People Know They'll Get Fed At Fliss's
Fliss Freeborn on how her student food blog propelled her to the publication of her debut cookbook, Do Yourself A Flavour
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Lecker Book Club is a 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.
Photo credit: Luke Albert
I meet Fliss Freeborn via our laptops in the middle of British summer. She’s in Glasgow, I’m in St. Leonards, but it’s grey and gloomy in both of our little screen squares. There’s a last minute emergency battery substitution in her audio recorder and then we’re ready to go. I tell her that I’m impressed she has a stock of double As so readily available in her house, thinking of the multiple recording jobs where I - a professional radio producer - have had to beg a guest for spare batteries so we can finish the interview. Fliss laughs, and tells me she always has them on hand for head torches. Head torches are an essential item in her house, always charged and ready to go on a camping trip.
The outdoors-y element of her book Do Yourself A Flavour took me slightly by surprise. In a recipe early on she talks about how it’s a really good camping dish, not requiring many perishable ingredients.
“Yeah, it would have been the Tex Mex tomatoes and beans. It's frying bacon lardons with fajita spice mix, a tin of tomatoes and a tin of mixed beans. That's it, but it's such an easy thing to do when you're camping. I do a lot of camping. I do a lot of being outside. I always say, if I spend too much time on LinkedIn reading like PR jargon, I need to go and touch leaf. So I go and do that quite a lot.”
You don’t have to be camping to make it. But if you know that you can prepare this in one pan over a little portable stove, with ingredients from a shop where the only other option for dinner is, as Fliss herself puts it, “vape-liquid, spam and condom casserole”, then the idea is planted in your head that this would be a very straightforward thing to make at home too. And that’s what the book is about, really.
Do Yourself A Flavour is kind of a student cookbook, but also kind of not. Fliss is definitely aware of the irony, having a couple of years back written a strongly worded piece for the Guardian about why student cookbooks are, mostly, a waste of your time and money. It’s not that people going to university don’t need a resource to consult when it comes to cooking for themselves – in many cases for the first time. They almost definitely do. But this is Fliss’s beef:
“My main huge ridiculous beef with student cookbooks is how sodding patronising they are. Look, if you're smart enough to get into university, you're smart enough to know how to chop an onion. The thing is, a lot of people haven't cooked before and the student cookbooks shouldn't be aimed at them.
I think a beginner cookbook is a completely different beast than a student cookbook. The best way obviously to learn is visually and it's via YouTube. I strongly maintain that cookbooks are kind of – as an instructional text from the very, very start – kind of null and void at the moment. They should be more of 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.
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 it starts with it starts with: here’s how you boil vegetables. Here's how you boil an egg. And then like by page 36, it's like, here's how to make roast duck with plum sauce. It's like, actually, no, people aren't gonna be doing these two things together.
So 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.
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 amazingly elevated meal rather than just your plain old pasta bake.”
Fliss also points out that the authors of many of the widely available student cookbooks are deeply out of touch with the average student experience. I think, anecdotally at least, that she’s right. When I went to university someone bought me a book called Cheaper Than Chips, Better Than Toast. I thought it was a nice book; it had a pleasing matte paperback cover and the title was written in alphabetti spaghetti. I don’t specifically remember actually cooking anything from it though, and I definitely haven’t opened since I dumped it on a bookshelf at my parents’ house many years ago. And when I looked up the author while making this episode, I found out that while she had written it while in her late teens, she wasn’t actually a student as far as I could tell. She was, however, the daughter of a food writer, and a member of a pretty famous family. So out of touch with the everyday experience is probably a reasonably fair assessment in this case.
Fliss has been very much in touch with the student experience in that she started her blog, Student Cuisine for the Gloomy Teen while actually at university, and signed the deal to write Do Yourself A Flavour very shortly after she finished. The path from one to the other, from blog to book, was unexpectedly paved with an out-of-the-blue tweet from the Observer’s restaurant critic Jay Rayner.
