The best food writing is personal

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘The best food writing is personal’

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Lilah Raptopoulos
There’s something about food. When I read a story that uses food to help tell it, suddenly I’m doing more than reading. I’m feeling the food in my hands, and I’m smelling and tasting it. I’m hearing the chopping or the crackling or the sizzling. I’m associating it with my own memories. Cooking and eating is one of the most sensory experiences we have, and that makes food writing one of my favourite kinds of writing ever. For me, it’s transportive and it’s the perfect vehicle for stories. My colleague Ravinder Bhogal agrees. 

Ravinder Bhogal
I remember Nigel Slater saying to me, you know, I’m not interested in the recipe for lasagna. I’m interested in the recipe for your lasagna and what the story behind it is. And I think that, that’s it. It’s the stories that make the food. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Ravinder’s family is from India. She grew up in Kenya and she has a restaurant in London now called Jikoni. Her columns in the FT and her cookbooks are all infused with stories from these places. She recently joined me on stage at the FT Weekend Festival with two other food-based storytellers, Angela Hui and Kitty Tait, to talk about the power of food writing. We’re gonna share the best parts of that conversation with you today.

Angela is a journalist. She recently wrote a very popular memoir about working at her parents’ Chinese takeaway in rural Wales. It’s called Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter. Kitty is just 19 years old and she is one of the most popular bakers on Instagram and TikTok. Kitty owns a bakery with her dad in Oxfordshire and they wrote a beautiful book together about baking and how baking saved her life, called Breadsong.

This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining. Welcome to a panel that I am really thrilled to host. It’s kind of my dream panel. So I’d love to start by hearing first how you came to tell your stories through food. I know it’s different for all of you a little bit. Katie, maybe we could start with you. Could you take us a bit into how you first discovered baking bread and then at what point you realised, wait, there might be a book here? 

Kitty Tait
Yeah, of course. So when I was 14, I started to really struggle with my mental health. And almost out of the blue, I just became overwhelmed with this crippling anxiety and depression. And baking was my way of not only finding purpose, but also just distracting myself from all these thoughts that were just constantly running around my brain. So by writing about food, and especially in the book that I wrote with my dad, Breadsong, it wasn’t just a way about writing about food. I think it was a way about talking about mental health in a way that was joyful and that gave you something out of it, not just dark and hard. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I loved it. It’s really wonderful. Angela, I’m curious at what point you realised that your family’s story was kind of perfect to be a memoir? You mentioned when we spoke that the takeaway was closing, but had you also always been thinking about writing this and been thinking about this as a topic that you were exploring in writing? 

Angela Hui
I’ve always, you know, had all these thoughts and ideas and recipes. You know, I grew up in an environment where, you know, working behind the counter since I was like eight years old, you know, stepping on a little blue stool to reach the counter, you know, struggling to reach over to give customers like big two-litre bottles of Coke and, you know, deep-frying chicken balls and chips. And, you know, I’ve always felt that, you know, I never really realised like how unique that experience was, how for everyone had a professional kitchen (laughter) a personal kitchen. And then, yeah, it wasn’t until then that, we closed the shop in 2018 and then it made me really reflect on all those times, all the good times, the bad times. And then it just made me realise like how that’s kind of dying out, you know, declining takeaways for loads of reasons. So I really wanted to have a, just kind of, write down all those thought processes of, you know, working this very thankless job. It was so much bigger than food for the Chinese takeaway. It was about the community itself, the people that we served. And, you know, a lot of these customers that walk through the door, they watched me and my brothers grow up behind the counter. And I really wanted to kind of tell that story. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Ravinder, you’re coming at this from the perspective of a cookbook writer and a writer and a chef. And I’m curious what’s made you over the years, like, infuse personal stories and history in your writing? Has that always been the way you wanted to cook, sort of combining those things? 

Ravinder Bhogal
Yeah. I’ve always really been interested in the stories of women particularly. You know, I grew up in a house in Kenya. It was an extended family, so my grandparents, my uncle, my aunt, their children, the five of us and my parents, and then whoever happened to be visiting. And the kitchen just seemed to be a place that was full of stories, women’s stories. And these were really, really ordinary women, but with extraordinary stories. They cooked for their families and never really got a platform, and their stories were never told. And the kitchen was often the place where these women sort of, you know, therapised in a way. And I always wanted to capture that. And I just think that food is actually ultimately always about people, whether you’re throwing a dinner party or whether you’re running a restaurant. It is, it’s an industry about people. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been thinking over the past couple of weeks in preparation for this about why I love food writing so much, and I think you can just tell so many stories about culture and identity through it. And like, our identities are so wrapped up in what we eat. And also everybody eats, right? So there’s something, like, everybody breathes, but that’s way less interesting of a lens and everybody eats and it’s like they eat in kind of different ways, but in the same way in some ways. And so everyone can relate to stories that use food. 

