It's Not Student Cooking, It's Just Cooking with Fliss Freeborn

Photo by Luke Albert

Welcome back to the Lecker Book Club. Every month I’ll pick a newly released food related book and talk to the author about the process of writing it. I’ll also be cooking from the book and writing about that on Substack and Patreon. Join me there as well!

On this edition of the Lecker Book Club: Fliss Freeborn's Do Yourself A Flavour. Did you go to university? If you did, there’s a chance someone bought you - or you bought yourself - one of the many student cookbooks available. But did you actually find it useful? I definitely owned a couple of these myself, and I can’t say that I distinctly remember cooking anything from them - certainly nothing memorable, and definitely nothing that I continued cooking once I left student life. Fliss Freeborn feels very strongly that these books are more often than not a waste of your time and money and with Do Yourself A Flavour she’s written a different kind of cookbook - for students, yes, but also for anyone who wants to get themselves out of a pesto pasta rut, as she puts it, and more importantly have a good time doing it.

Fliss started university with a few years of cooking already under her belt, and so she wsas in the ideal position to start cooking for her friends, and eventually she wasn’t just providing delicious home cooked meals for them, but also recipes too. She started a food blog while studying, mostly so she’d have an easy way to send instructions to friends, and  this - a few years in - led to an unusual lucky break for her.


Do Yourself A Flavour is out now, published by Ebury Press. Find all of the Lecker Book Club reads on my Bookshop.org list.

Support Lecker by becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon, Apple Podcasts and now on Substack.

Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

Full transcript for this episode after the embed.

LeckerBookClub_August_FlissFreeborn

[00:00:00] Lucy Dearlove: Before we start, I just wanted to let you know that you can become a paid subscriber of Lecker on Substack, Patreon, or Apple Podcasts, and you'll get access to exclusive content to hear and read. Subscriptions really help support Lecker. So if you're in a position to do that and you'd like to, head to leckerpodcast.com/support to find out more. And just to note that subscriber episodes start again next month.

[00:00:32] This is Lecker. I'm Lucy Dearlove.

[00:00:38] This month on the Lecker Book Club, Do Yourself A Flavour by FLiss Freeborn. Did you go to university? Because if you did, there's a chance that someone bought you or you bought yourself one of the many student cookbooks available. Maybe more than one. But did you actually find it, or them, useful? I definitely owned a couple of these myself, and I can't say that I distinctly remember cooking anything from them.

[00:01:08] Definitely nothing memorable, and certainly nothing that I continued cooking once I left student life. Fliss Freeborn feels very strongly that these books are, more often than not, a waste of your time and money, and with Do Yourself a Flavour, she's written a different kind of cookbook. For students, yes.

[00:01:26] but also for anyone who wants to get themselves out of a pesto pasta run, as she puts it. And more importantly, have a good time doing it.

[00:01:33] Fliss Freeborn: I deliberately did not want the word student in there because I think it really diminishes what people think about cooking and it diminishes what people, who would buy the book.

[00:01:41] I think because the recipes serve two, they can be scaled up or scaled down. So it's not just for students, it's, it's for everyone. But we'll be, I make a lot of references to being drunk at university. Yeah, I think the recipe should work for everyone really.

[00:01:53] Lucy Dearlove: Fliss started university with a few years of cooking at home already under her belt, so she was in the ideal position to start cooking for her friends.

[00:02:02] And eventually she wasn't just providing delicious home cooked meals for them, but also recipes too. She started a food blog while studying, mostly so she'd have an easy way to send instructions to friends. And this, a few years in, led to an unusual lucky break for her.

[00:02:22] Can you just give me a sense of like where in your life this book started happening? I guess when did you first have the idea of it and um, when did you start writing it?

[00:02:32] Fliss Freeborn: So obviously writing a book I'd never ever really Come into my mindset. I decided to go and study linguistics at university, which is a very ill advised thing to do.

[00:02:43] Um, and I really hated it. So I had to have some sort of like creative outlet somewhere. So I started writing a food blog just because I kept getting asked for recipes the whole time because I'm a feeder. So everyone would come to my house and I'd feed them and go, Oh, this is really nice. Where did you get the recipes?

[00:02:57] Like, Oh, just, you know, it's mine and you can have it if you want. So I was writing out recipes like a couple of times a week. So I started a food blog just for my mates and I did it for me. very consistently for about four years. And then in December 2021, a certain food critic with very big hair and a jazz quartet, uh, found me completely by accident on Twitter and shared my blog to his followers, like unbeknownst to me.

[00:03:22] And then he sent me an email, Jay, so this is Jay Rayner for, for, for clarity, for the avoidance of any doubt. This is Jay Rayner. And he sent me an email and said, don't do this for free. He said, you need to be writing for a living. And I went, okay. Cause I hadn't really, I thought I'd end up in recruitment.

[00:03:40] So I, I sort of took, took his words to heart really. Um. And started sort of pitching to newspapers about, uh, sort of various things I thought about. But he also put my blog link in front of a literary agency who then got in touch with me and said, would you like to write a book about student cooking? And I sort of said, yes, but no, I don't really want it to be completely for students.

[00:04:04] Cause I'd argued in a piece of mine that there isn't really such thing as student food. It's just food that you cook when you're a student. Like, you know, we're definitely breaking away from like the cast of pot noodles and beans on toast. Like we're. You know, there's been a food revolution in this country and I think we need to keep up with it.

