1 | The scarcity mindset
Have you had enough?
Hello. Thanks for reading.
This is the first edition of On Hunger, an occasional newsletter about food, people and desire. If you enjoy it, do send it on to a friend, or follow me on Instagram.
When I was a teenager, my mother would pull up the car by the side of the road and tell me to get out. “I can see some chives,” she’d say. “Go pick them.” So I’d get out of the car, skin prickling with embarrassment, and crouch by the side of the road picking chives. In the summer, in France, we’d steal mirabelles, sweet and warm from the sun, plucked stealthily from a farmer’s tree. In Sweden the forests were free to plunder, and so our cupboards, for years, were filled with jars of brined mushrooms and blueberry jam.
I never thought of us as poor, though I suppose we were, in those early days. I have dim memories of a dark and cramped council flat, of the trousers my mother would cut for us from my father’s cast-offs. They had debts to contend with, and lived with the spectres of conflict and hunger: post-war rationing, for my father; for my Cambodian mother, a whole country lost to death and famine.
I’ve been thinking about those years a lot, lately – every time I open my kitchen cupboards, in fact. My mother made a virtue of frugality, even as things improved and we jetted around the world. When I left home for university, I often lived on dinners of boiled rice and soy sauce: money, again, had become scarce. Now my pantry could feed me in style for weeks. There’s pasta, noodles and pulses; pâtés and cassoulets; jaggery, star anise and cinnamon sticks; anchovies, pineapple rings and chilli oils. Dumplings and parathas in the freezer.
Today we're all looking bleakly at the future, worrying that there simply won’t be enough – enough food, jobs, medical equipment, space, health, safety – for everyone. It seems like a futile pursuit, in the midst of all this, to even attempt to think about the luxuries, small and big, that make us feel whole.
My work may have completely dried up overnight, but I’ve found comfort in an abundance of time – time to think, cook, remember, and rest. Abundance sits better with me than the concept of gratitude. I’ve found it in the seeds I’ve sown for my tiny urban garden. In memories of the island of Mull, with its clear, cold waters and paths scented with wild garlic, which I picked and scattered on fried eggs. I hope Harriet, whom you’ll meet below, finds it at home, having left her London life behind to take a bet on herself. And that my mother, on her morning walks, sees it in the armfuls of wildflowers – useless but beautiful – she picks for her empty jars.
This week’s…
Read Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over.
Tune Hummingbird, Dengue Fever
Drink Myatt’s Fields espresso martini
Wild garlic chimichurri
This is barely a recipe at all – a few things thrown into a blender, or chopped finely and brought together with a slosh of vinegar and a squeeze of honey. This makes enough for one person to zhuzh meals up for a week. I had it on everything: poached salmon, cheesy omelettes, burrata, grilled asparagus and a huge slab of marbled beef. I got my wild garlic with my Oddbox delivery.
50g of wild garlic leaves, stalks removed, flowers kept to one side
40g of parsley, stalks removed
2 small chillis
100ml of olive oil
2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar
1 generous teaspoon of honey
Zest of one lemon
Salt, to taste
Wash and dry the leaves thoroughly. Blitz them in a blender with the olive oil and chillis. Add vinegar, honey, lemon zest and salt to taste; the chimichurri should be hot, sharp and sweet. Gently mix in the flowers, transfer into a clean jar, and let the flavours develop for a day, if you can wait. It’ll keep in the fridge for a week or so.
Meet… Harriet-Jade Harrow
I’ve always loved illustrations of food. In the drawn world, meals are nothing short of perfect: batter always rises; the crust is always crisp; soufflés never sink. I’m not sure how I first came across Harriet (@harrietjadeharrow) on Instagram. One day she was there, peppering my feed with rhubarb tarts, cinnamon buns and gnarled ginger roots. Her work always makes me hungry. She has a way with words, too – so here a few of her own.
I’d been working in food and drink PR for the past four years. I’ve always tried to keep my drawing up on the side, but I wanted to develop it properly and give it the dedicated time and energy it needed. I moved back home to Gloucestershire in the autumn and have been working on building my portfolio ever since. I’m still finding my feet, and the confidence to put my work out there. My dream is to shape my future around illustration.
There's so much storytelling through food. Most of my memories are food memories: at home we'll be reminiscing about family holidays and I will remember the day through the fact that I tried a particularly good flavour of ice-cream. That’s the lens I draw everything through: the joy of cooking with people and sharing food and recipes together.
When I was living in London, if I didn’t have any plans for the weekend I'd end up going for a walk and inevitably buying some kind of cake or produce from the market, then coming home and drawing it. That's how my day would pan out. Since coming home, I've been drawing what's available: the vegetables from our veg box, the wild garlic, nettles and dandelions we’ve foraged, or what I fancy cooking.
When I’m drawing something I paint some paper first, in all the different colours I will need for that illustration. I stipple it with my finger and just get quite messy with it, then leave it to dry. I sketch my subject on another piece of paper, and then cut out the shapes and textures I can see I’ll need to create my piece. Sometimes I collage in bits of newspaper or wrapping paper and magazines.
I love working into it once I've laid out all the shapes, and painting and drawing on top of it. I use watercolours and pencils to really get into the detail. I love Caran d'Ache water-soluble pencils, they're so fun to work with. I went on a bit of a spree recently and bought loads of new colours.
I’m lucky to be isolated with my family. There are four of us here and it's nice to be able to still cook together and for each other. But I do miss cooking for friends. I've been planning dinner parties in my head, imagining the days when we'll be able to invite people over. I want to hang lights in the trees and have lots of wine and a beautiful meal in the garden. My dream dinner guest? At the moment, Samin Nosrat as I’ve been listening to her on lots of podcasts and she seems so funny, positive, and an inspiring chef. She sounds fascinating.
I’ve thought about taking on the challenge of making sourdough, like everyone else. I’m worried about making something that eats flour when flour is the one thing that we don't have very much of. I don’t want to accidentally kill my starter – I’m not sure I can handle that kind of pressure at the moment! Instead, when my aunt dropped off some flour from the local mill, I made brioche, focaccia and a bread called Wicked Stepmother’s Black Bread from Ella Risbridger’s Midnight Chicken. I highly recommend it.
That’s it for today. Coming up soon: thirst traps, hot meat and upside-down baking.