Ravinder Bhogal
And I think everyone’s experiences of eating as well is so unique. Like, culturally, you know, who you grow up with and where you grow up. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I’m curious . . . Yeah, I just would like to pass it to both of you, like, why use food to tell our stories? Why? Why do it in the first place? Why does food work in ways that just telling the story? 

Angela Hui
I think with food is, like, everyone has their own relationship to food, whether it’s good and brings them joy, whether if it’s bad, where, you know, it’s tied up with very traumatic memories or, you know, they just kind of reject food. I think that’s what makes food so interesting. And I tried to talk about, you know, some of the times it necessarily doesn’t always bring joy. You know, sometimes there’s a lot of stress. You know, when you’re working in the kitchen, it’s a very tight space, it’s busy and it’s hot and you’re ending up like shouting over each other or like throwing things. You know, it’s a very heated environment and a high-pressure job. And I kind of wanted to talk about all the different ways in which food kind of has different intersections of a way, you know, how food can also be political, how also food can be tied up in identity like you talk about as well. And I tried to talk through the kind of rollercoaster journey of what it’s like running a, you know, independent Chinese takeaway. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah.

Ravinder Bhogal
I think you’re absolutely right as well that, you know, food is life. So it is everything. It’s joy, it’s pain, it’s sadness, it’s grief. But, you know, I think it’s really important that we publish, especially as cookbook authors, that we, you know, we push with our publishers to allow, be allowed to tell the whole story. And I think that’s, when I was writing my last book, I struggled with that because there were stories that I’d written that they were like, oh, this feels a bit sort of dark. And are you sure you want to include this story? And there was one in particular which was, it looked at the politics of food for widows, and it was this story about a woman having flashbacks of a very unhappy marriage that involved domestic violence and then sort of, in her sort of lull and stupor, she begins to eat rasgullas which are normally eaten on a celebration. And it’s the judgment of the community that happens and, you know, the whispers about her. And it was such an important story for me to include in the book because it’s important we have these conversations and look at ourselves as people and sort of examine what, like you said again, these women’s stories that are very untold. Luckily they agreed with me and (laughter) persuasive and they kept it in. So, yeah. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s great. I actually, I do want to ask you all about your relationship with disclosure, because when you’re telling your personal story through food, you’re also telling a lot about yourself. And Ravinder, one of my favourite things about your column is that sometimes it can get a little bit dark. (Laughter) I actually think that’s really moving and interesting for columns about food. One of your columns last year that I really loved and we’ve talked about was about a Kenyan bread called mandazi, like a doughnut. And it’s related to a difficult memory of your uncle. 

Ravinder Bhogal
Yeah, it’s, and it’s always difficult because of course my uncle has children, and to write a story about him is always, is always going to be a very difficult thing because it’s triggering for them. And so, I grew up with him. He was an alcoholic and he basically, I mean, he’s an alcoholic but he was a party animal. He loved life and, you know, his life and sort of party. So when I was very young, he built this sort of wooden bar in our house and then basically through these crazy parties. And I remember as a child, seeing people, you know, coming out of the rooms, bedrooms, you know, locked bedrooms, kind of doing up their clothes or falling acrobatically downstairs and the tinkle of glasses and strangers in the house all the time and this kind of discord and chaos. So, you know, we would drink sodas, ice cold sodas at 11:00. We would watch vampire movies. And then no one really noticed whether we were having dinner or not. So often we would go down to the kiosk to buy mandazi, which are like these amazing doughnuts that are really pillowy and sort of just like bread-like and delicious. They’re a very typical Kenyan doughnut and they’d fried hot, you know, you eat them when they’re hot. But my uncle’s nickname for me was Mandazi as a child. So when he died on one Christmas Eve, just suddenly drop dead, you know, a massive heart attack and his liver was going anyway, and I remember that Christmas Eve making mandazi and eating them, and they just tasted of remembrance and mourning and sadness. But they were delicious and comforting too. So yeah, that was the whole . . . But yeah, it’s always difficult to decide, you know, when you’re going to write about these people who are real and had real lives and that line of respect that you don’t cross, and some people, my husband hates being written about. (Laughter) So he’s always like, can you get me out of your columns? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Maybe. (Laughter) Maybe.

