout and connections to help out their neighbourhood suya joints. Instead, they continue to beckon twentysomething men towards the same Zone 1 and 2 spots - some good, many very average - and iterations of recipes never bad enough to complain about but never good enough to be clever. The world has moved on massively from the pandemic, but British Blokecore refuses to budge: you could drop a Topjaw or WhatWillyCook video from 2021 into feeds today and it wouldn’t look an inch out of place. So if these men are not using the platform to benefit others and they’re too scared to do anything innovative, then what is the point of British Blokecore?

While British Blokecore food and the way it’s discussed may be engineered to be uncancellable, I’d rather cook something nourishing for my mates than watch another round of blokey backslapping over some turbo-dank burger in a Marylebone pub. So a few weeks ago, I did just that for my friend Benjy.

Benjy’s shakshuka

Benjy is a pescetarian, which immediately makes him a pretty non-Blokecore bloke. He’s thoughtful, opinionated and shy, and doesn’t make a huge amount of time to cook for himself at home. I wanted to make him something he could replicate at home on a Sunday night without much difficulty for meals that don’t leave him slumped over his desk mid-afternoon. This is the gist of it: it’s not by any means an especially authentic shakshuka, and it’s so simple it barely even qualifies as a recipe. Still, it kept us going while we talked about his girlfriend’s medical career and how we had missed spending time with each other lately.

1. I made this for a Saturday brunch, so I had the time to toast a couple of teaspoons of cumin,coriander and fennel seeds until aromatic in the big Dutch oven I’d be using. I bashed those in a pestle and mortar with some salt and pepper, then got a couple of chopped onions and bell peppers sweating down in some olive oil. When they were translucent, I added about four cloves of garlic and a sliced chilli, then the spice mix until toasty and fragrant. Then I squeezed in about two tablespoons of tomato paste and cooked it all off until brick-red. If I’d had some cherry tomatoes to hand, I would have halved them and cooked them off at this point too, adding a bit of extra salt.

2. In went two cans of chopped tomatoes, which I rinsed out with some vegetable stock that got added to the pan and used to deglaze the base. I added a tin of butterbeans, drained and rinsed, at this point too - I like adding them early so that they break down just slightly and add some body to the sauce. I then left the sauce to simmer for about twenty minutes while I chopped up some cucumber for a simple salad and some parsley and feta to garnish the shakshuka.

3. When the sauce had reduced by about a fifth and had a nice stickiness round the edges, I hollowed out some divots and cracked in four eggs (had the pan been bigger this would have been six). I stuck on a lid, turned the heat down low and set a timer for eight minutes, in which time I gently toasted some pine nuts in a dry pan and put some flatbreads from my local Iraqi supermarket in the oven to warm up.

4. With about a minute to go, I scattered the feta and parsley over the eggs, stuck the lid back on to let it all meld, got the flatbreads out of the oven, sprinkled the pine nuts over the shakshuka and served it all with a jar of leftover pickled shallots and some sort of cucumber salad. First cut of mise en place to first mouthful in half an hour. No burgers were smashed in the making of this brunch.

When I was about sixteen, two things happened in quick succession. First, my social circle expanded rapidly. Throughout my teenage years, I spent my lunchtimes and evenings doing activities with Rushmore-adjacent names like ‘Edward Thomas Society’ and ‘Motley Croon’. By the time I hit sixth form, our teachers had decided that we were fit to do more of this sort of thing with kids from other schools, meaning more joint plays, shared concerts, and early attempts to attend and host house parties.

The second development was a direct upshot of negotiating this new set of relationships and activities without sleeping more or studying less. In short order, I developed pretty bad social anxiety. Having blundered my way through social occasions for most of my childhood, I now found myself blindsided by the infrequent but dreadful certainty that whatever I said or did next in conversation would be wrong and stupid. Suddenly, I wouldn’t know what to do with my hands. Words would die in my throat. My eyes would fill with tears without any warning. I became good at slipping away unnoticed to deal with this quietly and invisibly, gasping for breath over bathroom sinks or folding my shaking body into the corners of empty changing-rooms. You can imagine how well an all-boys school handled this at a point in the early 2010s when Men’s Mental Health^TM was barely a glint in the Madri man’s eye, and my parents were equally nonplussed.

The solution, as it turned out, was right under their noses. For as long as I could remember, my mum had spent multiple evenings a week baking for colleagues, relatives, or her children’s classmates. When I was very small, I thought this was a purely recreational endeavour: she was, by her own account, ‘terminally dull’, so baking seemed a good way of engaging with her children and colleagues. As I lurched through the pitchy terrors of my later teenage years, though, I started to see it in different terms. When you feel like you have very little to offer at social occasions, then providing food is a good way to avoid feeling like a complete spare part.

And so it was for me. It didn’t take long to establish that showing up to gatherings and risking a panicked exit was a less awful option than not showing up and facing my friends’ questions on Monday morning. With that in mind, and having spent a decade and a half absorbing my mum’s technique by osmosis, I began to spend more time in the kitchen, and to arrive at gatherings with something I’d made earlier.

Even fifteen years ago, the idea of positioning food as a source of calm was not an original one. Indeed, the first recipes I can remember cooking placed relaxation and stress-free outputs at the heart of the recipe. Nigella’s lemon meringue cake, which I remember making for a party as a teenager, describes itself as an ‘easy option’ compared to ‘the disappointment and self-loathing’ she associates with lemon meringue pie. My Facebook feed groaned with high-speed videos of sheet-pan dinner recipes. The back episodes of Barefoot Contessa I watched in school holidays felt like an endless procession of make-ahead delights to sustain Ina Garten’s idyllic afternoons with her friends. But these visions of stress-proof cooking all started from the same premise: that the cooking is the tricky bit, and sharing it with your mates is the release.

