Sally Ann Hunt: This is Lecker I'm
Lucy: Lucy
Dearlove
Sally Ann Hunt: so
also, another light bulb moment.
Do you know when you're putting something on the grill?
And you're trying to stir it and you think it's a little lost its heat.
All you do is you move it round your grill.
Because this is going to be warmer than it is there.
Because that product has actually lowered that temperature down.
So all you do is you keep moving it round.
Lucy: In a yard on Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire, Sally Ann Hunt is dancing
between her many different barbecues.
There's a neat red ceramic egg, a long sleek contraption, like a
black stretched limo and an oil drum had a baby, And two historic
looking setups taking centre stage.
Giant iron bowls with fire in the middle, and various delicious
things on and over them.
A leg of venison, rolled up hispy cabbage leaves, a tiny cast iron
skillet of toasting pine nuts, and my favourite thing of all, a shawarma spiced
cauliflower, imprisoned in a spherical iron cage, suspended by a serious
looking hook and chain, over the fire.
Sally Ann Hunt: When I butchered it, I separated the lean from
the fat to make sausages.
When I make sausages, it has to be a certain percentage,
a ratio of lean to fat.
Um, usually 80 20 when you're going that way.
So I took the fat out of there.
I usually get about 30 kilos of beef fat out of one animal.
And I render it down and I use that for everything really.
Mainly for frying chips in at home.
It's the, you know, old fashioned way of doing
it.
I've
done that before, so I've made candles out of a beef tallow.
Sally
Lucy: Sally Ann is a tutor at the School of Artisan Food on the Welbeck Estate.
She teaches barbecue, smoking and curing, pie making, sausages, dairy and foraging.
She's one of the most creative and resourceful people I've encountered in
food and seems to be always looking to try out exciting new techniques and ideas.
Sally Ann Hunt: This is called a flamborero or something, right?
And I've got a friend on the estate, told you everything's got a story, called
Joseph Dawes and he makes the armour for the Royal Family and also all of
the weapons for the Game of Thrones.
So I buzzed him and I said, I need one of these.
Ten minutes, well, ten minutes he said, I'll get you started.
Two hours later, I got one.
Wow.
Yeah.
So all he do with that is when he does it, he just trips over it.
Yeah.
You can see.
And it's so you don't get Burnt on your arms.
Looks the worst.
You'd be able to buy one of these though.
You can buy them.
You can buy them from Kadai.
But they haven't got them in stock.
Do you not have a personal armourer?
Lucy: Along with a dozen or so others, I was very kindly invited
to a press day at the School of Artisan Food earlier this year.
We all attended three mini versions of some of the courses that the
school offers as a way of learning.
of letting people know about this year's summer school.
Sally Anne's Barbecue Workshop, a bread workshop with baker Kevin Roberts, which
I have to admit I did not record because my hands were immediately so coated
in dough I couldn't touch anything, and a patisserie workshop with Martha
Brown, where we somehow made chocolate and hazelnut amaretti and honeycomb in
a suspiciously short amount of time.
It felt like wizardry.
Martha Brown: So you might be able to turn it up.
So the magic number for us Today is 146 degrees, so that's the temperature that
we're going to take our caramel to.
Before we take it off the heat and add our bicarb.
And our bicarb is there to give it volume, that's what turns it into honeycomb.
If we were to cook it to 146 degrees and then we were going to just pour
it out into a bowl, it would turn into a rock hard, clear caramel.
But what we want to do is aerate it, and so we're using bicarb.
So yeah, now I'm pretty happy with it.
I'm not going to get any more sugar crystals around the edge of my pan.
I'm now going to work my way round.
Just like, pushing all of that
down.
I haven't taken the temperature yet because it's not all
melted and coming together.
Yeah, these induction hobs seem to be hotter towards the back
of them, so you're going to set your pan and put it off centre.
Nothing's ever just right.
Every oven has a personal temperature.
Lucy: Martha actually started out attending the school herself,
doing the Advanced Diploma in Artisan Baking in 2011.
Martha Brown: Yeah, so there we go.
So we're at 146.
We've hit the magic number.
So I'm going to remove from the heat, important, you don't want
to be putting your bike on.