[00:04:19] Yeah, let's dream bigger here. But I have ended up writing a student cookery book. So, so there we go. So that's the, that's the sort of long winded story of, um, how I came to write a book. But it was, I mean,

[00:04:31] Lucy Dearlove: I would say that was very conciseless. It's not long winded at all. It's like well edited.

[00:04:34] Fliss Freeborn: It was, um, it was dropped into my lap essentially.

[00:04:37] It wasn't something that I had to go and query or had this idea from a.

[00:04:43] I feel very, very privileged and lucky to have been able to just have this opportunity presented to me, which was great.

[00:04:49] Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, it's kind of extraordinary. I actually, I actually do remember Jay tweeting it and being like, huh, that's cool. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And it took me a while to kind of put two and two together.

[00:04:58] And then when I saw the book coming out, I was like, Oh my God, yeah, I remember

[00:05:01] Fliss Freeborn: that. It was that. So like Jay. Um, I always say that, uh, he's dropped this opportunity into my lap and he's, I said this to him one time and he said, no, I've merely opened doors and you've just walked straight through them, which, which is a nice way of putting it, but, um,

[00:05:15] Lucy Dearlove: but I think it's also like, it's, it's great that you acknowledge like the kind of.

[00:05:20] Yeah, I guess, I guess the way, I don't know how to put this away because I don't want to diminish like the achievements that you have because the book's amazing. Um, I guess what I'm trying to say is like, it's fascinating that some people have the power to do that.

[00:05:31] Fliss Freeborn: Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating and for me it's actually kind of, it's kind of scary in a way because, I'm not part, I have not been part of this world.

[00:05:39] I didn't expect to be part of this world and living up to the huge expectation that has just been sort of placed upon me by everyone. And everyone thinks, you know, I've been doing it for years and years and I've been liaising this week with like various like publicity people and they're going, Oh, can you organize a panel talk?

[00:05:53] And I'm going, I know, I don't know how to do any of this. Like this isn't my world, but, um, I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm stepping up to it and then stepping into it. But yeah, no, it's a, it's a huge thing to have done sort of by accident. Um,

[00:06:05] Lucy Dearlove: I'm so young as well.

[00:06:08] Fliss Freeborn: I'm coming, I'm coming up for 25 in September, which feels, oh yeah, practically feels ancient now because I signed the book deal when I was 22.

[00:06:17] Wow. And so it's been like a long time coming, you know, late 22, but it's been like a long time coming. And, um, yeah, the publishing timelines were insanely long, but here we are, it's done. That's the way it

[00:06:27] Lucy Dearlove: goes. Yeah. So I really love. kind of your view on student cooking and student food, um, and it's something that I find really interesting.

[00:06:36] So a few years ago I made a series about kitchens and as part of it I looked at the way that kitchens have been portrayed in cookbooks and recipe books and so often it comes in like it's a very aspirational thing like you've got this beautiful like it's a set essentially and so few cookbooks with a few there's a few notable exceptions but So few actually take into consideration the real life circumstances of many people who want to cook still, but they live in shared houses.

[00:07:01] They live in kitchens that are like a landlord hasn't refurbed in like 20 years. Mm-hmm. . And it can be very difficult to kind of visualize yourself cooking in that environment when the images that you are being. presented are so different from your reality and as part of that I did very briefly think about student cooking and how strange it is that like that situation that you're envisaging students students cooking in where like people might not have had much exposure to like cooking from scratch if that's how they've grown up and they live in shared accommodation like that reality does not change that much like later in life for a lot of people because of the housing crisis and Busy lives, etc.

[00:07:42] So I guess yeah, my question is tell me about your beef with student cookbooks.

[00:07:46] Fliss Freeborn: Oh my god Where do I start? Um, I don't know thing is now I'm an author it feels incredibly It's difficult to be critical of other people's books I know how much like work goes into them, but essentially I think a lot of student cookbooks are written not by students They're written by people who think that you know, oh They've considered, yes, it's a cheap recipe.

[00:08:07] Yes, it's an easy recipe. Yes, it's relatively healthy, but they haven't considered anything that goes along with the context of the recipe. You know, how, whether you need to be clearing surfaces of other people's washing up before you start. So yeah, so my beef with student cookbooks, um, is that they are.

[00:08:21] really quite out of touch with the student experience. And I'll caveat that again by saying that anyone who writes about food is probably out of touch with the everyday person. Um, which, you know, I'm, I'm now sort of embedded within the food world and people, my friends are telling me, no, I don't, I don't want to make, I don't want to make bread.

[00:08:40] I don't want to do this. I would just want my meal in 10 minutes on the table. So, um, and yeah, so a lot of student cookbooks. Have this kind of out of touchness to them because they're not written for students or by students That's my first bit of beef and that's kind of acceptable. I don't mind an out of touch cookery book Whatever.

[00:08:57] My main huge ridiculous beef with student cookbooks is how sodding patronizing they are They just look if you're smart enough to get into university you're smart enough to like know how to chop an onion and if you the thing is if a lot of people haven't You know, cook before and the student cookbooks shouldn't be aimed at them.

[00:09:14] I, I don't, I, I don't think it's, I think a beginner cookbook is a completely different beast than a student cookbook. Uh, if you want to begin a cookbook or, you know, the best way obviously to learn is visually and it's via YouTube. I, I strongly maintain that cookbooks are kind of as an instructional text from the very, very start, a kind of null and void at the moment.