For my teenage self, nothing could have felt further from the truth. Cooking - baking in particular - rewarded precision and diligence, just like schoolwork. If I followed a recipe carefully, then the output would be pretty predictable. By contrast, the vagaries of anxiety meant that plans with friends could have me walking home from the last tube feeling ten feet tall or tearfully calling my parents to come and pick me up before I’d even got through the front door. But the more I cooked, the better and more confident I got. I learned how to adjust or rescue recipes in a way that felt much more straightforward than the fraught social interactions of late adolescence: as a teenager, a curdled cake batter and getting swerved by the girl you fancy will both make you feel like an idiot, but only one can be remedied with a spoonful of flour and a quick mix. It was also a way to try to show friends I cared about them in a way that felt less stilted than deep and sincere chats. If someone mentioned they’d had a great crab mac and cheese on holiday last year, I’d invite them over and try to replicate it, and I’d regularly pipe in-jokes about my friends onto the birthday cakes I made for them. And if all else failed, then cooking served as a distraction. There’s simply no time to get in one’s own head about a party when you’ve got to get a batch of sausage rolls done between a football match and history homework. Likewise, if you need to ice a tray of cupcakes when you get to the function, then that staves off talking to people for a good fifteen minutes when you arrive, and gives you something to talk about (other than oneself, crucially) when you can’t dodge it any more.

And so the pattern was set. I made Yule log as a Christmas peace offering to testy teachers and decorated sheet cakes for post-production parties. The day after my A Levels finished, I baked 350 petits fours for my leavers’ ball; the day of my first university tutorial, I made a tray of apricot flapjacks. I did pre-match pasta for university football teams and late-night grilled cheese for internship peers. I showed up for pandemic park dates with Ottolenghi steak salads and introduced myself to girlfriends’ families with rhubarb creme brûlée. On and on it went through my late teens and into twenties, the amount of time spent in the kitchen prior to social events directly tracking my anxiety levels. I still can’t imagine going a week in a new job without bringing something in for colleagues.

A recent exchange

I still get anxious. It’s much less frightening now: I make a decent fist of managing triggers like tiredness and stress, and things like therapy and medication help. Indeed, this hosting project is helping me get better at not hiding behind the food I make for friends, and forcing me to speak to them without the crutch of the menu when the plates are cleared away. But when I scroll through social media or flick through weekend supplements, the way in which cooking’s relationship with mental health is depicted still feels pretty similar to how it did when I was learning to cook in the early 2010s. Food is something you either make in photogenic abundance for a candlelit supper club of thirty well-dressed strangers, or it’s an ASMR solo endeavour in a monstera-fringed still life. Since I first learned what my anxiety was, mental health of all shapes and sizes has become a much more openly-discussed subject, and cooking is just one of the many activities that it is deemed possible to do ‘mindfully’. But sanitizing how cooking helps people cope with anxiety seems to me to undermine the very mechanism by which it does so.

As this piece reminds us, poor mental health is frequently a loud, inconvenient, ugly and undignified affair. In the case of anxiety, though, showing yourself that you can make something tasty, that even when choked by tears you can make yourself useful, is one of the most irrefutable ways I’ve found to quieten the screaming self-criticism it brings. In other words, if you find yourself looking at a video of someone dewy-skinned and softly-lit content entitled ‘cooking to unwind’ and thinking that they don’t look that wound up to begin with, you aren’t alone. And no, perhaps a recipe marked ‘brownies so easy and reliable you can have them done and boxed in under an hour even if you spend half of that time crying’ isn’t particularly algorithm-friendly. But I guarantee that if you have a recipe like that you can rely on, and you reach for it when you next feel anxiety crawl up your spine, your world won’t feel any worse once you’ve cooked it.

I am deeply impressed by the people who can make cooking look relaxed and mindful. That’s not me. But every so often, I wonder if the people meditating on the swoop of a Scandi-designed spatula through a mixing bowl know the twitchy joys of fussing over a cake’s icing in an unfamiliar kitchen, or the fastidious planning that goes into making an outlandish dinner for friends. If either of these sounds like how food relieves anxiety for you, then you need one of the following.

For strangers - chocolate Guinness cake

1. Nigella’s chocolate Guinness cake recipe is reliable, and also grants you the mercy of a leftover half-can of Guinness if you want a little something to settle the stomach. However, her cream cheese icing is too runny. The Good Food version is better here. Make that while the cake’s in the oven, and stick it in a tupperware or jam jar or some such.

2. You now have to contend with transporting the cake. I always find that lugging a cake tin about is cumbersome, and if I’ve left the house late (which I usually have), such things tend to combine poorly with a brisk Lime bike ride to a train station. A shoe box lined with baking parchment (with aforementioned vessel of icing wedged in the corner) is robust, discreet, tote bag-compliant and disposable when you reach your destination.

3. Upon arrival, greet your host and immediately ask if you could borrow a butter knife to ice the cake. Your host will, of course, be thrilled you’ve brought such delights, and oblige immediately. You can then flash a winning smile at the guests making idle small talk in the kitchen and disregard them completely while you ice your cake. This can take as long as you like, and can be done in an unobtrusive corner of the room. You also won’t be interrupted, and you have something to do with your hands while your nerves settle.

4. Having iced the cake, you now have a visually striking and delicious prop to discuss that deflects attention from you for a little while longer. There is much to talk about: how chocolate Guinness cake is so good (the tang of the cream cheese icing and the dark notes of the cocoa and Guinness), the recipe you chose (Nigella’s, obviously, but not her icing), the benefits of using a shoe box for cake transport, and so on and so forth.

5. You are now free to stand quietly in the corner listening to people marvelling at your creation, find someone equally anxious-looking to talk to, fetch yourself a drink from the side-table full of miscellaneous grog, or just quietly slip away. You’ve made yourself useful.

