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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: Ramen Forever by Tim Anderson. Ramen has ended up as a cornerstone of Tim Anderson’s life. As he writes in the book, it was originally his love of ramen - as well as Japanese food more broadly - that took him to live in Japan, which steered the course of his future in many ways, including meeting his wife. Avid food TV watchers in the UK may also remember that ramen was at the heart of his Masterchef story; when he won the series in 20211, ramen was his winning main course in the final. He previously ran a ramen restaurant in Brixton, Nanban, which opened in 2015 and closed in 2021. But although he’s got five cookbooks already to his name, he’s never written a book entirely about ramen….until now. Ramen Forever is out now, published by Hardie Grant. 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 a brand new subscriber series on Lecker. This is Out of the Box, a meandering exploration of what surrounds our food. That is, the containers and packaging that it so often comes to us in. In this series, I'll be talking to people who have taken an interesting and innovative approach to packaging what they cook and make, as well as exploring some of the broader context around the history and culture of particular food packaging, as well as, obviously, waste and the impact that food packaging has on the environment that we live in. The first interview of this series is with Sohini Banerjee. Sohini runs a supper club called Smoke & Lime and also cooks at the Cafe & Deli Italo based in Bonnington Square, Vauxhall in South London. I stumbled across an Instagram post Sohini did a couple of months ago about the condiments that she makes and more specifically how she's packaging them. So she agreed to talk to me a bit about that for part of this series!

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! In Made in Taiwan, Taipei based journalist Clarissa Wei beautifully captures the food and spirit of this proud island nation, and brings it to life on the page. The book is stunning - you’ll hear more about the thought and consideration that Clarissa and her team put into how it looks as well as what it says later in this interview -and it examines the current state of Taiwanese food in incredible breadth and depth. For me, someone completely new to the food of the country, it’s a beautiful and rich education. It was such a pleasure to meet Clarissa via video chat and talk about this book, which involved an astonishing amount of research and recipe development on the ground. I’m a big fan of her work as a journalist - the podcast series she made with Whetstone Radio Collective, Climate Cuisine, is one of my all time favourite listens - and it was so interesting to hear how she approached this book, the subject of which is something hugely personal to her but one which she wanted to approach journalistically, and write as an act of documentation. We talked about how missing home through food sometimes takes unexpected, shifting forms, her culinary collaborator on the book Ivy Chen, and why it was crucial that Made In Taiwan moved away from its original proposal as a “cosy” cookbook and became something deeply political. Made In Taiwan is out now, published by Simon and Schuster. 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.

Is it possible or productive to organise around a common language in order to reimagine how we produce grain and bread? In the third and final part of Good Bread, Kim and Ruth reflect on some of their experiences working on the project and consider what the future of good bread might look like. Good Bread is a three part series made with Farmerama exploring The Body Lab, a participatory arts and research project by baker Kimberley Bell and artist Ruth Levene considering standardised grain testing and the possibility of reimagining measurement within the system that surrounds bread production.  The Body Lab is funded by Farming The Future. Good Bread is hosted and produced by Lucy Dearlove. Thanks to everyone at Farmerama who has helped on this series in various ways: Jo Barratt, who was a fantastic exec, Abby Rose, Dora Taylor, Olivia Oldham, Annie Landless, Eliza Jenkins and Lucy Fisher. The music is by Owen Barratt. The artwork was by Hannah Grace.  Thanks also to everyone else who has been part of the series: Fred Price at Gothelney Farm, Rosy Benson at Field Bakery + Mill and Chris Holister at Shipton Mill. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Breadline! Make sure you listen to Cereal, Katie Revell's Farmerama series about bread.

Consistency is at the heart of industrial bread production, from the field to the mill to the oven. But what is it costing us? Good Bread is a three part series made with Farmerama exploring The Body Lab, a participatory arts and research project by baker Kimberley Bell and artist Ruth Levene considering standardised grain testing and the possibility of reimagining measurement within the system that surrounds bread production. The Body Lab is funded by Farming The Future. Thanks to Shipton Mill for their openness and generosity in allowing the Body Lab to explore these ideas Good Bread is hosted and produced by Lucy Dearlove. Thanks to everyone at Farmerama who has helped on this series in various ways: Jo Barratt, Abby Rose, Dora Taylor, Olivia Oldham, Annie Landless, Eliza Jenkins and Lucy Fisher. The music is by Owen Barratt. The artwork was by Hannah Grace.  If you haven't already listened to Cereal the previous Farmerama series about bread made by Katie Revel, I can't recommend it highly enough!

How is the quality of bread measured by the system that produces and consumes it?  Good Bread is a three part series made with Farmerama exploring The Body Lab, a participatory arts and research project by baker Kimberley Bell and artist Ruth Levene considering standardised grain testing and the possibility of reimagining measurement within the system that surrounds bread production. The Body Lab is funded by Farming The Future. Thanks to Shipton Mill for their openness and generosity in allowing the Body Lab to explore these ideas. Good Bread is hosted and produced by Lucy Dearlove. Thanks to everyone at Farmerama who has helped on this series in various ways: Jo Barratt, Abby Rose, Dora Taylor, Olivia Oldham, Annie Landless, Eliza Jenkins and Lucy Fisher. The music is by Owen Barratt. The artwork was by Hannah Grace.  If you haven't already listened to Cereal, the previous Farmerama series about bread made by Katie Revell, I really urge you to. 

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

Lara Lee is a cookbook author whose debut book Coconut and Sambal came out in 2020. She’s now back with another, A Splash of Soy, a beautiful vibrant orange tome full of gorgeous quick recipes to bring joy to your midweek meals. I caught up with her on zoom from my hotel room in Greece - I need to tell you about the breakfast buffet at some point - to chat to Lara while she was visiting London for some book press, including Saturday Kitchen. We talked about how A Splash of Soy came out of her joy for cooking rising from the ashes of lockdown and early parenthood, and she talked me through some of the incredible sounding breakfast recipes in it.