[00:09:32] They're more of a. There should be more of like an inspiration sort of thing. Like you'd flip through them and go, Oh, I don't know what to have for dinner. Oh, that looks good. I'll cook that. Rather than I don't know how to boil an egg. I'm going to look in a book. Like no one, no one really does that anymore.

[00:09:44] So my beef with student cookbooks is they kind of try and attempt to do far too much in that, you know, I've got a student cookbook on my shelf. I won't name it because I. Don't want to be a dick. I have named it in an article, but, um, um, it starts with it starts with his how you boil vegetables. Here's how you boil an egg.

[00:10:01] And then like by page 36, it's like, here's how to make roast duck with plum sauce. It's like, actually, no, like people aren't gonna be doing these two things together. So the where I've aimed the book that I've written is You can chop an onion, you can make a half decent pasta bake, you know how to feed yourself, you're not stupid, you know how to eat vegetables, you know what makes a healthy lifestyle, you just don't do it because you can't be bothered, and that's so fine.

[00:10:24] Mine is like, kind of, here's how to get you out of that pesto pasta baked potato rut, here's some fresh ideas that aren't necessarily much more difficult to do. They just take maybe a little bit of creative thinking or one outside the box ingredient and then you've got yourself a really, really amazingly elevated meal rather than just your plain old pasta bake.

[00:10:43] So yeah, my beef with student cookbooks is I've tackled it head on.

[00:10:47] Lucy Dearlove: And the book, you know, it's book is like, it's so like I can hear even though this is the first time and I haven't met you properly. I've only met you via Your voice is so clear, like it, it's so clear on the page and it's very like, it's very you, the tone of voice.

[00:11:02] Um, and I guess that's something honed through blogging because it's such a direct way of writing. It feels you can speak directly to people. Um, have you kind of, have you always written that way?

[00:11:13] Fliss Freeborn: I've always written this way. Um, my ex boyfriend actually picked up the book. We're good mates. My ex boyfriend picked up the book and he just started giggling and I said, What?

[00:11:21] What's so funny? He goes, Your teachers at school will hate you for this because this is what they try to discourage you from doing for five years. And it's so true. I have always written in this style. I've always been, I've always just directly translated my voice to the page and obviously there's practice that comes with that.

[00:11:39] And you're right, the blog has honed that in a way, but I've always done that. And I, when I first came to university, I got very, very told off in my essays for it sounding conversational and it sounding this and the other, but I was like, yeah, but it's easy to read and it's stylistic. Like, but no, they weren't having that.

[00:11:53] So I learned to write in an academic way. off the back of being told off for writing in my way. But yeah, so this is, so the book is like the first time I've actually been like praised and celebrated for writing in this way because I did a little bit of copywriting work as well. And I'm in sort of between the, I still do a little bit now.

[00:12:08] And so, um, I've had to turn that back, but it feels very, very natural for me to write it completely in this style.

[00:12:17] Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, that's, that's really interesting because I think a lot of people can probably relate to that experience. Being told to write in a certain way in a particular environment, and I think for a lot of people.

[00:12:26] It's very off putting In something that's a creative process to be like you're doing it wrong So it's really nice that you kind of have the strength of character to push through and now like you're reaping the

[00:12:38] Fliss Freeborn: reward I am I must also say like a huge massive Appreciation post shout out to my editor who just got it from day one.

[00:12:49] Like she didn't, she did not, she was amazing. She just kept so much of me in there. And I kind of wrote the book thinking that I would be like toned down in the edit and the copyedit, so I wrote it like I properly upped the fliss, expecting my editor to be like, right, we'll take that out. That's inappropriate.

[00:13:06] We'll take that. And she just didn't, she was like, no, I love this. This is. Great. Let's keep this in. Okay. She had some sensible stuff to take out like references to Big Toes and Thrush. And she, she, she was like, I think one time I said, I said, I was talking about sausages. I think, I think I had the phrase in there.

[00:13:22] Like there's just mashed up this dead pig stuffed inside its own guts. And she said, Fliss, I don't think that should be in a cookbook. And I said, is it because you're a vegetarian? And she said, no, it's because I'm a cookbook editor.

[00:13:37] But she really got it, like the rest of the stuff, she let me keep it. I can't believe, you know, there's a, there's a little bit of, uh, there's a, I've got a section on five things to do with XYZ and I've got five things to do with peas. And she let me keep in a little story that I wrote about Hansel and Gretel and they meet a...

[00:13:51] Some ducks in the forest or something like that, but I was just so, so blessed to have someone that just understood it completely from day one. You know, it's such

[00:13:59] Lucy Dearlove: a fun book, like when you go into the like, Chaucer style vegetable tales, I was like, yes, great. Like more, more, I think there's kind of a, like sometimes an expectation, like an understanding or an expectation that when we write about food, it has to be like serious and it can be.

[00:14:15] funny, but it kind of still has to like, have this like seriousness or earnestness about it. And it's actually, it can just be like really

[00:14:23] Fliss Freeborn: silly. It's so silly. I, I actually remember, so I, so that was in one of my blog, my very early blog posts and it was actually kind of, it was the choice of, the choice of recipes was a very pivotal stage for me in writing about food because I was, I was procrastinating an essay.