For friends - steamed game pudding

1. At least the day before, go to the butcher and ask if he has any kid, because you’re going to make this recipe from Jeremy Lee (having heard from your friend that he’d quite like to try a homemade suet pudding). The butcher doesn’t stock kid, obviously, because that would be insane. Instead, get about a kilo of venison, pork shoulder, braising steak, or something similar. On your way home, get a roll of the name-brand kitchen foil at the big supermarket, because the cheap stuff will let you down at the crucial moment in this one, and spend as little time as possible getting a pudding basin (they are largely indistinguishable from one another).

2. Take your time with the braise, which you should make the night before. Do the mise en place properly and systematically; saute the mirepoix slowly to avoid colouring; brown the meat in chunks, because otherwise your casserole dish will scorch. You can afford to be a little loose with measurements - a whole bottle of wine ought to do it, and just add enough stock to cover the mix - but you can take your time assembling and tying up a bouquet garni nice and neat or cutting out a cartouche for the pan. You have two or more hours while it cooks in which you are bound to be in the kitchen to stir intermittently, so you can run over topics of conversation for tomorrow in your head if it makes you feel a bit calmer. Leave your braise to cool at room temperature overnight.

3. Make your pastry early the morning of the party. Suet comes in 200g boxes and Lee’s recipe yields barely enough to make a robust base for your pudding, so I suggest scaling the recipe up and substituting the egg yolk volume with extra milk (or just beating two yolks together and using most of them). If you want to feel cheffy and have it lying around, you can stir some thyme leaves through the dough for a pretty effect. You want a slightly wetter dough than you might think - it should clump together in a ball with no cracks. Set it to rest in the fridge.

4. You want to construct your pudding about four hours before you want to eat, because it will almost certainly be more fiddly than you anticipate. This requires total concentration and is really the last bit of difficult work that catering this meal will involve. Cut the two sheets of foil and sheet of parchment out before you get your hands all sticky. You’ll need to trim off a sort of triangular section when you lift the pastry into the buttered dish so it fits the basin’s shape; you then roll this cut-out bit and any other offcuts into the lid, which needs to be crimped tightly. Set it to steam two and a half hours or so before you want to eat. Peel some potatoes/trim some veg in the meantime before guests arrive.

5. Make some mash and veg when you’ve got half an hour left. This should require a grand total of about eight minutes of hands-on time, meaning you’ll be forced to chat to these people who do, in fact, love you irrespective of the food you serve them. If you’re still nervous, make a gravy - onions, butter, flour, sherry, stock, bit of soy sauce, done. Likewise, the pudding now just needs to be removed from the pot and turned out (with confidence - pastry, like horses, can smell fear) onto a warm plate. Take it to the table and watch your friends’ eyes grow wide with wonder. Don’t caveat that this is ‘not your best’ or ‘a bit of an experiment’. Sit down and eat. And when you’re ready, speak.

Seeing this response pop up time and again accentuated the low-flying despair that time on a dating app entails. This is because pub roasts are, almost without exception, bleak. The meat sits out for hours under heat lamps, drying to a uniform grey. The same treatment turns the Yorkshire pudding to dusty filaments in the mouth. The potatoes are cooked at too low a temperature, meaning the crisp gold sheen you crave is replaced by a gummy brown edge. The veg is pitiful. The gravy is unidentifiable. And, once you throw in a drink and a microwaved sticky toffee pudding, you’ll be lucky to get change for £40. So why is it so popular among this demographic, and why is it a preference young singletons seem so keen to advertise?

The instinctive answer to this question is that liking a Sunday roast (and a long walk, for that matter) is pretty unimpeachable. A Sunday roast is filling, versatile, convivial and an excuse to explore. In other words, broadcasting to potential partners that you like a roast is a straightforward way to reassure them that you don’t number among the abundant freaks who haunt online dating platforms.

But on its own, that explanation doesn’t quite get to the ubiquity of the response. Even if professing one’s love of going for a roast is a reliable indicator of being Chill And Normal^TM, it’s odd to see single people going out to bat en masse for such a hit-and-miss dining experience. I think the reason Hinge users reach for it in such numbers is not only because it feels like a safe bet, but also because it speaks to what single people in London feel like they’re missing, and the hole they’re trying to fill (to coin a phrase).

For young adults in 2026, being single in London is expensive, and for those who choose to live alone, it is also cramped. It’s become something of a truism to observe that modern twentysomethings would crawl over broken glass for the expansive open-plan Borough kitchen so misused by Bridget Jones or Will Thacker’s brief saunter to work in Notting Hill. With young people priced out of square footage and green space on their own, the roast-and-walk one-two punch isn’t just a shared pang of yearning that Hinge users hope gives them common ground with potential matches. It’s also a nod to what they’re trying to build with a future partner.

The proper binmenism underpinning the roast obsession speaks to a desire for a decent, secure home, having time and energy to spare to get the meal right, and loved ones with whom to share the cooking and eating. Brilliant though the Sunday offerings of the Waterman Arms or the Duke of Cambridge might be, they pale in comparison to the emotional heft of the cauliflower cheese that redeemed your granny’s still-bleating roast lamb, or your dad’s ability to yank the pork joint out of the oven seconds before the crackling went up in smoke. Indeed, just as in any relationship, these foibles of the home-cooked roast are among their most affectionately-regarded characteristics. But when an IRL meet-cute is as unthinkable as producing a full roast dinner in the clapped-out oven of a Zone 9 shoebox flatshare, it’s no wonder that singletons spend years of their life in search of an algorithmically-driven shortcut to the perfect version of each. Ultimately, the paradox of the pub-roast-and-walk response is that in seeking authenticity and shared respite from the horrors of millennial London life, it consigns its authors to a doom loop of £6.50 side orders of Paxo stuffing and eye contact-free clomps up Primrose Hill.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this is because neither my friends nor I are in a position to do a roast brilliantly at home just yet, but the hankering persists. A roast is a bloody hard thing to get right. The meat needs to rest, but you want it to stay warm while you do the potatoes, which benefit from a really long stint at a high temperature; getting the gravy and anything but the simplest boiled veg to finish up at the right time together requires three hands and two brains at a bare minimum; you may then want to do some sort of baked pudding, which will need to go in as soon as you sit down for your mains (and if you’re heating up a sauce to go with it, that’s the tail end of your mains accounted for); and unless you’re blessed with multiple sinks and a truly enormous crockery drawer, you probably need to wash up as you go. So if you want to make a roast work at our stage of life, you’ve got two options: make it differently, or secure space and assistance. I’ve done the former recently and I’m about to do the latter. Here’s how.