Gonna
see the magic.
Gonna see the magic!
So, this is essential.
That's ready.
It's in a location that you don't have to move it, so you're not
gonna burn yourself moving it.
My bicarb's a little bit lumpy.
I'm gonna pour it all in.
And then I'm gonna whisk violently.
And it's gonna climb.
And then while it's still climbing, I'm gonna pour, sorry people at the back.
Be so careful not to touch any of this caramel because it will
stick to you while it's burning
you.
And then
so that's, we're now not gonna touch that.
Because we actually don't want to knock any air out of it.
We want to leave it alone.
It is going to sink.
It completely sinks.
That's normal.
It's magic.
It is literal magic, isn't it?
How can they do that?
I think a lot of people have that kind of completely foundationless
dream of like, wouldn't it be nice to have a cafe or a something, I
don't know, something food related.
And I think, I think I was like, I might make biscuits for a living.
I don't really know what.
Lucy: Little did you know.
Martha Brown: That seems manageable.
That seems manageable.
I was like, yeah, maybe biscuits.
And I think I was just randomly saying this to a friend one evening and, uh,
he said, Oh there's no artisan bread in Sheffield and I don't think I even knew
what the word artisan meant And so I was like Yeah, yeah, there's no artisan
bread in Sheffield and I went home and I googled artisan bread And the school came
up and I was like Oh that actually is out, that's such a cool course like, because
I, I, I definitely knew the difference between like better quality bread and
the kind of industrial supermarket bread.
Food has always been a massive part of my kind of upbringing and like
I've always been really into food so I've got kind of Cypriot family
and kind of English Scottish family on both sides very differently.
A lot of my memories from childhood are wrapped around food whether it's kind of
like Cypriot barbecues and being handed a fork with a bit of like barbecued lamb
on it to run around the garden, you know, by my like Or kind of um my scottish
grand baking, you know, it was a food.
It was always has been massively tied up in my memories.
Like literally my, my Greek granddad used to come up to to Sheffield to
see us with a suitcase, not full of clothes, but full of food, you know,
like bread from green lanes and like, just full of halloumi, you know that.
So yeah, I think when I saw the course and that it wasn't that far away from
me and that maybe I could either like commute or it wasn't a far move, I kind of
thought like, actually, this is something that I am really interested in, even if
it's not bread specific, at that time.
I was just really interested in food and hadn't gone to uni.
I'd kind of dropped out of school.
I only had GCSEs, so never thought that, that I would be
kind of academically studying.
So yeah, I thought the school was my version of university and a, and a chance
to kind of expand my interest in food.
I totally got obsessed with baking and bread and sourdough
and pastry while studying.
So the diploma while I was there was a year long and you could study bread and
patisserie, you could do butchery and charcuterie, and you could do dairy.
So there's quite a real interesting mix of people and a really
interesting mix of subjects.
It's kind of the school of the fermented arts and we're all, most of us were kind
of living together in a local village.
So we had all sorts of things growing in our kind of student
accommodation throughout the year.
So it was a really amazing.
year of discovery of kind of food and fermentation for me.
Lucy: When you started the course, was it like an instant, like, oh
yeah, this is where I need to be?
Because it must have, I mean, that must have been quite intense to
just suddenly go into the, because it's very, you know, you learn
some very advanced skills, right?
Martha Brown: Yeah, I think it's really accessible though at the start.
It was a lot of kind of Real basic techniques.
And also just the, I think what's unique about the course was that it was, there
was such a good amount of practical time to really get into the nitty gritty
of just like every single ingredient.
It was, yeah, you know, we spent probably the best part of a week thinking about
like salt in bread and being able to do lots of tiny little experiments on
the, you know, dough on salt and just the difference of the water made or
the difference that, you know, that kind of, theory and time to play, which
I think is really difficult to get professionally when you're working in a
bakery and there is production and there is like this kind of constant cycle.
I was in my early 20s and it was kind of my uni experience and I was like,
so I, I feel like I could have even got way more out of it than I did.
That time is quite unique in that you're not working, you're not at work and
you're not having In the grind, yeah, it is really precious and, and the estate
and the school, there's so many other things going on, I don't think I stuck
myself into everything that was going on in the estate, um, because also at the
time I was playing roller derby and I, I would like, so I was, I was really,
really, really deep into roller derby.