“[Jay] found me completely by accident on Twitter and shared my blog to his followers, unbeknownst to me. 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.
So I sort of took his words to heart really. And started pitching to newspapers about 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.
It was dropped into my lap essentially. It wasn't something that I had to go and query…I feel very, very privileged and lucky to have been able to just have this opportunity presented to me. I always say that, [Jay has] dropped this opportunity into my lap and 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.”
I say to Fliss that I find it very cool that he did this, and – not to detract from the significant achievement of her publishing her book – simultaneously completely fascinating that a single person has enough power to make this happen. She agrees:
“It’s completely fascinating. For me it's actually kind of scary in a way because I have not been part of this world. 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 publicity people and they're going, Oh, can you organise a panel talk?
And I'm going, I don't know how to do any of this. Like this isn't my world, but yeah, 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.”
Fliss grew up in Cornwall, with her mum and dad and brother, Fred. Her parents involved her in the kitchen from toddler age upwards, clamping her high chair to the surface in their galley kitchen to let her smell the spices as they were going into the pan and talking her through what they were doing. She writes in the book about how she independently decided to bake for the first time aged six, finding a recipe in a book, getting up early before school, and almost entirely successfully executing a plan to make cupcakes before her parents were even awake. (She baked them on a flat baking tray not in a bun tin, so they were a bit flat but still delicious.) She continued reading cookery books and trying things out in the kitchen.
“And then my parents marriage broke down. So my dad left probably between the age of, like, 13 and 14. So my mum just needed a hand to do stuff. I took over the kitchen in terms of…what she'd bought, I would make. We had a lot of beef mince and sausages and so I could put meals together quite easily, having ingested cookbooks for the last four or five years, taking them to bed with me. But the whole economising and home shopping thing kind of came in slightly later when I realised that we were struggling financially.
And so I kind of was steering her in the direction of Aldi rather than Tesco. 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 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.
At that point I taught myself how to sort of look at the price per hundred gram labels and really economise through that by the value brands and sort of see if I could make something out of nothing. You know, without wishing to go too far into private life, money was always a huge concern in the family.
I never, ever went hungry. I had everything I could possibly want in terms of educational opportunities. I ended up at university, you know, but, my parents, they were always trying to better themselves all the time. And I think they put a lot of pressure on themselves to have what we couldn't afford. So I was always made aware of money and how that worked.”
This experience put Fliss in a relatively unusual position, once she arrived at university. Not only did she know her way around a kitchen, but she also understood budgeting and meal planning. And she quickly established herself as someone whose door was open when it came to welcoming friends at hers to eat.
“I've always wanted to be generous around food, because it's such a nice thing to do to just to be able to invite someone back to your house and be like, Oh, do you want some dal or do you want some soup or toast? Being able to cook is definitely a catalyst for making lots of friends.
There's also no 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. It's been really, really great for opening doors and friendships and people always know that they're going to get fed at mine.”
Towards the end of our conversation, I ask Fliss if any of the recipes in the book are particularly close to her heart.
“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! That's a big joke, I love you mum. Fred loves you too. My favourite recipe…the mussel linguine. You don't even have to fry onions for it. It takes a supermarket packet of mussels, 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.
And that is just the freshest, summer-iest dish, which you can have year round if you really wanted to. I've cooked that when camping quite a lot because 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.”
When I look up the recipe in the book later, I find that it’s preceded by a double page limerick about the dish, which rhymes ‘mussel’ with ‘bustle’ and also ‘fussle’ and ‘linguine’ with ‘seenie’ as in… “this mussel linguine is the best I’ve ever seenie.” Perfect.
Do Yourself A Flavour by Fliss Freeborn is out now, published by Ebury Press.
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 Fliss, click here for the podcast.
You can follow Fliss Freeborn on Instagram and you can follow Lecker there too.
Have you got a copy of Do Yourself A Flavour? What have you been cooking from it? Let me know in the comments!