"I'm just a chancer who writes books!"
Maria Bradford on writing the first internationally published Sierra Leonean cookbook, Sweet Salone.
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Lecker Book Club is a new monthly feature spotlighting a recently released book within the genre of food writing. As well as a podcast interview with the author, you can find additional content here. As the name suggests, I’d love this to be a conversation. Have you read the book? Are you cooking from it? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Sweet Salone by Maria Bradford is out now, published by Quadrille.
You can find all the Lecker Book Club picks on my Bookshop.org list.
Peckham Rye station doesn’t give much away. Its tracks slice neatly past the Bussey Building, across Rye Lane, coming to a halt high above Blenheim Grove. Alighting the train there, you can peep down at the Georgian townhouses, even down into the arches below: tap rooms, tattoo studios, yoga spaces. But it’s only once you descend the stairs of the station – slowly, cautiously creeping forward in the inevitable crowd through the barriers, exit into the small grey yard, walk down the alley past Jenny’s, and the fruit and vegetable stalls, that you truly arrive in Peckham. And here – unexpectedly – is where Maria Bradford felt herself come home.
“Whilst I was at uni I was cooking a lot, experimenting with ingredients. And then I found Peckham. Because I was living in Kent, so I didn't know Peckham existed. The day that I found Peckham, oh my God, it was like, how come nobody thought to tell me!”
As a teenager, a few years before, Maria had come to the UK from Sierra Leone.
“And the insane thing was, I got off the train at Peckham and there was people speaking Krio.”
This was the first time she’d heard Krio spoken, one of her native languages, since leaving Sierra Leone.
“Do you know, it was just such an amazing feeling. I could have cried, seriously. The hustle, the bustle, it just felt like I was in Sierra Leone and it just felt [like] home.”
One of the aspects of living in London that I love the most is finding out about layers to life there that are invisible or inaccessible to me. A friend stayed in my flat last summer and told me she had heard through the open window someone, perhaps in their garden, speaking Korean in a regional accent that matched her own. It made her feel at home, she said, and I was both moved and fascinated by this. I could have heard this person speaking too, countless times! And never recognised which country they were from, let alone which city. I love that we can feel at home somewhere, but not necessarily know everything to it, just simply appreciate the complexity of life there.
And it wasn’t just the languages on the streets of Peckham that made Maria feel at home.
“I could find ingredients that I could relate to. There was plantain, there was cassava, I had so many bags, you know. I wanted to buy the whole Peckham and take it with me and it was so exciting.”
When it came to writing her debut cookbook Sweet Salone, it was crucial for Maria to represent this part of her story.
“There's a lot of positive obviously that I wanted to write about, when it comes to my childhood, but it's also writing about reality. But you open up, there are people who read that and it resonates with them. Especially when it comes to like, things like immigration stories. You know, there are lots of migrants, here in the UK and other parts of the world.
I'm sure we all have similar stories and similar feelings and, this book is very much written where you're missing home, you're missing food, you're missing people and all of that gets blended into one and you find yourself in this new world, in this new space and you're trying to find yourself.
And how do you find yourself? You find yourself through food, through the things which is so familiar, not finding that initially such a rude awakening. It's not just like you're learning about a new place, isn't it?
You're also learning new food, new cuisine, new ingredients. Not necessarily as a cook, but as an eater. Somebody who just loves to eat. Somebody who's grown around food. Somebody who's grown around lots of family members. I grew up in a house where there's siblings. There's my mum. My grandmother, there's lots of aunties, there's lots of uncles. Everything was surrounded around food and everything was surrounded around celebrating food.
And all of a sudden, there are new and exciting ingredients, of course. Like, I've never had strawberry, I've never had blackberry. So it's all new and exciting, so you should be enjoying it. But at the same time, you're not able to enjoy it because you're missing home.
You can't relate to it. Now I can relate to strawberry. You know, now I'm a Kentish woman, so I can relate to it! It's like, in the summer if I don't eat strawberry, I'm like, what's happening? You know, if I go away and I'm sitting in Sierra Leone, I should be enjoying it, I'm like…I wish I was eating strawberries, you know, but it's such a, it's such a strange thing, isn't it?”
It wasn’t just the local fruit that piqued her interest. Maria wanted to soak it all in.
“So you quickly start learning about things. I've always loved reading anyway. So you quickly start typing and googling or researching. Not really googling, there wasn't that much googling. Researching and asking a lot of questions about, and being really curious. I've always been curious about food anyway. So asking a lot of questions.
But it's also weird when a teenage person is asking someone, what is strawberry? You want to learn. And you want to know. I always say that's my superpower because I don't only know about all the exotic stuff. I also have new knowledge and new power of knowing all this new stuff that a lot of people don't know.
So yeah, you know, I'm the best. I know everything! I'm like my own Google. You know everything that you've grown up around, all these amazing exotic ingredients and you also know all this new stuff. So everything keeps being exciting and it's only when you find that comfort and that balance and you start settling because it takes some time to do that.”
After university Maria started a career in accounting and finance, met her husband, had two children. But her ever-present love of food was about to change the direction of her life. She catered a relative’s wedding as a favour, and was blown away by the response of the guests.
“Everybody kept asking – people that I didn't know – asking for my card, asking how they can contact me. I was like, what? Really? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then 2017, I started my first Instagram post of her wedding.
And I was actually really shocked by how many people were liking what I was doing. Then, of course, that encourages you to do more, to experiment a bit more, but I was still working.
And then you know, my husband was like, maybe these drinks that people have been telling you is really nice, the chili sauce and all of that, maybe you should bottle it and we do try farmer's market. So I did. And farmer's market again was a massive shocker and eye opener.