So I was kind of going back to train like three times a week.
So I was kind of being pulled back to Sheffield.
Three times a week?
Lucy: Oh my God.
Martha Brown: Even, yeah, yeah.
That's so funny.
Roller derby and bread were fighting for my attention.
Lucy: And if I guess like, you know, there's a similarity in that you'd
come to both of those things, I imagine, not really knowing anything
about them or like being, having to be thrown quite in the deep end
in like a very physical experience.
Martha Brown: Yeah, I think maybe that's what I'm into.
Yeah, I seem to get really Uh, into things and then really go for it.
Yeah.
The, the term like that just kind of has haunted me in my personal
life and, and at the bakery was like, Martha likes the project.
And I think as soon as I've kind of got like headspace from one project
and then like, now we can do this.
Lucy: This experience of kind of full body immersion learning.
was really the thing that I wanted to explore when I knew that I
was going to make an episode about my day at the school.
Watching all of the tutors working and teaching that day, it felt impossible
to me that I could learn to do what they can do any other way apart from
watching them do it, having them teach me, working out mistakes and challenges
on the fly, while I tried it too.
Sally Ann's tallow basting, Martha's careful pastry brushing
to stop caramel crystallizing.
I'm just not sure that I could have got them right out of
a book or watching YouTube.
I've never really done a cooking or baking class before.
I'm quite resolutely self taught in most of the things that I do with my time.
But recently I've begun to notice and to consider the limitations of
learning in this way for me personally.
And to think more about the value of physically handing down or
receiving knowledge and skills in the presence of other people.
What do you think the value was in learning those skills in the
environment that you did, like in s in such a hands on way?
Because I sort of feel like we're in this age where, in theory, you
can kind of learn anything from a book or from a YouTube video.
It's actually like, in practice, I don't know if that's So I was
interested to know what your thoughts are on that in, in terms of like
bread and pâtisserie in particular.
Martha Brown: I think like, it is amazing the amount of information
there is online now and actually how accessible a lot of it is.
But I think, And actually, I've learnt so much from online, like, I took apart
a gearbox of a mixer because it was broken and I was like, well, I found a
YouTube video, I may as well follow it.
I stripped out this gearbox of a mixer, I stripped out the gearbox
of a mixer, I found a broken cog, I ordered the part, and then I literally
just watched the YouTube video in reverse to put it back together.
Lucy: Well, that's incredible.
Martha Brown: And it worked, so like, totally, it's something that
is completely methodical and there is effectively one way of doing something.
I think like, that is the, the great thing about kind of like online learning.
I think food, and especially baking, there is just so many variables.
And if you're watching, you know, even if you're reading a recipe in a book or
you're following a method on a video, You are reading or seeing a single, a single
kind of way that you can do that process.
And actually there are so many variables, whether it's the temperature of your
kitchen or the equipment that you're using, or the, the heat of your hands
or how strong your fingers are, you know, there's so many variables.
And also what you're seeing is the very best outcome for that person or that
person who's produced that product or that recipe, and there's so much in between,
and just because it doesn't turn out.
That way doesn't mean that it's wrong or bad, or it's not going to taste
nice, but there's that, Oh, I haven't reached that, that perfection, that goal.
I think a lot of the time when you're, when you're looking at online things,
especially on social media, whereas I think learning in an environment that
is not only face to face teaching, but in a group situation where you're
learning with other people, you see all that gray area and you kind of can
really, you dissect what's happened and evaluate and problem solve.
I think it's that like problem solving brain, especially with bakery, that is
so essential, whether it's at home or whether you're baking professionally.
And I think that's so hard to understand solo when you're kind of
at home learning and just being able to see the different outputs and then
be like, Hmm, what happened here?
Do you know what I mean?
Like just, just seeing the variation, I think.
alone is so useful.
Lucy: I hadn't actually thought about it from that angle and that's so
true, like the idea that, yeah, you're reducing the process to its outcome
or its output only, but actually like, in learning, the benefit is, yeah.
What you're figuring out along the way.
That reminds me of when we made the honeycomb.