[00:14:40] that I was writing. I was in my first year at uni. I was procrastinating an essay and I just sat down on my bed and just this idea came to me and I was like, why don't I do this? So I wrote it and it took me about two hours to write. And, um, then everyone loved it and I was like, okay, this, this is good because it means I don't necessarily have to write about food in a way that other people write about food.

[00:15:01] I can be completely daft with it. And it is daft.

[00:15:05] Lucy Dearlove: That's the beauty of it. So, tell me about your route into cooking. So you cooked at home as a kid, right? And not only, by the sounds of it, so not only would you cook for the family, you would also um, like, economise. So, meal plan, um, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but you were very much part of not just the cooking process, but the kind of whole, like, headspace around everything that goes into that meal.

[00:15:32] Um, how did that come about in your family life? So...

[00:15:35] Fliss Freeborn: I start, I was very lucky that my parents were always involved with me in the kitchen from like, you know, the toddler, like I have one of those clamp chairs that like my parents first kitchen was really, really tiny. It was like a galley. And I, but I have one of those like, um, clamped high chairs that went to the, that clumped on this on the counter.

[00:15:50] And my dad would like make me smell the spices and tell me what was going in the pan and stuff. So I was like extremely involved. I was always treated like a small adult. So I was always extremely involved in that sense. Um, and then I started baking when I was uh, I actually started baking when I was six, so I had...

[00:16:05] This is a story in the book, the fairy cakes. Yeah, the fairy cakes and stuff. So I had this kind of, I was very comfortable in the kitchen from a very, very early age. You know, I wasn't attempting, you know, family meals or anything at that age. Yeah. But I was, you know, making fairy cakes and stuff. And I did that until I was probably 12, 13.

[00:16:20] And then my parents marriage broke down and my dad sort of, they had a very, very rocky time. So my dad left probably around... He left in sort of various bits between the age of like, uh, 13 and 14. So my mom just needed a hand to do stuff. So I took over the kitchen in terms of what she'd bought, I would make, I would make meals out of, you know, cause we had a lot of tinned food.

[00:16:45] We had a lot of sort of beef mince and sausages and sort of, so I could put meals together quite easily. Like that having ingested cookbooks for the last, you know, four or five years. He's taken to bed with me, but the whole economizing and home shopping thing kind of came in. Um, slightly later when I realized that my mom was like quite, she was, we were struggling like financially.

[00:17:04] And so I kind of was steering her in the direction of Aldi rather than Tesco and, you know, going into, into bits of both. I never did the full what's in the cupboard meal planning, et cetera, but I would go to the supermarket with her and pick out what I would, what I thought would be useful. Um, for cooking on a sort of, it wasn't on like a weekly basis, but it was sort of every other week I would come with her and do that.

[00:17:26] But in the end, you know, she would just buy it, what I could make stuff out of. At that point I taught myself how to sort of look at the price per hundred gram labels and, um, you know, really economize through that by the value brands and sort of see if I could make something out of nothing. You know, without, you know, without wishing to go too far into private life, but money was always, money was always a huge concern in the family.

[00:17:49] I think probably ungrounded, unfoundedly actually, uh, you know, looking back, I don't think we had an enormous, I never went hungry. I never, ever went hungry. I had everything I could possibly want in terms of educational opportunities. I ended up at university, you know, I had all this stuff, but, um, my, my parents, they were always.

[00:18:07] Trying to just, they were trying to better themselves all the time. That's kind of like middle class way of, Oh, we don't have this and the other. Why can't we do this and the other? And they would, they were always trying to better themselves. And I think they put a lot of pressure on themselves to have what we couldn't afford.

[00:18:19] And so I was always made constantly aware of the fact, you know, we couldn't go out to eat or we couldn't buy coffees out or we couldn't have, you know, sandwiches that we'd always take out sandwiches and stuff with. But I think it's a really normal experience for any. sort of, you know, small family growing up on a middling income, you know, that we can't afford to do these things.

[00:18:35] But, um, I grew up in a very, very nice area of the world where a lot of people had a lot more money than we did. And I think there's a lot of grounds for comparison there. So I was always made aware of money and how that worked. And I was, and I got a job at the age of 13 and carried, I've worked.

[00:18:52] Constantly since then. And, um, yeah, saved. And then the university looked at, the university looked at my background and went, ah, single parent, low income, we'll give you loads of money. So for the first time in my life, I had money and it was like, it was really strange. So I saved a lot of it and I worked alongside it as well.

[00:19:08] And I, and I, but I, and I. Budgeted, like for the first month at uni, it was so funny. I was just like, right, how can I spend like 10 a week on my shopping? And I would like make lists and I would budget. And then by the end of, by Christmas, I was like, Oh wow, I've got loads of money. I probably don't need to do this quite as strictly as I was doing.

[00:19:24] And then I, and then from there, that was. I think a lot of people ask me, you know, how did you afford to feed people? You know, how do you, you know, make your budget stretch? I thought, and I was lucky enough because I'd been given a massive grant that I could be quite relaxed about who I fed. And obviously I'm not going to feed them like salmon and racks of lamb, but you know, I, I've always.

[00:19:43] Like, I've always wanted to be generous around food, um, because it's just, it's such a nice thing to do to just be able to invite someone back to your house and be like, Oh, do you want some doll or do you want some soup or toast? Yeah. Being able to cook is definitely a catalyst for making lots of friends.

