MIKEY BELL

I feel wildly modern saying that a meme inspired me to take to my laptop and write ferociously, but honesty feels like the best place to start today.

I saw a meme that, in some kind of fashion, mocked food writers for wanting to lament a reader with a very long essay about their stoveside childhood memories with dear old granny before offering a recipe for a cake.

Viral, it went. 

jUsT gET tO tHe ReCIpe, it said.

Haha, they laughed.

And I get it.

I understand just needing to get down to brass tacks and really, when all is said and done, at the end of the day, nobody cares about your nan when there’s cake at stake. I’m sorry. And I say that as someone who opened an entire food memoir with a story about cooking with his grandmother.

Fine. 

But also, I think it’s important to look at what we lose during the determination of rushing to the recipe and we separate it from the story that inspired it.

It should come as no surprise to you that, to me, the recipe is often just as important as the story. Again, as mentioned, I wrote a whole book on that exact premise. And given that you are even reading this sentence on my website might mean you feel the same way too? Hopefully?

Because food and cooking is personal. Wildly and beautifully and ridiculously so, if you ask me. More than anything, I believe, food can carry the emotional weight of life. Food can be loaded with memories of family, friendship, culture, celebration, grief, and so on. It would seem strange to divorce a recipe from its source story, because in doing so, you erase everything that it means to live the human experience. 

I’m with you to a point that essentially, all we are doing, as food writers, is motivating you to cook and/or eat. This is true, but to see it that linearly is to see life itself that linearly too, and I don’t think we should ever see life as that… well, boring.

For years, I really struggled to find my voice as a writer, and luckily, in the kitchen is where I found it. Learning to write about food gave me a clear path in writing about everything else in my life, and through food, I was able to write about the world and my place within it.

Everything I knew about cooking and food was, and will remain, a direct metaphor for how I exist in the world, so there is no way I would be able to divorce the two. I wrote How an Egg Changed My Life because telling the story of my life through food was the only way I knew, at that time, to make sense of the complexities of living. I would argue that there are so many other food writers in the world, who are sharing their recipes, because this is how they want, and need, to make connections to the world.

That’s not saying that sometimes the recipe can exist without an enormous back story. Sometimes I am inspired to write a recipe, and its accompanying headnote, purely on the basis of the fact I was excited to share the recipe because the food was great or the ingredient was exciting or, at it’s most frequent, something just tasted great and I want you to have great food too.

When a recipe is just a recipe and the purpose for its existence is to simply teach to cook, that’s great. That is one side of food writing where it can be service over storytelling, and that kind of writing is valuable, and sometimes, what I crave to write. But often, recipes take shape in my life for a deeper reason, and there is a place in the world for both kind of writing to live together, and it would be the writers choice as to what shape they want to put their writing in the world.

My favourite kind of writing, however, is when they entwine in the same space.

A few weeks ago, at very last minute, I made an upside-down balsamic vinegar and honey shallot tart.

It went like this:

Melted butter. Sliced up shallots and onions cooked in a hot skillet with salt and pepper until soft and slippery. A generous glug of balsamic vinegar and a drizzle of runny honey cooked until hot and syrupy. Pre-made puff pastry rolled into a circle placed on top. Pricked a few times, glazed with egg wash, baked until golden and then flipped on to a plate.

That, right there, was the upshot of the tart. 

The fact it was delicious and treacly and sharp and sweet and crunchy and pillowy is neither here nor there, but the fact that, if I needed to write a more formal recipe for that tart, then I could. You’d have the ingredients, the method, and there, after a little cooking and flipping, you would have a tart.

You got what you wanted, I got to write a recipe, and everyone is happy.

But what you wouldn’t have known is that I made that in the last, waning days of this blazing hot summer because I was cooking for my best friends.

We hadn’t seen each other in a while.

We’re all busy and one of the more bitter pills I’ve had to swallow in my thirties is that, unfortunately, the paths of our lives don’t cross as frequently anymore. We have to put polls in the group chat to find the most common free date. That’s just the way the pendulum of life swings sometimes. We’re not seventeen in the common room and seeing each other on a Saturday to go into town to drink Starbucks and shoplift the mug is not a given anymore.

So after finding a day, I cooked for them.

The meal needed to work for people with different dietary requirements, and somehow this tiny little tart became something we could crowd around a table with.

We stayed up late, sitting in candlelight, talking for hours, like we used to, when we were teenagers. When we didn’t have to plan something six months in advance. When we didn’t have work tomorrow. When we didn’t have challenges that were bigger than the entire planet in our own heads, but somehow seemingly seem smaller than a pinhead when we finally speak them out loud.

It anchored me into having to think about how I want to care for and feed my friends in a way that felt safe and cozy for everybody after such a long period of absence iin our lives. It spoke to my thought process of connection and how I wanted to make something that not only made everyone feel included, but also considered.

I only made a tart because my friends had to eat something, but the reason why I wanted them there in the first place, felt like so much more than feeding them some shallots and pastry.

That kind of sh*t matters to me.

That kind of story will never find itself on a printed page, but if I think it’s important to the reason why that story exists, and I think that maybe someone finding themselves in a similar situation may need to hear it in order to understand how that tart could fit into their lives, then why can’t I tell it?

Wanting a food writer to publish a recipe without the story is like asking a songwriter to make music but leave out the lyrics. I know instrumental music is gorgeous and has its place (I even write to it…. I’m writing to it right now!) but sometimes words are what help us bring that song into our lives because we have been there too.

Recipes can be stories in the same way that stories can be recipes, for me, the two will never not be disconnected, and the story is the reason the food is there at all. I don’t know how to produce one without the other.

My goal is, and forever will be, to motivate my readers to find small specks of joy in their life, food or otherwise, it just happens that food is the speck I hold a magnifying glass to the most. If someone only ever wants to see food and cooking as a means to put a meal on the table and sustenance in their stomach, I have no issue with that, but perhaps looking to someone who is sharing their story through food is not the most appropriate place to look for that. 

So am I offended by those that want to just scroll to the recipe?

Not at all.

But I hope you wouldn’t be offended if I say that I can, and will forever, tell my stories, and you can scroll past it if it bugs you so much.

Also, that tart was incredible, if I say so myself, but I won’t actually write the recipe for it, because if you scrolled past all of this to get to the recipe then I’m sorry…. It’s not here. 

Serves you right for trying to jUsT gET tO tHe ReCIpe.

Go to BBC Good Food or an Instagram content creator instead. They’re much better at providing that kind of stuff than I am.