Za’atar roast chicken with carrots, butterbeans and tahini dressing

I made this for my friends Chen and Ianthe, and their one-year-old daughter Susie, three weeks ago. They were coming off the back of a horrible night’s sleep and a brutal workweek (Chen’s a doctor and Ianthe’s a teacher. Susie is a full-time menace.) Chen and Ianthe are great hosts, but having an energetic (and grabby) baby with an aversion to sleeping through the night and a kitchen under reconstruction means that a roast isn’t coming out of their kitchen any time soon. Likewise, I was flying solo for this one, so I wasn’t going to go to the trouble of all the trimmings, but roasting a chicken and doing some easy bits with it was a good way to get the set-piece satisfaction without the slow-motion train smash of the whole nine yards. A recipe for quantities of this is probably less useful than a broad order of proceedings, which ran as follows:

1. Fluke up the oven to 200C/180 fan.

2. Sort the chicken out first. Pat it dry, salt it liberally, and stick it on a roasting rack if you’ve got one in a roasting tin (if you haven’t, use the onion and garlic - unpeeled - that I mention below as a kind of trivet by slicing into thick rings and resting the chicken on that). Mix some olive oil (not the posh stuff, it’ll burn too easily), a couple of nice big splodges of za’atar, a bit of lemon zest and juice (use about half a lemon - we’ll use the rest of the lemon later) and some fresh thyme if you’ve got it kicking about. Shove an onion and some garlic in the chicken cavity, daub your chicken with your za’atar mix (should be the consistency of a loose dressing, not a spice paste) and put it in the oven. Set a timer for 35mins.

3. Meanwhile, you’re going to prep the butterbeans. This is embarrassingly easy. Get a jar or can of butterbeans, rinse them, pat them dry and toss them in a bowl with some olive oil and salt. You can add whatever you feel like at this point - a bit of chilli powder, some paprika, some sumac, up to you. Set that aside.

4. Sort out the carrots. Peel and chop as many as you reckon you can fit in a single layer on the base of the chicken pan into batons the size of your grandad’s fingers. Toss with a good squeeze of honey and some olive oil and salt. Add a shake of unsmoked paprika if you feel like it. (This carrot and butterbean arrangement is derived from this recipe, and you can make the nice parsley-sesame salsa thing if you’re so inclined, but it’s not a dealbreaker).

5. If you’ve still got time before your timer goes off, you could usefully do the dressing. This is just a couple of big spoonfuls of tahini, whisked until it’s got past the tiresome cement stage, with a dollop of yoghurt, a squeeze of honey and the remainder of that lemon’s zest and juice with some salt and pepper. Set that aside.

6. Your timer’s probably going off about now. Stick the carrots underneath the chicken within the roasting tin. Put the butterbean sheet tray in there too. Close the oven and put a timer on for 35mins. Grab a drink; say hello to guests; lay the table; fuss about the flowers; nibble some crisps; make the aforementioned salsa if you so please. You’ve got the time.

7. When the timer goes, yank the chicken out and see if the butterbeans want another few minutes, possibly at a slightly higher temperature or higher up the oven - you want them brown and crispy. Shroud the chicken in some foil if you’ve got a particularly draughty kitchen. Once everything’s out of the oven, turn it off and stick some flatbreads in there to warm through. In the three minutes it’ll take them to do so, shake a bag of salad into a nice bowl, toss through the carrots, add the butterbeans and drizzle the dressing over it artfully.

8. Assembly: we did something like flatbread-toum (or sauce of your preference)-salad-chicken in a kind of freeform open flatbread-as-plate situation, but do it however you like. You could also turn the salad into a couscous salad very happily.

The full roast

I do a full roast for friends when I go away with about 15-20 of them once a year in February. It’s a real laugh, but it’s only made possible by the multiple ovens of whatever holiday rental we descend upon and various mates mucking in at crucial moments. This year I’m doing chicken, but previously I’ve done pork crackling joint, slow-cooked lamb shoulder and beef short ribs. This is roughly how I intend to play it for a Sunday night dinner.

1. Before leaving London: on Thursday evening I’ll make a sage and onion stuffing and some bread sauce. I’ll probably just follow a couple of Good Food recipes for these, barring better suggestions, and watch some YouTube videos so I get a feel for what I’m looking for in each case. Those will go in Tupperwares to come down to Herefordshire with me.

2. Sunday morning: obviously there needs to be a warlike quantity of puddings to eat after the roast, so I’ll prep a cherry and almond crumble. Frozen cherries with a good sprinkle of sugar and lemon juice, some sensible-seeming crumble recipe from online, ensuring to incorporate ground almonds, a mixture of light brown soft and caster sugar, and eschewing oats. Stick that in the fridge.

3. Sunday mid-afternoon: basic mise en place. Peel and chop vast quantities of potatoes into thirds, submerging them in water. Sort out onion, carrot and garlic trivets for the chickens. Get the chickens out of their packaging and let them come to room temperature. Stick as much tenderstem broccoli as I can in steamers or saucepans.

4. Sunday early evening - 1hr40 before eating: set potatoes to boil. Season the chickens, add a bit of butter or olive oil under/on top of the skin and get them in a hot oven. In the same oven (or ideally a separate, even hotter oven), start heating up a pan (or more than one) with oil/goose fat for the roast potatoes. I’ve now got about half an hour to make a sticky toffee pudding (double quantity of the Nigella recipe) and set it aside.