And I instantly was just like, oh, ours doesn't look like Martha's.
So, something must have gone wrong.
And that's exactly how I would have reacted if I'd made that at home.
And I'd watched a video or like, seen a picture or whatever.
I'd have been like, oh, mine's bad.
But then you were like, oh no, it's just like It's going to look
fine on the inside, it's just the bubbles on the top aren't that big.
And like, just even having that, like, there are actually different ways
for this to look and like, this might be the reason why this has happened.
Yeah, it's hard to troubleshoot in that way, I think, independently.
So it's really valuable to have that experience in the room.
Martha Brown: I think reassurance is a massive thing that you get
from a face to face teacher.
Like, I was teaching Fred last weekend, and You know, quite a few people were
being like, mine looks different to yours when we were kneading our dough and just
for me to be able to go, cool, you need mine now and I need, I'll need yours just
so we can both feel each other's dough and then instantly they've touched it and
they're like, Oh yeah, they feel the same.
And it's like, yeah, they do.
It's just, I like when you've been baking for a while, you just get nonstick hands.
It's just like magically happens one day and you're like, dough
doesn't stick to you in the same way as it does when you're learning.
Oh my God.
Mine looks smoother and, you know, and kind of different from other people's,
but it was just because I, I was touching the dough in a slightly different
way to stop it looking as sticky.
Do you know what I mean?
And it's that kind of, You can go into instant kind of like, spiral of
like, mine is going wrong at home.
When actually, it could, it could be exactly like the tutors in
terms of like, quality or texture.
Yeah, totally.
Lucy: Do you, did you have any experiences, I mean, I guess it's quite
a while ago now and a lot has happened, but did you have any experiences
like that when you were learning?
Martha Brown: Yeah, I definitely remember watching our tutor kind
of, I think it was, it was just like pre shaping dough and, and it
just wasn't sticking to his hands.
And I was just like, how is this possible?
It's like, it's magic, like what the hell?
It was so, yeah, or looking into a mixer as a dough was developing and like our
tutor Wayne would be kind of describing what he was seeing and I was like, I
literally have no clue how he can like, it's like he's dough whispering and he
understands the dough from seeing it.
Whereas at the time I like, it just looked like lots of ingredients
sloshing around a mixing bowl to me.
Whereas I now have that knowledge.
And that comes from, from things being pointed out to you as you
learn and from repetition and, um, kind of, yeah, knowing the process
through to the end and then being able to start to see that development.
you know, earlier in the process.
Yeah.
I think it's really interesting.
I have like strong memories of being told things and kind of not
being able to see them at the time.
And now it's something that like, I'm probably doing to other people by just
saying, look, you can see it being doing this and they're nodding along.
And I'm thinking, are you good?
Do you know?
It's all right.
But I'm going to tell you anyway, because
Lucy: one day you'll look back on this moment and be like,
Martha Brown: yeah, yeah, totally.
I think I'm a really practical and visual learner,
and I actually
think it really helps me then learn in a more academic way if I've
had an experience of the process.
I really struggle to learn completely, theoretically, about anything, but
once I have a bit of an experience of something I can then read and
devour information written that I would not have been able to do before.
Lucy: I think somehow I had thought of the school in quite a romanticised way because
I had decided that I wanted to tell this story about learning how to make food in
a hands on way and that being embodied.
Sensual, almost.
And I think this made sense when Martha and I had a conversation
because of her personal experiences and approach to learning alongside
her professional experience.
And this was linked in my mind to the idea of skills we used to have relating to food
making and production that stopped being passed down for one reason or another.
Quite often when I'm making something for Lecker, I'm
slightly unclear about what it is.
What my point even is.
Everything I make starts with being curious about something, but generally I
begin working on it without knowing fully what I actually want to say about it.
Quite like starting here, although it can feel very uncertain.
It's fun, it's satisfying when it comes together, sometimes
against the odds or so it feels.
And generally I'm kind of lucky.
Or cocky, I suppose.
Enough to figure it out on the fly.
And then it all comes out in the wash.
But sometimes this approach results in asking interviewees questions
that are extremely confusing to them.
When I interviewed Alison Swan Parenti, the founder of the School
of Artisan Food, we found ourselves slightly at cross purposes.