[00:19:58] And you know, having that, there's also no, uh, obligation involved. I think a lot of. These sorts of things can become quite transactional, but I always sort of was like, no, you can come and eat at my house literally whenever you want. That's so fine. And I just don't have to, you know, absolutely not. Like I don't, and people, people would, and that's always really nice.

[00:20:18] It's a lovely, nice bonus. I remember one time I, my friend was a law student and he had a, we were going to an AGM for my mountaineering club and he, he needed to make it, but he couldn't get out of the library. And I said, look, I'll, I'll bring you a curry. Um, he said, I'm going to have to go home and cook because I know I'll bring you a curry.

[00:20:35] No, that's so I brought him this curry and then like a week later he was like, I'm going to cook you ossobucco at my house. And I was like, wow, okay, this is a fair

[00:20:43] Lucy Dearlove: trade.

[00:20:45] Fliss Freeborn: So yeah, no, so it's been really, really great for opening doors and friendships and people always know that they're going to get fed at mine.

[00:20:51] And so,

[00:20:52] Lucy Dearlove: um, you said when you were a kid, you used to take cookbooks to bed. Um, what were you

[00:20:56] Fliss Freeborn: reading? I was reading, All of Jamie's. Um, so my parents sort of being in this sort of demographic, they would be given loads of Jamie Oliver's cookbooks from like 2005 onwards, really. And so we had, uh, we had Jamie's 30 minute meals, Jamie's 15 minute meals, Jamie's...

[00:21:13] Great British food adventure all the rest of James Italian and then we had also the Bible that my mum used was of course Delia Smith's complete cookery course So I read through a lot of that, but that was that's you know So straight up and down without a huge amount of photos in it It's not massively entertaining to bring kind of a little bit.

[00:21:30] So I said we'd use that, you know for actual in the kitchen But I would bring And then I think I started getting interested in my own sort of baking and cooking books. I got a lot of kids cookbooks given to me. Um, so I brought, so I would like rip through those as well. Oh yeah. And I had a couple of, uh, I had good, good food by Sarah Raven because I went on like a bit of a sort of teenage health thing, which was definitely very thinly disguised orthorexia, but which I know that now, but I got a lot of like health cookbooks as well.

[00:21:57] And yeah, I just sort of read as widely as possible. Also, all the little cookery booklets that you got at the supermarket, like recipes. It was kind of inevitable I was going to write a cookbook, wasn't it, really? Listening to myself about

[00:22:09] Lucy Dearlove: all this. All the signs were

[00:22:10] Fliss Freeborn: there, really. And then, and then when I got to uni, when I got to uni, I sort of scoured secondhand bookshops and found all of Nigella's back catalogue.

[00:22:17] And I had a couple of, we had a couple of Nigella's, um, at home, but I can't actually, for the life of me, remember which ones. Then I really got into Nadia Hussain when she won Bake Off. Like, I cried when she won Bake Off. And, and I've got. You know, a vast, vast collection and having a publisher that also publishes Ottolenghi is really, really useful because they just send me all of his books as well, which is great.

[00:22:40] So yeah, I'm a bit of a cookery book addict and have always, Oh, Nigel Slater as well. I used to take him, do you use to take

[00:22:46] Lucy Dearlove: him to bed? Of course. So is that how you learn to cook or were you, you know, you said you watched your dad cook at home. Um, was there anyone else kind of in your life that?

[00:22:56] Personally, personally, you learned to cook from?

[00:22:59] Fliss Freeborn: I learned the basics from my dad. He taught me how to chop an onion, you know, when to add the tinned tomatoes, you know, the very, the very normal basic stuff. And, um, he would soak a lot of beans and we'd have like quite big sort of bean curry type things. So I, I learned how to do that.

[00:23:12] And dad was always, dad always really liked to have a bit of creative flair in the kitchen. He always used to put like chives, chives from the garden, like over the top of mashed potato and be like, ah, it's a restaurant. That kind of thing. So he would always like to sort of play around with that a little bit, but my mum was very much more practical cook, you know, sometimes meals at home would just be fish fingers, plain pasta and peas.

[00:23:33] Like, you know, that's, you know, it's kid food fine. And she used to buy a lot of mints from the. Butchers because it was, we had a really good local butcher that she would buy like five kilos of mince at the beginning of the month and like freeze it in portions so we would just have like spaghetti bolognese and rice like the whole time with mum, which, um, you know, she, she did the job and we ate really good home cooked nutritious food.

[00:23:53] So I kind of, I've always been, I've always grown up surrounded by good home cooked food, but it took until I was 14 to really learn sort of. How cookery worked and that was from my ex boyfriend's mom, Tanya, who is an outrageously good cook. I always like to tell the story of when I first started going out with Pete.

[00:24:12] I went around to his house and there everyone was eating this like meat, which was pink in the middle. Like it was, it was a butterfly shoulder of lamb and it had like pistachios and pomegranate seeds and, and just the most glorious sort of things. Around it. And Tanya had done it like on the barbecue and it smelled amazing.

[00:24:29] But in my house, we cooked meat until it was done. Yeah. And, you know, we didn't eat out. So I didn't really know what sort of medium steak was. And so we cooked it until it was done the same with fish. And so everyone was tucking into this, like, very pink meat. And I thought, Oh, no, I'm going to die. I'm going to get ill, but everyone else seems to be enjoying.