5. 1hr10 before eating: get the potatoes drained, roughed up and into the hot oil. Rotate the chickens if feeling ambitious. Boil as many kettles as you can get your hands on. Neck something strong.

6. 50mins before eating: stick the stuffing into some sort of ovenproof dish and wedge it in with the chickens. Give the potatoes a shake. Make some chicken stock up for the gravy. Dump the bread sauce into a pan. Pour boiling water into your intended gravy jug.

7. 25mins before eating: grab anyone who looks like they’re at a loose end. Take the stuffing out, take the chickens out and stick them on a tray or something where they can stay warm in a low oven along with the roast veg. Get some water on to boil again. Decant all the juices into one pan, add a good shake of flour, cook that off on the stovetop for a few minutes, add some wine and cook that out, then add some wine/sherry, cook that out, add the stock and stir constantly. Gravy is done and it’s probably taken you about 10mins, which means your potatoes are done (keep the oven on) and you need to do your veg.

8. 10mins before eating: make sure your chicken oven has cooled down a bit, because your crumble and STP are about to go in there. Meanwhile, shove some frozen Yorkshire puddings in the potato-roasting oven, boil your veg, and start getting your chicken out. Decant gravy if you haven’t before. Once veg is boiled, drain instantly, add olive oil, salt, pepper and lemon juice.

9. 2mins before eating: get everything out and put your two puddings in. Plate up.

10. 30mins or so after sitting down: puddings done. Fin.

If you’re looking at either of the above and thinking that your kitchen seems much too small and lonely to achieve any of the above and you’d far rather go to a pub and let them take care of all the hard work, I get it. Even my most domesticated friends are still some way off having the sort of kitchens (or having had the sort of practice) that makes a roast seem like the effortless assemblage that punctuate childhood memories. But if (Sunscreen-style) you’ll tolerate one exhortation from me, give yourself a chance. Stick a chicken in the oven this weekend. Make a salad with the leftovers and offer some to the fit winger you play five-a-side with. Resist the urge to apologise for the lack of crispy skin. Walk back to the tube with them. Text them when you get home. Your flirt to roast ratio is perfect.

Before Christmas, I read this piece by Amanda Litman about her family’s decision to host people every Saturday in 2025. I must have read it about two weeks before one of my quarterly efforts to host - in this case, an evening in which I produced an enormous festive ham, my nearest and dearest made ham sandwiches (or, in some cases, cut off defiant wedges of ‘cake ham’ to be consumed tout seul), and we all poled off to my local for Thursday night pub jazz. It was, as these occasions often are, characterised by seat-of-my-pants time management, barely controlled and poorly-planned outlay, and a dwindling number of lovely friends looking on with puzzlement as I sweated alone in the kitchen over an enormous piece of meat.

Litman’s dinners, however, seemed an altogether more relaxed affair. Unfazed by the needs of her own two small children or domestic and spiritual obligations, she and her husband seem to have found the exercise not just achievable, but both enjoyable and fulfilling:

Our social circle expanded dramatically. We actually made new friends! As adults! With tiny kids! A year in, there are people in my life who last year I would’ve called acquaintances and now I call friends.

It was an excellent forcing mechanism for booking quality time with people and for getting off my phone for a few hours.

We have a broader and deeper community because of this effort. Breaking bread (or tacos) with others is a tradition going back millennia for a reason: To share a meal is to share time, vulnerability, and sometimes chaos with others.

In short, while my efforts to host were sporadic, stressful and didn’t actually bring me much closer to my friends, Litman’s were reliable, relaxed and fostered community. So I decided to copy her, starting with this last weekend (10 January). In the rest of this post, I’ll try to explain why and how I want to do it.

Why do the same thing as Litman?

Although what I’m trying to do isn’t original, there are important differences in context that I think make it an interesting project for me to attempt. First, Litman is married with kids (whose routines and needs are, as her original blog points out, a major factor in why the concept appealed). I’ve got a partner who lives across town and my own place, but I don’t have kids (though an increasing number of my friends do). There’s an extent, then, to which I’m pre-empting a phase of life that Litman’s project attempts to confront, but another difference - that of her living in New York as a successful consultant and me living in London as a junior public-sector employee, and the resultant disparity in incomes - speaks to why I think it’s worth doing here. London is a fantastic city to eat out in. It is also expensive, enormous, and unreliable. Cooking more for myself (and bringing my friends along for the ride) is one of the easiest ways to have fun without spending quite a lot. Finally, as she alludes to a couple of times, Litman is Jewish, and the rhythms of Shabbat - morning shul, a home-cooked meal shared with loved ones - inflect her Saturday routine. I’m a woolly sort of Anglican, a demographic whose attitude towards hospitality is diffident in comparison to Abrahamic siblings. But with my church attendance in abeyance, trying to create some sense of community, or indeed communion, in my kitchen feels meet and right. I want to put colour in my friends’ cheeks.

Why not vlog/reel/TikTok it?

The short answer to this is that the photos and videos I take of food are enthusiastic but rubbish. The longer answer is more complicated, and pertains to how I feel about written media, being a young(ish) man, and what cooking does for me.

During lockdown, I found two outlets for creativity outside teaching: writing about education, sport, food and a few other things, and taking pictures of what I eat and drink. Though I’ve persisted with both, I’ve proved much more proficient at the former. Meanwhile, a whole ecosystem of food content creators has sprung up, with TikTok and Instagram the dominant outlets for the thousands who can make a smash burger look sexier than I ever could. So part of why I’m writing is because it’s where my (pretty modest) talents lie.

But my choice to blog this project isn’t just a function of my inability to make food look fit on Instagram. It’s also about what a predominantly visual culture is doing to the way people - particularly men - talk and act around food. James Marriott and Kit Wilson have written recently about what a barrage of short-form content, both textual and televisual, is doing to our critical faculties (and Daisy Christodoulou has also addressed it here), picking up on warnings that critics have been issuing since the eighties at least. And on social media, the collision between short-form content and a very online crisis of modern masculinity has produced a gamut of performatively non-threatening, blokey men who cannot talk about home cooking without the help of zany camera angles, emotional support moustaches and Guantanamo Bay-grade kitchen lighting.

