Breaking with nostalgia

Finding a food culture in oven chips and lost connections

If you’ve spoken to me at all over the past few weeks, you may have already noticed how increasingly obsessed with food I’ve become. The cooking of it, the eating of it, but most potently the reading about it. I’ve even taken my first step into writing about it on here,¹ as you may have seen in my last newsletter.

I have indeed been reading a lot of food writing recently, from the intricacies of wheat production and historic clay ovens in Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery to personal reflections and food memoirs like Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life Through Food. I’ve been obsessively consuming everything Samin Nosrat has done, from reading Salt Fat Acid Heat and watching the accompanying Netflix show, to devouring Home Cooking, the podcast she collaborated on with Hrishikesh Hirway.

Not too long ago I reached out through Substack Notes, looking for food writer recommendations. Soon after that I stumbled upon one of my favourite food-related Substack newsletters, From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy. It was there that I read a particularly gripping essay Kennedy had written, that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole of self-reflection and questioning. And that’s what I’d like to share with you today.

A caveat: this isn’t an essay, an argument, or even a complete piece of writing. It’s a meandering of thoughts that I wrote down in my journal after reading Kennedy’s essay, and I’m still questioning what to do with them. They’ve since led me to a potential idea for my own memoir, but it’s still just a mess of ideas and I’m only tentatively exploring where it could lead.

So here’s where I’m currently at. I’d love to hear if anything in particular resonates with you, or if you have suggestions for other reading materials or writers to seek out.

Photo by Richard Bell on Unsplash

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I loved this quote from 'On flavour' by Alicia Kennedy so much that I added it to my commonplace book:

"I was born loving so many flavours, and so I was born blessed."

A later paragraph from this essay that I didn't record there, but that I want to reflect upon now, is this:

"For years, I haven't really said anything about being Puerto Rican - aloud, in writing - because I'm not, because it's a minuscule amount, and while I grew up with some of the flavours, I didn't grow up with the culture, and these are connected but distinct. To be something is more than just blood and food; it's about common experiences and understandings."

This paragraph really resonated with me when I read it because it speaks to my own disconnection from part of my heritage. There are differences between us, of course. It seems that Kennedy at least grew up experiencing the flavours of Puerto Rican cooking. I didn't. I couldn't tell you the first thing about Trinidadian culture or cuisine unless I looked it up first.

I will unfortunately never have that connection to my paternal grandfather's country, and sometimes I question why I'm even so curious about it in the first place. After all, it's only something I came to really think about in my late twenties. I never really gave it much thought before then. I was raised in a white family unit, taught to tick the 'White/British' box, and that was that.

If anything, although I've found validation in the concept of racial impostor syndrome and had my visibility affirmed by people of colour I respect, why am I trying to lay claim to something that will never be mine? I didn't know the man, I never experienced his mother's cooking, I don't really know anything about his homeland, and he wasn't even a good person. So why do I cling to this minuscule part of my identity and see it as the hidden key to my roots? Why do I feel like I need to understand it in order to understand myself?

I read Kennedy's essay because I'm feeling a pull towards experimenting with creative nonfiction food writing, and I was drawn to her poetic style, and captivated by the connection she makes between flavour and identity: the flavour of food and the flavour of people. I’m also exploring this in fiction and using food as a tool in the novel I'm working on: meals as an opportunity for important conversations to take place, and the sensory experience of eating them to immerse the reader. The way Kennedy owns up to the fact that she wasn't raised on the food of her father's ancestors rang true with me because neither was I.

But more than that, I wonder how I can even hope to write something worthwhile about food when I don't have much of a food culture to draw upon. At least, nothing that I wish to relive. Most of the food writers I enjoy reading draw from their lived experience with food. Samin Nosrat's connection to her mother's cooking is utterly compelling, and she has so many recipes and recommendations drawn from Persian cuisine. Stanley Tucci’s Italian parents instilled in him a deep love of Mediterranean cooking and his memoir is filled with pasta-related anecdotes.