[00:24:45] Well, it can't be that bad if everyone else is eating it. And I ate it and I was like, Oh, that's what it's meant to taste like. Right. Okay. And then I sort of watched Tanya. You know, she. Sort of showed me that fish wasn't meant to be cooked for 45 minutes in the oven in just foil You can flash fry it in a pan.

[00:25:02] It's really nice And you know She said she taught me all about sort of not taught me directly like I was never sort of next to her or like, you know on her knee They had a really gorgeous open plan kitchen Which I would always sit at us like a bar stool and just watch her while she cooked and like she had this amazing in amazing cupboard full of Not just sort of rosemary, bay, sage, cumin, but she had all these like dukkahs and, and zug and, and herb and spice rubs and pastes and, and jars and like in a really Otolenghi kind of style way.

[00:25:36] And her fridge was just always full of amazing ingredients that I've never heard of and like marinated olives and things like that. And it was just like a real. Eye opener to how food could be. Yeah. Yeah. So it was a real, yeah, it was really cool. So, so I learned a lot from her over those kind of years and I would put what she was doing into practice in my own house as well when I could.

[00:25:57] So that, yeah, so I, I learned from mostly. Got the basics from my parents and then it was sort of Tanya's, Tanya's doing, which really influenced it. And now I must, I must say that my, my current, my current boyfriend, that seems like I'm going to have another string of them. My, my, my long term, my longterm partner, um, his dad is a really, really good cook.

[00:26:15] And so I've learned loads of stuff from him. Like I learned about like Lao Gan Ma chili oil from Martin and um, like loads of Asian inspired food from him and you know, how to do, how to do lots of things on barbecues and he's got a, he's got a. pizza oven and, oh, it's great. And he loves Italian food. So I've, I've learned like sort of by proxy.

[00:26:34] I've been with Lewis for five years, so yeah, thank you. Boyfriend's parents. Yeah, that's really

[00:26:42] Lucy Dearlove: interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of, that makes a lot of sense to me. the way you're talking about that, because I think one thing that really struck me reading the book was that the kind of recipes, and I don't want to like give myself too much credit here because I'm not a recipe writer at all, but I think the recipes that you've included in the book really reminded me of the way I like to cook, which is I think quite, I think quite typical of like, an English person that's interested in food, where you don't necessarily have a deep rooted kind of historic food culture of your own.

[00:27:13] You know, like, again, I think similar to you, like, my parents are really good cooks, and they've definitely, like, the way they cook has changed over the years, but I definitely grew up, like, eating lots of mince based things, like, eating stuff that was, um, not necessarily plain, but kind of... Spiced in a way that was very, like, typical of, I guess, like, the 90s.

[00:27:33] Fliss Freeborn: Yeah, really, really similar to

[00:27:35] Lucy Dearlove: you, yeah. And so the way that you kind of, like, acknowledge the origins of things, but bring in, you know, it's very much like, I think that is how a lot of people in this country cook and eat, so.

[00:27:45] Fliss Freeborn: Yeah, definitely. I, I kind of, I consider myself really boring in terms, which I am, you know, I'm typically white, middle class, absolutely no sort of proper food culture that.

[00:27:58] You know, if I was, if I was Cornish, so I grew up in Cornwall and if I was Cornish working class, you know, that would have been sort of pasties and saffron buns and things like that. But it's not, it's not even my culture because I drew from everywhere. And as you say, I kind of, there's this kind of tepidness to a lot of English cooking, which I want to, which I really enjoy, like, I think I quite like it.

[00:28:20] But yeah, whenever I've referenced anything that's not from my culture or it's been inspired by something else, like I've been really sensitive about that because there's been a lot of issues in the past of white middle class people who are taking. Recipes that perhaps don't belong to them or cultures that perhaps don't belong to them and, and profiting off them.

[00:28:40] And I really desperately want to avoid that. I think by proxy of having a recipe book with like stuff like Thai style things, like there's some sort of fine line to be trodden, but you know, where I have referenced other cultures, I have been very clear that, you know, this is not, this is not mine. Because I ate basically mince and potatoes or mince and rice or mince and whatever for growing up nearly every meal, like we wouldn't have a particularly varied, when dad was away we didn't have a particularly varied diet, so I now have this like Uh, sort of compulsion not to eat the same meal twice.

[00:29:15] Like I'm quite happy to have leftovers for lunch. Interesting. Or like put a fried egg on top or whatever. Like make it sort of, you know, since the way, but I, I, I have like a visceral aversion to eating the same thing for tea twice in a row.

[00:29:26] Lucy Dearlove: And so is that why you've written the recipes in the book for two?

[00:29:29] Yeah. Rather than like, you know, some of the specifically for a crowd. Yeah, some of them. Yeah, that makes a lot of

[00:29:35] Fliss Freeborn: sense. So the majority come for two because I think, Because you can have it for lunch the next day or you can split it with a partner. That's a kind of like, I also think that it's a lot easier to cook for two than it is for one, because you know, you're using a tin of tomatoes rather than two, you know, this is the practical side of that as well.

[00:29:50] But yeah, I, um, actually literally yesterday I cooked a sort of a very loose take on lasagna. I had a leftover sausage ragu in the freezer and I was just like, I don't want to put that just with pasta. So I'll put that in lasagna and I didn't have it. I couldn't be asked to make bechamel. So I put like cream cheese and ricotta and stuff.