Women like Rachel Roddy, Rebecca May Ferguson, Felicity Cloake, Ruby Tandoh and Anna Jones write about what, why and for whom they cook at home with tenderness, humour and style. Meanwhile, young men seeking to crawl away from the yawning gullet of male loneliness might want to do so by cooking for their mates. If they look online for role models, though, they will find that their choices are either Nigel Slater penning pleasant missives from his Hampstead eyrie or a self-styled Zone 4 badman called Joe in a Stussy t-shirt, who captions his videos ‘slinging bare (dan dan) noods’ but never seems to have anyone to eat them with. In much the same way that everyone is hot and no-one is horny and everyone is busy but no-one can hang, every guy out there is eating but no-one is sharing. Hosting every week and writing it up on this Substack is an attempt to move counter to this trend using two of the only skills - writing and cooking - into which I’ve channeled a few hundred hours over the last decade or so.

So what does it look like?

The plan is simple:

• I’ll cook for people at my flat every weekend when I’m in London in 2026. At present, that looks like something like 40-45 weekends, mostly Saturday evenings and Sunday lunches.

• On each occasion, I’ll do at least a main course and a side, and generally a pudding too.

• My guests will write down what we eat and talk about in a book bought for this purpose, which I’ll refer to occasionally here.

• Guests don’t have to bring anything to dinner, though they might bring a bottle of something.

• I’ll keep a record of who attends and what we ate on a spreadsheet.

• I’ll write up what I’ve learned, and maybe a couple of the better recipes I’ve cooked, at least once a month (but hopefully more frequently) on this Substack.

• I’ll cross-post what I write and eat between here and my food Instagram (but as pointed out above, please set the bar for visual content on the floor and then be prepared to dig a trench).

This last weekend, we had my girlfriend’s flatmate Katie over for dinner, and we had a sausage and butterbean casserole loosely based on this recipe. It wasn’t hard at all: brown some sausages, sweat down a mirepoix in the residual fat, fry off some garlic, squeeze in some tomato paste, deglaze with wine, slug in two cans of butterbeans and cover with stock and passata, thrown in a bouquet garni, then bake at 180C with some torn-up sourdough on top until golden brown and bubbling (25mins or so). The rainbow chard we had alongside it wilted down to almost nothing, so I’d double that next time. For pudding, we had galette des rois from Layla Bakery in Acton, about a week late for Epiphany. We talked about private tutoring, orange wine, having children, and Geography field trips. We went to bed with colour in our cheeks.

Got suggestions for who to host or what to make? Want to come over for dinner? Send me a message!

Yesterday, Bridget Phillipson made a speech on the attendance crisis. Bolstered by research from the Centre for Social Justice (the hosts of this speech) and previous work from Public First, she outlined measures to tackle the sharp jump in absences since the pandemic – including adding attendance to Ofsted’s safeguarding remit, providing universal breakfast clubs for primary children and using, er, AI to join up records for children across school, health and social services. Slipped in near the end of the package was a brief reference to language development interventions; curriculum reform soft-pedalled, in other words, just as in Labour’s ‘Breaking Down Barriers to Opportunity’ mission statement.

If this strikes you as a social policy argument being delivered by a Shadow Education Secretary, you’re not alone. After a decade and more of emphasis on teaching and learning in education policy, Labour are suggesting that the curriculum – teachers’ bread and butter – needs to be put on the back burner for a while. For the first time in years, something other than pedagogy, standards and the curriculum is being framed as the main obstacle to achievement, and the attendance crisis is a manifestation of this. Both recent reports on attendance highlight that it is rarely the quality of teaching that leads parents and carers to keep their children out of school. Instead, it is lack of support for issues adjacent to their learning, such as mental health difficulties and SEND challenges. In a striking section of the speech, Phillipson refers repeatedly to barriers that children face without touching on the curriculum (a word that features only once in the speech):

It is that wider sense in which the school system is failing. Barriers to learning. The fastest growing legacy of Tory rule.

Barriers because children haven’t come in. Barriers because children aren’t ready, that day or that year. Barriers because children haven’t slept, and can’t concentrate. Don’t succeed when they should, aren’t learning when they ought.

Barriers because the children simply aren’t well. Barriers that speak to the wider failure. The piling of expectations on schools alone, that schools alone can never meet.

I wonder if Labour realise how bold a statement this is, and how radically they’re breaking with the way that education policy has been made over the last fifteen years. Ever since Michael Gove brought Katharine Birbalsingh on stage at the Conservative Party Conference in 2010, the Tories have bet the house on teachers. In keeping with Gove’s meritocratic understanding of education, initiatives focused chiefly on how better teaching could produce better outcomes. The curriculum changed; new professional qualifications sprang up; the content of initial teacher training attracted more scrutiny. Alongside this emphasis on teaching and learning, a battery of current and former teachers have assumed positions as civil servants, political advisers, commissioners and tsars. To solve a school problem, the theory ran, you need a schoolteacher. There’s an extent to which it’s worked, too: post-pandemic PISA outcomes were less bad than in other jurisdictions, and English pedagogical expertise enjoys a global reputation. It’s no wonder Phillipson praised Gove’s ‘energy’ and ‘high standards’.