Because what I was asking her about what the school did and the basis
on which it was founded, It just didn't make sense to her at all.
Alison Swan Parente: Kat, uh, I'm not quite sure what you're asking me there.
Are you asking me I guess just,
Lucy: was it, did, was it, how can I rephrase it more, um, it was more
just coming off the back of not necessarily knowing how the passing of
information previously happened when it came to learning how to make things.
And was that a gap that you wanted to fill?
Alison Swan Parente: Yes, it was.
But when I started the School of Artisan Food, It really
wasn't about cooking skills.
Um, it was about making skills really.
And, and that sounds a bit kind of prissy to put it that way, but I was
quite interested in mass production.
It was to do with how to make bread for the sake of making a staple.
And so really, what I've always been interested in is
establishing small businesses.
with what we produce, what we teach in the school.
So it really is roots into work.
So it's so that you can work in somebody else's small business or you can
start a small business of your own.
So it's much more that than domestic cooking.
The first thing we thought of was teaching people how to make food that's
going to produce a living for them.
That's a kind of dignified living and a living that is both creative
and pretty helpful to other people and good fun and producing, you know,
it's good for the culture really to have nice food that tastes nice.
It's um, what's wrong with that?
I didn't have very much to do with schools or artisan food
before I founded the school.
I was a child psychotherapist and I worked in the national health service, but.
It is actually a very logical progression from being a child
psychotherapist to opening a food school.
Because one of the things that I found working with challenging and
difficult and usually very nice adolescents was that they were very
much helped by having something to do.
And that, something that they could really succeed in.
And so one of the reasons that I started the School of Artisan Food was, to do
with providing roots into work for people who find it hard to get that together.
When we were founded, we really thought we were going to be teaching
fermentation more than anything else.
And if you think about it, what we're doing is thinking
about fermentation a lot.
We're thinking about the way that bread is made through a fermentation process.
Cheese, clearly, there's even a little bit of fermentation in
salamis and things like that.
So, Really, in a way, one of the benefits is, is really exposing people
to the miracles of nature in a way.
Just how, if you put several ingredients together, they produce these wonderful,
very simple ways to feed you and help you, help make you healthy.
But they are very simple.
I think that one of the benefits that we can take from them.
pass on is that good food is actually incredibly simple.
One of the things was just a scarcity of skills.
You know, I'd started a bakery.
We wanted to make long fermentation breads and there was very, very few
people in the country at that point.
I mean, it's hard to believe now.
who knew how to do it.
There were two bakeries in London that were producing artisan bread.
There was Andrew Whitley up in Malmoby in Cumberland producing artisan bread
and there were very very few other people doing it and they didn't know how to
do it or where they should be doing it.
So a school was really a place to um, teach, methods that were really dying
out and we managed to do that actually.
As soon as we built the school it became clear that it was a place for
people who had really wanted to pass on their skills but didn't have the
infrastructure in order to do that and so we built Uh, we had a capital
project, building the building, but we also, you know, put in place a booking
system and all of those things, which did make it much easier for people.
So partly I started the school to provide a place where people could teach, rather
than a place where people could learn.
So it was obviously started with both of those, but the teaching has
been a very, kind of, um, primary.
Lucy: Mmm, that's really interesting.
And I suppose, obviously, the, the side advantage is that you would have
access to great bread, which, if that's something that you were keen to eat, that
feels like a great Was this something that you had learned to make yourself
in the process of setting up the school?
Alison Swan Parente: I had, I'd learned to make good bread
a long time ago in America.
I was living in a communal household.
Lots of people in the household baked bread.
The men baked the bread, and so it was quite inspiring.
And it was pretty good bread.
It wasn't actually really good bread that we made.
It was, um, yeasted.
It wasn't long fermentation.
But it was much, much better than anything that you could buy in a supermarket.
I'm really keen on that still being something that's, you know,
in the general culture, you know.
But the school itself, the thing that differentiates itself from or
differentiates the school from other places is really that we're interested
in pre industrial techniques with food.
That's what artisan skills are really.
They're, uh, skills that, um, have a lot to do with knowing where things come
from, knowing the feel of things, knowing how to make them, knowing what their
history is, and all of those things.