Kitty, I’m conscious that you are 19. Is that right? Yeah. And you came to sort of be known publicly at 16?

Kitty Tait
Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And your story is very centred around your struggles with mental health. And it’s like a real joy for many people, even who don’t know you personally to see how well you’re doing now and learn from you and to like get so much joy from the work that you do. But I also wonder what it’s like to have shared it. And you know, none of our mental health is static, but I imagine, yeah. 

Kitty Tait
Yeah, because it would be so easy to be like, oh, so I’d be baking bread, and then I was fine. And then anxiety and depression. Ooh! . . . But that wasn’t the way at all. So at first it became this amazing tool for me to really, like, transform my brain. But then and I don’t know how you found this, when lockdown hit, I was running the bakery and people just went mad. So I went from like five days a week to seven days a week. And I was working through the night and I was working, it feels was a 12 hour day, I was like, oh, that was easy because I ended up doing 16 hours and my mental health just fragmented again. But this time the thing that had helped me, the thing that had really brought me back was the thing that was now slowly destroying me. And it’s one of those things, like you said, food is complicated and making food is complicated because you are in service to people. And despite how passionate you can be, being so passionate means you can also become a bit of a slave to it. And I had to really work on making sure that bread was just a passion of mine. But it wasn’t my whole life. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Angela, I want to ask you how your parents responded, but you told me that your parents don’t speak much English and haven’t read it? (Laughter)

Angela Hui
Haven’t read it, which I’m really scared of. But it’s being translated to Chinese next year, so I’m very worried. (Laughter) No, no, no. It’s, can this have like, you know, I really struggled with imposter syndrome and anxiety about whether it was coming out because these are such personal details, you know, detailing of like what goes on in the shop and talking about very personal things like arguments that we would have. And my dad, who, you know, is quite big in the Chinese community where a lot of them are, you know, they would go to casinos after working in the kitchen all day and they needed some way to, you know, relieve stress. So I kind of detail a lot of that. And I think a lot of a lot of them, like Chinese community, they’re very secretive. So it’s it was very difficult for me. And I was really, really worried and scared, like what my family members would say. And I think my mum was the one that actually gave me some really great advice while I was writing my book. And I was really scared of when it was coming out. And my mum was just like, As long as you’ve kind of written it as honestly and truthfully and most authentically as yourself, and it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks. And that it’s coming from my point of view. You know, it’s only, no one else can kind of write your story for you. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And also to like when, it’s pretty amazing I imagine that like when you do publish about it, people come to you who haven’t had the exact experience that you have and say like, wow, thank you. That connected to me in a way that, you know, maybe you wouldn’t have expected. 

Angela Hui
Yeah. No. Exactly. Like, the other day, I get, I keep getting emails from people who’ve read my book and you know, they related to it, even though I never thought they would be my demographic. Like the other day, I had like a 97-year-old Irish man who emailed me saying like, oh, thank you for writing your book. You know, I grew up in a pub, I grew up since I was like eight years old. I worked behind the pub, you know, feeling like I had lost my childhood because I had to, you know, help my family. I had this family obligation to help out. But, you know, I read your book and I loved it, you know. And I never thought a 97-year-old Irish man would love this book. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I want to ask you all about form a little bit. All three of you have done a really amazing job breaking format. And there’s kind of like a very traditional way that people write about food or people write a book and they kind of just they write their story like a normal chapter book, and it goes out or they write recipes in a very specific way. But Kitty, your memoir is full of drawings and scribbles and handwritten notes. And some of the sentences are these big pull quotes. And halfway through it, you know, in the narrative, we’re like actually learning about bread with you. And then halfway through it, it just becomes a cookbook, which is amazing. And Angela, your memoir is kind of structured around recipes and the ones that meant something to you from the takeaway. And you know, Ravinder, your cookbook Jikoni is also kind of weaves very beautifully between story and recipes. And I’m curious if any of you can speak to that. Like, how did you think about format? How do you approach your work so it’s not just words on a page or traditional?

Kitty Tait
So for us, we did it during lockdown. So it was, we got Bloomsbury to publish it, which we were very, very lucky with. But apart from that, we were left to our own devices with it. And just like our story, our book is quite chaotic. So it starts with how we got into bread and we have these drawings that my dad drew on each page, and they are these scribbles, but they tell the story when words can’t. And I think to write it, it was something that I was very scared to do because it meant of going back to a time where I wasn’t very happy and actually writing about it. It made me go over those times and see it through a different light. And I wrote it with my dad, very much like pen pals.