But after almost a decade and a half of this approach, Phillipson’s speech implies that Labour sees the problem differently. This speech makes a claim that the balance has swung too far away from the basic necessities, such as food, housing and mental and physical health provision, that make it possible for children to benefit from good teaching. It’s a claim I think they have ample grounds to make: although the attendance crisis provides an obvious and immediate fulcrum, the stagnation of outcomes and widening attainment gap over a longer period speak to a crisis which predated Covid. By taking this approach, Labour have attempted to get to the root of under-achievement (they liken the Tories’ Attendance Action Alliance to a ‘Coughing Control Campaign’, tackling symptom rather than cause), but they’ve created a new dilemma in the process

Unlike poor behaviour, pedagogy and progress, absenteeism, which takes place outside schools by definition, requires the intervention of experts dealing with that problem outside schools. But the scope and severity of cuts to ancillary services has not only rendered any such experts under-amplified (or, indeed, nonexistent), it has also left schools picking up the pieces: 72% of teachers report helping students with non-academic matters more than they did five years ago. Arguing that other services reeling from years of cuts are best placed to make the difference in education is unlikely to go down well with teachers who’ve had to pick up the slack in these fields for years. Even if it did, the lack of commentators (and even language) to articulate problems in these fields leaves Phillipson without the luxury of strident advocates for her argument à la Bennett and Birbalsingh. The dearth of effective advocates when it comes to these external social crises is so severe that teachers (specifically Teach First alumni) have been drafted in to shake up prisons and social work and advocate for reform in these fields. Deviating from a teacher-centric approach to education policymaking leaves Labour surveying a barren landscape for influential allies, all while risking accusations of being soft on standards and sidelining the expertise of teachers.

So should Phillipson keep teachers onside by touting them as the solution to the problem? That option seems just as difficult. Work on teacher retention highlights the expansion of the role, particularly during the pandemic, as a major factor in teachers leaving the profession. Many teachers are reluctant to be treated as another wing of the emergency services amid stagnant wages and conditions that provoked massive industrial action last year. To put it another way, if Phillipson wanted to position teachers as the solution to the crisis in schools, she would need to make an emphatic and evidenced justification for a large, well-funded expansion of their role (and encroachment on several other professions’ areas of expertise in the process). This would do little to endear her to a profession brought to its knees by workload, or to a Shadow Treasury team with minimal fiscal headroom for such schemes and the pay demands that accompany them.

In short, Conservative school policy has envisioned a bright child struggling to learn from an under-supported teacher in a chaotic classroom. With better curriculum, teachers and assessment, they’ve argued, that child’s life chances will improve. Labour’s argument is that in too many classrooms, there is an empty seat where that child should be. This speech by Labour makes a totem of the empty seat and the ‘TO LET’ sign in the youth centre, the out-of-office email from the mental health practitioner and the parent’s bare purse in the supermarket. Bridget Phillipson has inadvertently stumbled into doing education policy via social policy, a move that breaks with decades of orthodoxy in the schools world and champions the cause of a child we can’t see. It will take all her skill to pull it off.

In 1943, the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University conducted research on behalf of the US military regarding the damage that their aircraft were sustaining on missions. Military officials presented the group with analysis of where bullet-holes were showing up on returning planes. As you can see from the diagram above (which, as this article explains, isn’t much like what they drew up), these planes had lots of damage in areas like the wings, the fuselage and the tail. Intuitively, then, some officials sought to apply reinforcement to those parts of the aircraft. But Abraham Wald, a mathematician who had fled the Nazis in the mid-1930s, argued successfully that the additional armouring should be going on the spots where no damage was showing up, most prominently the engines. The reason for this was simple: in order for the planes to be included in the survey, they first had to return from battle. This story illustrates the idea of survivorship bias: when we analyse our decisions, we are apt to overlook entities that did not get through an implicit or explicit selection process.

If I had the attention of every senior leader, policymaker and education commentator for five minutes, I would teach them about survivorship bias. I think that understanding the principle is key to supporting the most disadvantaged, recruiting and retaining teachers, and using education to drive social mobility. In this blog, I want to prod around at the edges of the story of Abraham Wald’s planes to explore a few ways in which educational decision-makers would benefit from an awareness of survivorship bias.

1. Ghost planes: what does ‘survivorship’ even mean?

Aerial warfare in WW2 was characterised by huge casualties. Most strikingly, though, the unique nature of airborne combat means that those losses took place way out of sight, deep behind enemy lines. It’s this that generated the main problem that Wald faced when analysing damage on returning planes: it was impossible to break down the total number of lost planes into sub-categories based on what had caused them not to return. Although Wald’s suggestion that under-armoured engines were the most likely source of fatal vulnerability explained many losses, there would have been other causes of lost planes too: mechanical failure, human error and navigation problems will all presumably have prevented some planes from returning. But we can’t be sure how many. For want of better information, we lump all these lost planes together. Let’s call them ‘ghost planes’.

Ghost planes no longer exist to nearly the same extent. Technological advances mean that losing a plane for unexplained reasons is incredibly rare (although famously not impossible): it is in everyone’s interests to make causing a plane to disappear far more trouble than it’s worth. The same could be true in education, but for the time being, it isn’t. To take one example, media is awash with detailed stories of students getting into top universities – increasingly seen as the defining outcome of a successful school career – but at the other end of the scale, the ‘forgotten third‘ of students not passing GCSE English and Maths are treated as a homogenous lump of underachievers, like ghost-plane students (I wrote about this here).

These ghost-plane students don’t just disappear, though. Rather than bewailing their poor outcomes when these students show up in sources such as the Labour Force Survey and the Census, we could do much more to leverage the existing relationships that schools have with ghost-plane students. For example, many schools do ‘certificate awards evenings’ in the autumn term, in which the summer exam cohorts return for a celebration of their achievements. If schools used these evenings as opportunities to reach out to all students, and gathered curricular and pastoral feedback particularly from students who had not passed their exams, then not only would this allow them to target interventions more effectively for the upcoming cohort, it might also help staff to chase up potential NEET students, as well as allowing students who hadn’t made the grade to reclaim a sense of ownership and purpose over their schooling. In short, then, the existence of ghost-plane students is a policy choice, and one that could be mitigated against with quite small changes.