If you hail from a part of the world with its own distinctive cuisine and food culture, and have memories of your mother’s, or grandmother's kitchen unlocked by a certain aroma or spice, then you're bound to tell captivating stories.

I was not raised on much in the way of home cooking. My mum tried her best, but she was twenty years old, had a terrible relationship with food based on unfathomable trauma, and didn’t know how to cook. Her mother, my nan, tried to help where she could, but their relationship had been fraught and damaged somewhat by abusive men. My childhood memories of home cooking are mostly made up of Birds Eye oven chips and chicken nuggets, and the occasional lumpy mash potato.²

The rich food experiences I did grow up with came from dining out with my father on the few occasions I saw him per year. With no real connection or shared interests to this day, food has always formed the basis of our turbulent and rather detached interactions. These meals specifically centred around meat and seafood: bloody steaks and huge shellfish platters, deep-fried crispy whitebait dipped in mayonnaise, mussels drizzled in garlic butter, octopus soup, crispy nile perch and braised monkfish. Our foundation was a veritable surf n’ turf, and pretty much only consisted of foods that I haven't touched for well over a decade. You can only imagine what my decision to go vegan did to our already quite fraught relationship.

Where does this leave me as a potential food writer? Sure, the smell of vinegar-doused cockles brings back some memories of the seaside, but I'm not eating them, or even thinking about them anymore. I have no desire to romanticise food that's derived from the bodies of animals. I can't exactly draw on those memories for inspiration, and I don't want to just focus on veganising the foods I grew up with (not that there would be much interesting source material to work with even if I did).

So how do I find a way to write compelling pieces about food? I suppose my only choice is to draw upon recent experiences. I'm not exactly a beginner in the kitchen and don't want to come across as such, but I need to figure out what my unique food journey is, and how to find what's interesting about it. Perhaps I record the things I learn, and my own experiences of trying things for the first time, but I don't see how I can, like Kennedy, tie them into more interesting subjects like identity and culture when they feel so untethered and meaningless.

I think there’s potentially a story in the link between the staple foods of my childhood at home with my mum, and the inherent classism of food in the UK. Ultra processed foods have been pushed onto the working class since the ‘80s at least (when I came along), not to mention the fact they've been subsidised and made so cheap and readily available, despite having no nutritional value.

This also ties in with something my friend Frit pointed out to me when we discussed these ideas: the notion that most successful food writers, those who draw upon the culture and cuisine they were raised with, are often very privileged, and while their stories and perspectives are both important and a joy to read, they're not the sole route into good food writing, and there are other stories to be told.

And whether or not it’s interesting to most readers, I can’t escape from the veganism element of my story. It's twofold. On the one hand, it's yet another disconnection; this time it's the distance I've put between myself and the nostalgic foods of my childhood, like my nan's stuffed lamb hearts, and the somehow intoxicating flavour of Birds Eye chicken chargrills that sent me into a frenzy after school.

How do you, as a food writer, draw upon the flavours of your childhood when they're foods you no longer find appetising and wouldn't ever want to touch again?

And on the other hand, while I'm not necessarily interested in simply veganising recipes, there's definitely something to be said about how doing so could potentially help me to not only reconnect with nostalgic foods of the past, but also gain access to something new that wouldn't otherwise be available to me. For example, is there a story to be told in sampling Trinidadian cuisine to try to explore my grandfather's culture? What about the traditional Jewish foods and dishes Nana, my paternal grandmother, was raised on? Can these types of foods somehow be veganised as a way of gaining access to them?

I have lots of ideas that overlap, but require a lot of space to unpack. Therefore, you’ve been warned. I might do some of that unpacking here.

1. Fun fact, that wasn’t actually my first foray into writing about food, but it was the first time I’ve woven it into my political musings. I used to write a vegan food blog, many years ago, which has since died a death and been cloned and plagiarised by another website (so I guess it wasn’t terrible).

2. To this day I still enjoy a more textured mash as a result. I don’t bother peeling the skins and opt for a more rustic result.