[00:30:05] Lay it up and then Perfect. Yeah, I'd run out Anyway, I made this lasagna and I had a portion, then Lewis took something for work today and he was like, well, you gonna do the rest of it? I was like, I'll have it for lunch. He was like, oh, why don't you have some more of tea? And I was, I'm not, no, I I will make something else.

[00:30:20] And you know, that's, and I'm very lucky that I can do that 'cause I, you know, I don't have kids. I can work from home. Yeah. I have all these sort of things in place that allow me to do so. And I know that not everyone's as lucky as that. Or not everyone can be bothered. I definitely can , like it's one of my things if I've had a really bad day.

[00:30:34] I cook something and that just makes it all better. Like the other day, I had a real downer, I don't know why I had a real downer a couple of weeks ago. I think it was just, I just planned the book launch and I was just like, kind of anticipating it for it to happen and then my brain was like, it's going to go wrong, everyone's going to hate you.

[00:30:49] They're going to leave you one star Amazon reviews. Yeah, exactly. And so I just like deep fried like half kilo of chicken thighs and I was like that'll do. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So I have to, I have this kind of like weird compulsion to cook something different every day of the week. But yes, that's why the recipes in the book are so varied and like, you know, they, they, they exist.

[00:31:09] As you say on this kind of plane of, this is an English person cooking someone else's dishes, and but like taking influence from everywhere, but it's still varied and it's still like quite different. And you could quite happily work your way through the book and have something different to eat for, you know, how many recipes are there?

[00:31:23] More than 75 actually, because 75 was kind of a round number that I came down to. But um, yeah. But when you consider all the variations

[00:31:29] Lucy Dearlove: and I

[00:31:32] realise this is asking you. A bit like choosing your favourite child, but, um, are there any recipes in the book that are particularly close to your heart? Can you talk me through one or two of them, just kind of, a little bit of context about how you developed them and where you've cooked them for people?

[00:31:50] So one

[00:31:50] Fliss Freeborn: of the, my, so my favourite recipe in the book, and it is like choosing between your favourite children, but my mother's not found that so difficult, so, um, So, um, my, that's a big joke, I love you mum. Fred loves you too. Um, I, um, my favourite recipe The muscle linguine. I originally did it as a series of limericks, but actually it, you don't even have to like fry onions for it.

[00:32:11] It takes a supermarket packet of muscles, uh, that, you know, they're quite cheap and you can, you just, most people bypass them, they come in like a cream and wine sauce. And you mix that with a bit of fried off cherry tomatoes, garlic. Lemon zest and chili flakes or fresh chili if you have it. And then you sort of toss that all together and then you put it around cooked pasta with an absolute boatload of fresh parsley and more lemon juice.

[00:32:33] And that is just like, it's the freshest, summer iest dish, which you can kind of have year round if you really wanted to. Um, but I've cooked that. When camping quite a lot because as a first night thing, because obviously you don't want to keep muscles, but if you've just gone to the supermarket for your camping dish and it's in the middle of summer and you're by a loch or you're by the sea, it's just such a lovely thing to have.

[00:32:54] And if you can forage your own muscles even better, but, but it's, um, so I cook, I've cooked that when camping a fair amount, which has been really, really nice because it's kind of gourmet. Really. It feels really, really posh to have that. It's actually really cheap. So I love doing that one. That's one of my absolute favorite ones.

[00:33:10] Um, I think about another one that's really, really close to my heart. I absolutely love the chocolate fudge cake, the pizza express chocolate fudge cake. I love that reference. I kind of had, I kind of, I was a baker. I'd always made chocolate sponge just by sort of substituting like a couple of tablespoons of flour out for the cocoa powder in a Victoria sponge kind of way, which is fine.

[00:33:31] It makes a really nice. sort of very light chocolate sponge. But I, I, when I say I like chocolate, I like chocolate and I like things to be as chocolatey as chocolatey possible. And so I came across a very American recipe for it and I've kind of like tweaked it and made it my own and I always cook that if there's a celebration happening, I will do that enormous chocolate fudge cake actually.

[00:33:52] So that's why it's close to my heart. Um. When I graduated during COVID and we didn't really know what to do for the kind of graduation presents and party. And I lived with, I lived with three other girls who like my sisters and we were like, Oh, we need to get each other something for graduate, you know, we're graduating.

[00:34:09] What do you want? And we all, I think Amanda made us like little key rings out of clay and it was very cute. And then Eve, uh, so Lucy did something else and Eve did something really lovely. And then I said, Oh God, I don't know what to do. They said to me. Or can you cook us a recipe of our choosing, you know, on the weeks leading up to us moving out of the house.

[00:34:28] And Eve said to me, can you make that enormous, really just chocolaty as chocolate cake you can? Can you make it? Can you make it for me? Can I just have it to myself? And I said, yes. Absolutely. So I made her this chocolate cake and I've got a great photo of her in a dressing gown sitting on the counter in our student kitchen, just with this enormous slab of chocolate cake.

[00:34:48] I think it might have even been the day. I think it even might have been the day we graduated. Disclaimer, she didn't have it all to herself. We did eat it all together, but she had the first slice. And, um, yeah, she, she loved it. So yeah, we had

[00:34:59] Lucy Dearlove: that. I love just coming back to your first, the choice of your first recipe.