2. Heavy weather: the fallacy of ceteris paribus

Wald’s mandate was pretty limited. The design of the study focused on a single cause of aircraft failure – enemy fire – and sought an intervention that was likely, but still not guaranteed, to reduce losses. As a story about observable variables and probability, it’s as interesting for what it doesn’t tell us as what it does. As we saw above, it conveniently elides other potential explanatory variables. One particularly interesting one for our purposes is the weather.

Bad weather can be catastrophic for aircraft, and this was no exception during the war. Airforce commanders had to be strategic about the sort of missions they pursued at different times of the year. In much the same way, the school system is strategic about the ‘missions’ it chooses for children at different stages of their development, increasing in difficulty as they get older. To stretch the image in one dimension, we can think of standardised tests like GCSEs as a tried-and-tested training exam that every cohort of trainee bomber pilots does, in which they’re scored on various competencies (and, for our purposes, there’s live enemy fire – stay with me here). In an ideal world, every cohort would undergo this test at the same stage of their training, under similar atmospheric conditions. Although it’s not perfect, such a test provides a least-bad way to evaluate their abilities against a stable set of parameters and to gauge the effectiveness of the training you’re providing.

But what we’re seeing is that the metaphorical weather is getting worse with every passing year. The assumption of ceteris paribus – other things being equal – is what allowed Wald to state within the parameters of his investigation that adding more armour to planes’ engines was probably going to reduce losses. If he was providing that advice while staring out into an oncoming snowstorm, then it would have been taken much less seriously. In a sense, the money that the DfE has funnelled into curriculum and teacher qualifications in the current climate is the equivalent of the military buying loads of armour just as a vicious winter sets in. It’s a sunk cost, and it crowds out strategies that could make participants resilient to the challenges of the broader climate. This results in more lost planes, and demoralised staff as we persist with the fallacy that test conditions are stable from year to year. This then becomes cyclical: if we blindly insist that planes getting shot down are all we’re interested in, experts in the system will get frustrated and leave in droves, and we start to struggle with strategies for both the missions we assign and the wider climate. We need to be mindful of the wider context when we compare from one cohort to another, and avoid being blinded by accountability that assumes parity across years.

3. Returning heroes and also-rans

Among the planes that Wald’s team inspected, some will have attracted more attention than others. Those with most bullet holes are likely to have been involved in more perilous encounters, and their pilots are more likely to have been garlanded with awards for gallantry and the like. The media seizes on stories of triumph over adversity, and these daring, brilliant pilots are held up as heroic role models for their decisive action and quick thinking.

Even though their risk-taking and brushes with disaster make bomber pilots terrible role models for state school students, narratives of unlikely triumph over adversity continue to dominate the educational airwaves. Every few months, a new feel-good story emerges about a down-on-his-luck boy getting a scholarship to Eton against all odds. Likewise, there are plenty of well-intentioned social media accounts with considerable followings shining a light on students who have reached dizzy academic heights despite huge challenges. These voices are an important part of ongoing work to diversify access to university in particular, but survivorship bias means that we are utterly blind to those who have worked just as hard, but who have not been quite so lucky.

This was a massive problem when I was working on university applications strategy last year: students with ordinary grades would brandish these stories as evidence of the possibility that they could theoretically get in for Medicine or go to Oxbridge, impinging upon the already scarce time that my team had to support much more plausible candidates from disadvantaged households with their applications. Moreover, the more challenging the wider conditions are for students, the more the media seizes on particularly impressive anecdotal cases, and the easier schools with established reputations for bucking socioeconomic trends find it to continue their momentum (although this is not always achieved very ethically).

The depressing thing about all of this is that an education system producing a few heroic bomber pilots while sustaining ever greater losses is clearly not doing its job properly. To take a counter-example, Estonia’s education success often flies under the radar, but one striking aspect of their approach is a truly comprehensive approach, in which classes are mixed-ability and materials and school lunches are universally free. To go back to the analogy, they aren’t clamouring for heroic pilots – they’re building a force, and they’re losing far fewer planes along the way. Nick Hillman has written about the need for a better-articulated argument in favour of comprehensive education; this need has surely only grown more acute as conditions have worsened across the last few years.

So what?

The very nature of survivorship bias means that its lessons are easy to overlook. Here are a few that I’ve covered in this blog.

1. Some of the most useful insights for schools are going to come from students who would otherwise slip through the cracks. Capturing their feedback is easier than we think and could be transformative.

2. We aren’t comparing like for like when we look across different years facing the same exams. Awareness of changing climates (and efforts to ensure that students are as insulated as possible from those changes) can make interventions much more effective.

3. The media chase outliers, and some students lean into underdog status. If you’re courting media attention as a school, it’s unlikely that your practices are setting a replicable example for other schools and settings.

If you’ve not read my stuff before, welcome! I’m a former teacher and current education policy consultant at Public First. To bring you up to speed on how I got here, I started out writing while teaching for Tes and Vittles, had a couple of bits picked up by The Independent and The New Statesman, and did some stuff for The Guardian and IPPR while doing a Masters after five years in the classroom. These days, I work with the brilliant team at Public First on topics like teacher recruitment, youth mental health, widening participation in HE and online conspiracies for organisations like Teach First, Cambridge University and the Pears Foundation.

If you know me or my writing, thanks for sticking around! Several colleagues, friends and loved ones have been encouraging me to write a bit more, so this is me trying to do so. I enjoy writing, but I’m not very good at sticking to a schedule. You can find my old site here; it contains a bunch of my old writing, as well as a few posts about a range of different things. I’m going to keep updating the writing page there, mostly as a personal archive, but I’ll begin by adding a couple of posts here that have got some traction on that blog in the past to give a sense of the tone I want to strike here.

There’s a few things on the education agenda that I want to write about, particularly looking at the upcoming Curriculum and Assessment Review. I’d also recommend subscribing to the Substacks that my brilliant colleagues (past and present!) Tom Hamilton, Tim Leunig and Jonathan Simons. I’m going to try to get some stuff up over the next week or two, but in the meantime, do feel free to subscribe and share!

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