And then when it came to the recipes, I think, I don’t know about you, when you look at recipe books, sometimes it can feel incredibly intimidating, especially baking books. And I so remember looking at these baking books and looking at the bread and just thinking my bread doesn’t look like that. But my kitchen also doesn’t look like that. And it was really important to us that we really included that. So the pictures are authentic and it is what we bake. But there’s flour in the corners, a little bit of like, honey, that spill over, because that is kind of the nature to my baking and my recipes, it’s chaos. And also, I mean, especially with bread, it’s very precise normally, and I’m not a precise person. So with all the recipes, it’s like, well, when it’s proved this much, it’s bready, not up to 3 hours because everyone’s kitchen is different and everyone’s process is different. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. 

Ravinder Bhogal
I think for me, when I wrote the Jikoni book, it was very much about memories, specific memories, specific stories that I felt very strongly that I had to tell. I think almost all the stories in the Jikoni book are about women, whether it’s the pickle maker who was this incredible woman. And I just remember these memories of kind of going to get pickles from her when I was a child, you know, a big satchel with empty jars and you turn up and she was deaf and she had, God, geese, not dogs. And you have to like sort of stand there shouting there for almost an hour sometimes. And then, you know, just the paraphernalia of her pickling shed and the smell, the strong smell of vinegar, you know, all these spices, this giant pestle and mortar. And then the way she lay down her pickles, almost like baked, you know, like making you want everything. And these were such strong memories. And they kind of led how the chapters would kind of form and what would go into the chapters, what recipes would be included in that. 

Angela Hui
Yeah. So mine has like recipes for every chapter. And I think, like, the top review was like, I didn’t buy a cookbook. I bought it for as a memoir. So people got really confused. (Laughter) No, so I specifically wanted it to kind of build the foundation of the book. You know, I’ve been slowly collecting recipes from my mum and, you know, in the lull between our when we were working the takeaway, we would always cook together because, you know, my Cantonese isn’t the best, you know, And I feel like me and my mum, or my parents, we always have like a language barrier and we kind of communicate through food. She always asks me, like, she doesn’t ask how you are. She asks, like, have you eaten yet or, like, have you had dinner or have you had your soup, or you know, caring and through action and through food? And so that was the way that we always bonded. So I wanted it as a way to kind of collect all the recipes. So that was the kind of foundations of it. But I really wanted to kind of weave all those different ways that we talk about food and how that kind of ties in to my story in the Chinese takeaway, you know, from like egg fried rice and also other foods my dad would kind of bribe me as well, there was like steamed eggs or whatever. My dad did something wrong or when he would shout at us or, you know, throw something because he was in the heat of the moment, he would always make it up through food. And, you know, so there was always food that was tied with kind of grief and happiness and trauma. So I really wanted to kind of bring all that together. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
So I have one more question for all of you. What advice would you give to people who want to start to do this themselves? How to tell their story through food? Yeah. What would you tell them? Kitty?

Kitty Tait
I think the biggest thing for us was the imposter syndrome, because everyone eats food. So you think, who needs another recipe book or who needs another. But actually, just go for it. And even if you make a difference to one Irish man, there’s one Irish man who was like, wow, there’s someone who has gone through similar or completely different but experience that I have. So go for it and just try. And it doesn’t have to be perfect. Your food doesn’t have to be picture-perfect. You don’t have to be a Michelin-star chef or a renowned baker or anything like that. You just have to put the joy or whatever you found in food, stories of passion and put it to paper ‘cause people will relate. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. 

Ravinder Bhogal
Absolutely. 

Angela Hui
As long as you’ve written it as authentically as you can, you know, no one else can tell your story. I feel like it’s as long as you tell it through with heart and a passion, and I think that’s what really matters. And it really does shine through. You can tell when someone’s very, when something’s like half-baked or undercooked or . . . Yeah, it’s a fun thing. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. That’s such good advice. Brilliant. Kitty, Angela, Ravinder, thank you so much. Thank you all so much for your questions and for being here.

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That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the Life & Arts podcast of the Financial Times. As you know, we love chatting with you. The show is on X, formerly known as Twitter. It’s @ftweekendpod and I am on Instagram and X, but mostly Instagram, talking with you about culture @lilahrap.

I am Lilah Raptopouloss and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Monique Mulima helped produce this episode. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer, and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week. 

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