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