[00:35:04] I love the kind of references to cooking while camping in the book. I do a lot of it. It just, the first time, I think, I can't remember what the first reference was to it, but I was like, and it really took me by surprise. I

[00:35:16] Fliss Freeborn: was like, huh? Yeah, it would have been the Tex Mex tomatoes and beans. It's like the fajita.

[00:35:20] Yeah. So it's. So it's a, it's a bake, it's frying bacon lardons with fajita spice mix, a tin of tomatoes and a tin of mixed beans. Like that's it, but it's such an easy thing to do when you're camping. So yeah, but I do a lot of camping. I do a lot of being outside. I need to, I always say like, if I didn't spend too much time on LinkedIn reading like PR jargon and you know, I need to go and touch leaf.

[00:35:39] So I go and do that quite a lot. I'm actually going camping, I'm going snorkeling and camping on Friday. Um, so I'll probably be camping, I'll probably be

[00:35:45] Lucy Dearlove: making some. I mean, that sounds like advice. Advice we should all take. Go and touch leaf. Uh, but actually it's a great analogy for, um, straightforward cooking because obviously you're limited in the, what you can carry with you.

[00:35:58] You're limited in what you can do. So it's actually a really, it works so well in a cookbook like well, if you can do it over a little stove. The

[00:36:05] Fliss Freeborn: pesto pasta thing was also, that was developed when I was camping as well. Yeah. I took it, I kind of was. There's a kind of culture within the mountaineering club I joined of like, what you eat for your tea is a jar of Freddie Mae pesto and tortellini, and you know, it's got loads of calories, it's kind of easy to take in, you don't have to worry about it.

[00:36:20] But I was just like, oh, I'm really, I need to elevate this, this is kind of boring, and I really don't like being bored with food. Probably because I was bored with food as a child. And so I kind of took him with me, like half a floret of broc, like a broccoli florets in a bag, like with some spinach, half a lemon and two tins of mackerel.

[00:36:36] And I sort of mixed it around this pesto pasta with fusilli. And I was like, Oh, this is really good. I think it must've been. 18 at the time, like really early on. And then the friend hadn't brought any food, he'd forgotten his food, he'd left it on the bus or something. God. And I'd obviously made loads 'cause I'm incapable of cooking for one

[00:36:52] And so I was like, have some of this. And he was like, how did you make this? This is really good. And I was like, well maybe I have got something here. So yeah, there's all these recipes sort of come in from different angles and yeah, a lot of it is developed outside.

[00:37:02] Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, I mean this comes back to what you're saying about like it's just food.

[00:37:05] It's just food. You know, you can write about it in a specific way, but like anyone can cook it. Yeah,

[00:37:09] Fliss Freeborn: anyone could cook it. And you know, I'm kind of prepared to have a bit of backlash for, for saying things like use fresh herbs, or here's where you could probably put some capers in if you wanted. And then people go, what sort of student has that in her cupboard?

[00:37:22] So, well actually quite a lot of them

[00:37:23] Lucy Dearlove: these days. And also like, it's nice to know, for people that don't have it, it's nice to know that you can do that. Like give people permission. Oh yeah, and

[00:37:31] Fliss Freeborn: I've do the nice things. I've got a lot of substitutions and stuff in there. And I've also kind of done, you know, I've pointed out if there's a real budget way that you can do this, here's how to do it.

[00:37:39] I think for the, I've got a sort of tie style coconut green curry, and I've said I've, I've indicated, you know, if you wanna add. Pak choy and you know, these fish sauce and all that, that's great. Please go ahead because that's very authentic. You know, you've got lemongrass and galangal, do it. If you haven't got that and you know, and I've said it very caveatedly, like I am not Thai, you know, this is not a Thai curry.

[00:38:03] You can substitute it for cabbage and spinach and the cheaper stuff and you can add soy sauce rather than this, that and the other. And I kind of like to give people the options of like picking and choosing which kind of level they're at with it. And so, yeah, I mean. I'm sure there's something that I've lost there by making it as broad as possible.

[00:38:17] I'm sure there's an audience that I've lost, but I will . Well, you can't win '

[00:38:21] Lucy Dearlove: em all. You can't win them. Can't win 'em all.

[00:38:25] Leer is hosted and produced by me, Lucy. Dear Love. Thanks to my guest, Fliss Freeborn. Do Yourself A Flavor is out now published by Eey Press as part of the monthly Leer Book Club. I'll be writing about the book over on the Leer CK Patreon. Have you been cooking from it too? Come and chat about your favourite recipes in the comments or tag me on Instagram when you post your finished dishes.

[00:38:47] I'd love to see them. And another reminder that you can sign up as a paid subscriber to support LECA on Apple Podcasts, Patreon and also now on Substack. Links are in the show notes. And to any paid subscribers who are listening here, thank you so much for your continued support. And if you've made it all this way through the credits, here is an extra little treat for you, a kind of funny nail in the coffin of student cookbooks.

[00:39:14] I remembered the name of one I was given as a teenager. I'm not going to name it here because, you know, I've taken a leaf out of Fliss's book. I'm not going to be too shady. And I looked up the author out of curiosity. She was a teenager when she wrote this book, or very, a young person, shall we say. But.

[00:39:34] Turns out that not only was her mum a food writer, she was also from a, let's say, pretty well known family. So, based on that example alone, I think Fliss's point about how people who write student cookbooks are out of touch is pretty accurate. Music on this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. Lekker Book Club will be back in September with another delicious read for your kitchen bookshelves.

[00:40:02] Thanks for listening.