We just did a taster. I ran out, that day of farmer's markets. I had lots of drinks and I ran out, I ran out of all the chili sauce, ran out of all the drinks. I didn't know British people liked chili that much until that farmer's market! They were putting it on everything. So I was just like, okay…
Still, I had this thing where I,…maybe it's the African in me, but I've studied for everything that I called myself, you know, I've gone to school, gone and had a degree, blah, blah, blah.
So I just felt like, you know, I needed to dig deeper into this food. I know a lot about food. I know a lot about ingredients and I cook a lot from recipes and that, but I wanted to go to culinary school just to dig more. So I went to Leiths.
I always thought I was academic until I got to Leiths and I actually realised I was made for cooking because everything just kind of…it was like a puzzle fitting in perfectly. It was just, uh, the best thing and I remember him saying, like, it's going to be stressful. And then I never once found it stressful. For me, I felt like it was a place where I could go and relax.
While she relished the depth of the learning at Leiths, its classic French cooking approach wasn’t without its tensions.
“I had knife skills, you know, of cutting potato leaf with my hand and doing it perfectly in a traditional Sierra Leonean way. But, I didn't have a European knife skills that were for chefs. So I went there and pick up those skills and just blended it in with what I knew already.
There also, I realised that there was a massive space for what I do. Because there were lots of times where I really wanted to have a conversation with tutors about my food and what I know as food. It was easy for them to have conversation with the Italian, the Spanish and that, but not as easy for them to interact with me with food that was very much my culture, my food…food that a baby would know, for example. So, that was a little bit frustrating, I'm not going to lie, because you're in a space where you're meant to be learning about food. So of course, you want everybody involved in that space to know a bit more about people coming from different angles.
But there was that shortcoming, which I've spoken to them about, but it still didn't take away the fact that I learnt a lot. And I learnt that, also, there's room for what I do, there's space for what I do, and I think it's very, very important that I am in this space, because people need to know that there are other people across. the barrier of food, this food chain or hierarchy that's been done. There are other people on the other side of that, and their voices need to be heard too. So it just made me want to push even further.”
Reading Sweet Salone has been very educational for me personally, someone who had pretty much zero knowledge of Sierra Leonean food before. And – like it was for me – reading this book could be the first formal encounter many people in the UK have with the country’s culinary culture and history.
“So this is the first Sierra Leonean book published by an international publisher. So there was lots of pressure, because you're almost like setting the standards…and you're hoping somebody beats it all the time. I'm hoping somebody does something that's even more amazing. But you want to do so much justice.
So there's lots of pressure and lots of research that goes into it. And we don't have a culture of people writing recipes down. In African culture, you really have to earn it for your mum to reveal what goes into that sauce. She feels like you need to be in the kitchen, burn your hand a little bit…a lot. Maybe have a few slices on your arm and really earn your rights to those recipes.
And then once you've earned those rights and you can say, I can cook. It's so important to us because quite a lot of time our food is so tied to heritage and so, of course, so they feel like you need to earn that. You start digging into your own food, into your own culture, and then you realise…wow. You know, my ancestors were geniuses because, there's a lot of thought, lots of effort that gone into everything that they've been doing and why they put A and B together and why it works so well.
Why is it that when you put ogirie and palm oil together and it's boiling and you can be anywhere, it just takes you home? You know, it's such an amazing thing to realize all of a sudden, but writing this cookbook really, really made me feel extremely proud. I've always been proud of being Sierra Leonean and an African, but it really just takes you one step closer to the people who had come before you.”
In person, Maria is charming, hilarious and full of so much wisdom and knowledge that I’m bowled over by how generous and enlightening our conversation is. Because of this, I’m even more surprised by something she writes in Sweet Salone: that she found the book really hard to write. Why was this? I asked her.
“It is very hard because for me I feel like writing involves really almost forgetting everything that's happening outside, sitting down and focusing on that one thing that you're doing. And my brain doesn't necessarily work like that.
You know, I'll be lying in bed and I'm thinking about recipes. I've tasted something somewhere and I'm thinking, Ooh, I can put this and this together. I wake up in the morning and I'm thinking I need to go to the supermarket, I need to call Becky who supplies vegetables and say, can I have this, this and this? And I want to be in the kitchen making notes as well as trying things out. And sometimes we try, one million times failed, but I like that process because it means I'm doing something.
And writing is so different. And it's not something that I've done before. The last time I wrote anything like this was a dissertation. I do write with Instagram and that, but it's always like fun stuff and there's no structure to it.
I had two amazing people working with me. I had Sarah and I had Susan as well [from Quadrille]. And they're both like, very detailed individuals which works for me because I plan everything. I like to know what I'm doing today, tomorrow, and so on and so forth and that.
And I prefer talking to people rather than sitting down and emailing or writing to them. So that part I found really hard because once they've read over your stuff, they have to send it back all in…massive writing thing. And then you have to read it, read it and sit down where I just want to pick the phone and just say, let's talk about this and why I'm not changing it. And why I'm keeping that. And now you have to document everything.
So those processes, it's hard to navigate and that, but I just felt it was really important. It's a new skills that I never thought I had as well, cause I wouldn't have called myself a writer at all, and even now, like, it's hard to think of myself as an author.
I'm a chancer who writes books.”
Sweet Salone by Maria Bradford is out now, published by Quadrille.
You can find all the Lecker Book Club picks on my Bookshop.org list.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity. If you would like to hear a longer version of my conversation with Maria, click here for the podcast.
You can follow Maria Bradford on Instagram and you can follow Lecker there too.
Have you got a copy of Sweet Salone? What have you been cooking from it? Let me know in the comments if you have, I’d love to hear!