Lecker – Details, episodes & analysis

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 writing about it on Substack and Patreon. Join me there as well!

This month: London Feeds Itself, edited by Jonathan Nunn. This episode features Kurdish chef and writer, Melek Erdal, one of the contributors to the book, reflecting on the essay she wrote, The Warehouse, and on London and Kurdish food in general.

You can find a transcript for this episode at leckerpodcast.com.

The second edition of London Feeds Itself is out now, published by Open City and Fitzcarraldo. 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.

A meandering exploration of what surrounds our food: its packaging, history and meaning for our world.

Featuring Hugo Lynch, Sustainability Lead at Abel and Cole, Alice Kain, curator at Museum of Brands, Renée and Anshu, founders of Dabba Drop and Sohini Banerjee, chef and founder of Smoke and Lime supper clubs.

Dabba Drop are offering 50% off the first order for Lecker listeners in London zones 1-3! Enter LECKER50 to use this excellent offer.

You can find a transcript for this episode at leckerpodcast.com.

This episode features excerpts from longer conversations published for paid subscribers on Substack and Patreon. Support Lecker by becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon, Apple Podcasts and now on Substack.

You can buy zines on BigCartel. You can also order print-on-demand merch at Teemill.

Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

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 writing about it on Substack and Patreon. Join me there as well!

Conversations around food often - rightly - touch on attribution, ownership and identity, especially when it comes to certain dishes. But the subject is so, so complicated and many dishes we consider to be deeply entrenched within a country’s culinary history and culture are no more than PR exercises dreamed up a few decades ago. 

In National Dish :Around the World in Search of Food, History and the Meaning of Home, Anya von Bremzen explores whether we can find nationhood on a plate - and what it says about us that we’re so obsessed with looking for it there.

I loved this book. It’s fascinating and surprising but also Anya is such a great, dynamic writer that you feel like you’re on the road with her: party hopping at the Semana Santa in Seville, in the boardroom of an instant ramen company in Tokyo, learning to roll out the perfect pizza dough in Naples, drinking midday mezcal in Oaxaca. 

Anya and I spoke via video call a couple of weeks back, coincidentally on the day the book came out in the UK.

National Dish is out now, published by ONE, an imprint of Pushkin 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.

Stories of moving house, and moving kitchen.

Episode contributors:

Ruby Mason
Ruby is an editor at SAND, a Berlin-based journal of contemporary writing and art (www.sandjournal.com)

Margaux Vialleron
Margaux writes the newsletter The Onion Papers: https://theonionpapers.substack.com/

Maria Agiomyrgiannaki
Maria is originally from Crete, now living in London. You can find her on instagram.

Stephen Rötzsch Thomas
Stephen writes the newsletter Ideas With Legs: https://ideaswithlegs.substack.com/

Matthew Curtis
Matthew is a co-founder and Editor-in-Chief at Pellicle. 

Eli Davies
Like her doctorate, much of Eli's work is focused around women and home building; you can read some of it on Tribune here. She is currently writing a book about single women and cooking.

You can listen to Kitchens if you haven't already! And buy the print zine too.

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

Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

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.

Welcome 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 the first edition of the Lecker Book Club: Maria Bradford’s Sweet Salone. Maria grew up in Sierra Leone and moved to Kent, UK in her late teens. Sweet Salone is the first English-language book of Sierra Leonean recipes published internationally, and in it Maria wanted to share the unique nature of the food of her home country, but also celebrate the country’s people, including her own family. But it wasn’t necessarily a smooth process writing the book, as you’ll hear her talk about.

We spoke about the culture shock she experienced on arriving in the UK; what it was like encountering strawberries and apples for the first time. But it was Maria’s deep-rooted curiosity about all kinds of food that eventually led her on a path to training at Leiths and setting up her fine-dining catering business, Shwen Shwen - a Krio phrase meaning ‘fancy’. It’s this outlook and experience that closely informs the recipes in the book: from traditional dishes learned from her mother and grandmother, to her very own brand of Afrofusion.

Sweet Salone is out now, published by Quadrille. 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.

An audio exploration of the most enigmatic meal of the day.

Thanks so much to the guests on this episode:
Bre Graham
Bettina Makalintal
Gurdeep Loyal
Dan Hancox and Dr Kasia Tee
Thea Everett
Lara Lee

You can listen to the full versions of all the Breakfast Season conversations by becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon, Apple Podcasts and now on Substack.

Music is by Kevin McLeod at Incompetech

This is a preview of an episode of the excellent Cursed Objects podcast, featuring me, Lucy, talking to Dan Hancox and Dr Kasia Tee about the great British institution of Meal Deals.

Listen to the full version on Cursed Objects.

I’m delighted to bring you a very short sweet taste of a conversation I had recently with the food writer Gurdeep Loyal. I’ve followed Gurdeep’s work for a few years now, and have always been in great admiration of what he does; not only in his own writing, and not even just in his platforming of other people’s work on his site and instgram page Mother Tongue, but also just in his general enthusiasm, charm and fostering of connections and community within food. 

His debut cookbook, also called Mother Tongue, is published this week and celebrates his heritage as -as Gurdeep himself puts it: "a descendant of Punjabi farmers and Leicester market traders.”

This is part of a much longer interview over breakfast of crab crumpets - recipe in Mother tongue - which you can hear over on the Lecker Patreon or via Apple Podcasts subscription.

Reminder that merch is available via the Lecker Teemill site or BigCartel

Music is by Kevin McCleod at Incompetech.

Ginger and apple bircher, toast toppings, Australian pancakes; writer Bre Graham talks about being a breakfast person. Her debut cookbook, Table for Two, is out now!

This is the first episode in a new interview series all about BREAKFAST! Future episodes will be available exclusively on the Lecker Patreon. For £3 a month you can get access to all episodes. Subscribe here.

Merch is available via the Lecker website. Or you can go directly to Teemill for T-shirts and tote bags, and to bigcartel for zines and patches.

Follow Lecker on Twitter and Instagram.

Music:
"In Your Arms" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

"Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/