"2023 was the year Fliss Ran Out of Beans. Strewn in the wake of those larger successes are multiple failures and unfinished projects"
Fliss Freeborn
I'm not sure how I came across this particular blog. However, having come across it because of a particular article, I was taken by the title Student Cuisine for the Gloomy Teen and also by the style of the writing and so added it to my list of websites to write about.
Interesting that 'gloomy teen' is included in the title because I suspect that she was not a gloomy teen. The writing, anyway is always upbeat. Now I was a gloomy teen and many are, but my current grandchildren teens are not gloomy - well I'm sure they have their gloomy moments, but overall they seem to be pretty upbeat. But then they are privileged both in their economic circumstances and their wonderful parents.
Fliss Freeborn's student website is for all intents and purposes now dead. The last post was in July 2013, but it is still there, and Fliss Freeborn and the net have certainly not parted ways. So here is some of her story, with a few asides along the way
Anyway this young English lady - from Cornwall - started her blog in October 2017 when she was at university in Edinburgh because:
"Upon the realisation I was writing out recipes for my friends three times a fortnight, I decided to start a public-facing food blog for anyone who wanted to move beyond pasta pesto and oven pizza at uni. I kept this facade up for a while, and then suddenly realised that people were coming here for the writing, not the recipes themselves."
In my day, as I described in an earlier blog, we didn't have to cook at university. It was all provided for free. Honestly how were governments able to provide free tertiary education and maintenance whilst we were there? They can't have had more freely available money than governments do these days, so they must have just used their money differently. Although again - surely they had a massive defence budget because these were the days of the Cold War.
But I digress. Fliss Freeborn is very derogatory about student cookbooks, saying that they spend far too much time on method.
"The best way obviously to learn is visually and it's via YouTube. I strongly maintain that cookbooks are kind of – as an instructional text from the very, very start – kind of null and void at the moment. They should be more of an inspiration sort of thing. Like you'd flip through them and go, Oh, I don't know what to have for dinner. Oh, that looks good. I'll cook that. Rather than…I don't know how to boil an egg. I'm going to look in a book. Like no one, no one really does that anymore."
So true. Which is why things like the supermarket magazines, Jamie's videos, TikTok - sometimes - and books like Nigel's Real Fast Food are so good. Although somebody really needs to update Nigel's book with lots of pictures.
Anyway that's what Fliss Freeborn set out to do with recipes such as this one for A very sort of aubergine parmigiana and yes, the style of her writing which is very sort of in your face was a major attraction. So much so that the Guardian's restaurant critic Jay Rayner noticed it and tweeted:
"I read a lot of food blogs. Most of them are badly written. A lot of them are annoying. This one is well written, has useful recipes, and made me laugh. Start with 10 naughty things to do with puff pastry"
He also emailed her and told her she should earn money from her writing, and linked her website to his literary agents, which ultimately led to the publication of this book in 2023. Which just shows the power of gaining the attention of the right people. Success included winning the Fortnum and Mason Cookery Writer of the Year in the same year, and appearing on the BBC's Kitchen Cabinet.
I do not know how successful the book was, but when asked what was her favourite recipe from the book she replied:
"My favourite recipe…the mussel linguine. You don't even have to fry onions for it. It takes a supermarket packet of mussels, most people bypass them, they come in like a cream and wine sauce. And you mix that with a bit of fried off cherry tomatoes, garlic, lemon zest and chili flakes or fresh chili if you have it. And then you sort of toss that all together and then you put it around cooked pasta with an absolute boatload of fresh parsley and more lemon juice. And that is just the freshest, summer-iest dish, which you can have year round if you really wanted to. I've cooked that when camping quite a lot because if you've just gone to the supermarket for your camping dish and it's in the middle of summer and you're by a loch or you're by the sea, it's just such a lovely thing to have.”
Maybe I'm too much of a food snob to buy mussels already cooked in a sauce from the supermarket, but I heartily endorse this kind of thing for the novice cook. Just check there aren't too many chemicals in the sauce!
And yet. Her last post on her blog was in July 2023 at which point she decided to move to Substack and set up a new blog - well they call it an online newsletter these days - called Amused Bouche by Fliss Freeborn, where she is:
"Introducing a brand-new way to share my innermost thoughts and unhinged recipe writing"
In her first article - The substack cometh she explains how it came to that.
"Despite some massive highs, such as publishing a whole damn cookery book, appearing multiple times on BBC R4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, and winning a big Fortnum and Mason writing award (all of which I am eternally, stupidly grateful for, or course), 2023 was the year Fliss Ran Out of Beans. Strewn in the wake of those larger successes are multiple failures and unfinished projects"
Which I find interesting, because it seems to me that in the world of the foodies, this sort of thing - running out of beans - happens to even the big names - Noor Murad of Ottolenghi's Test Kitchen, Meera Sodha - Indian vegan cooking queen and others whose names escape me now, have similarly dipped out of sight, at least for a while.
I have actually subscribed to her newsletter which she began in May 2023. The posts are occasional - the last was in July last year, when she revisited that aubergine recipe, but it still seems to be live. Of course I may just dip out again, but we'll see.
For Fliss Freeborn, after trying various other things, she eventually got a full-time job as a writer for a website about hiking and camping Live for the Outdoors. She had always been interested in the outdoor life, and had contributed to websites such as UK HIll Walking, where she did indeed write about food. That link will take you to a post about breakfast whilst camping, ending with these words:
"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day is a giant lie made up by cereal companies to sell more cereal. Before we had advertising to tell us to consume as many sweetened grains as possible first thing in the morning, humans would eat whatever they liked for breakfast - including leftovers from the night before."
On Live for Outdoors however she seems to be almost exclusively writing about camping and hiking matters and testing out equipment. Her last post seems to have been in November last year. I hope this does not mean the end of this particular job. Maybe she's just away on holiday in the snow as above.
I do hope that she still has a job and that moreover she is enjoying it. I look forward to seeing the newsletter. And if it doesn't appear I shall worry just a little about her. After all she does not appear to have that many readers - one of her posts had a mere 3 likes - just one more than I have ever had. And if all is not going well maybe she should take her own advice and make some Get out of my flat chicken soup because, she says:
"One thing I have found which makes me feel more positive and fulfilled... - is soup."
YEARS GONE BY
January 27
2023 - Whim whams
2022 - Onions et. al(liums)
2021 - The vegan thing
2020 - A new blog?
2019 - Mayonnaise
2017 - Nothing
Well I am not a student and I don't like soup - thus only 3 stars. But good luck to Fliss in all her endeavours!