Lucy: It's funny listening back to this, having finally worked
out what the episode is about.
And considering that Alison had just carefully explained to me that her
work with the school had been entirely business focused, I still just couldn't
help myself trying to burrow in her personal story, searching for hints of
skills being passed down hand to hand.
I think it's really because I like so many of us.
I have such an emotional connection to making food, and also it's not
how I make my living day to day, which probably allows me to rose
tint it slightly, or quite a lot.
And I'm so grateful to Alison for being so generous in really listening to me,
really deeply considering the angle that I was trying to come from, but then very
clearly clarifying and explaining her position and the school's so clearly.
I learnt a lot from it.
And She actually did reflect a lot more on her personal
experiences of learning to cook too.
Alison Swan Parente: We were talking about the difference between learning
about food from other people and in the company of other people and learning
about food remotely and through cookbooks and what those differences are and I
was thinking about it and I think that I learned some of my actual cooking
skills from cookbooks much more than any other way because You know, everybody
has their own cookbook, but people love a particular cookbook that's helped
them along and mine was Julia Child.
So I just loved following those recipes because she goes, and then
you do this, and then you get his wooden spoon, and then you do this,
and in the end, it's pretty good food.
So she's a fantastically good step by step tutor.
And I did actually really enjoyed doing that on my own and making the mistakes.
So having classes is a very, very different thing.
There's much more to a class in a way.
There's much more, uh, in terms of human contact.
There's much more in the way of being able to share with people how things work.
feel and how things taste but I think I actually think both of them are very
good ways to learn to make food and um, uh, that a cookbook in a way on
your own is one thing and a cooking class is an entirely different thing
and both of them are pretty good.
I'm pretty old, I'm a post war baby and the women of my mother's
generation had learned to cook in quite a creative way because they
didn't have much to cook with.
They remembered rationing, they remembered actually cooking a lot of stuff from
allotments and gardens, and so the kind of cooking that I learned was pretty frugal.
And that was a great influence on me, but also there was another influence,
which was the kind of wonderful 50s cooking that went on in my mother's
kitchen if she gave a dinner party.
Every day she would cook wonderful, kind of, you know, good, wholesome
food, but a dinner party was an entirely different matter.
Lucy: What would she make?
Alison Swan Parente: Baked grapefruit with a glacé cherry on the top, first course.
Second course, either kebabs made with a tent peg.
Do you remember those kind of screw, metal screw tent pegs?
Lamb, and then a pepper which was really unusual.
I mean you had to go to Worthing to get a pepper.
Then, uh, a bit of tomato and a mushroom.
And straight into the oven.
So that was a very sophisticated second course.
Or there was also tuna bake, which you make by putting one can of
tuna, one can of Campbell's mushroom soup, one packet of crisps, and a
lot of mousetrap cheese on the top.
Again, in the oven.
Success!
And I can't remember what her desserts were.
By that time, you know, you were completely floored.
Lucy: The ten peg kebab is inspired.
I love that.
Alison Swan Parente: It's very good.
And then she also had some very good cookbooks, really, to speak
to what you're interested in today.
So she did actually I don't think my mother ever went to a cooking class.
She was quite competitive with her other friends, so they would talk about cooking.
But she did have the cookbooks that everybody had.
There was Constance Spry's cooking.
She also had the Penguin Elizabeth David cookbooks.
And she taught herself from those, and she taught herself very well from those.
Lucy: It's really interesting that she, you talk about her learning from you.
from books, I guess, rather than from her parents.
I mean, obviously I don't want to make any assumptions about what her
relationship with her parents were like, but that in context of what you're
saying about pre industrial food is quite interesting that that almost has
the, the passing down of information from generation to generation hasn't
always been that fluid or, um, seamless.
Alison Swan Parente: I don't know.
where she learned to cook or what her relationship was with her mother.
She never talked about her mother or what her relationship
was with her mother's cooking.
She talked about her mother but she never talked about
the food that her mother made.
Lucy: To come back to this idea of creating roots into work, this was
something Martha, somewhat unexpectedly to her, put to practice very, very
quickly into her time at the school.
Martha Brown: A few months after the course, or even while the course was
going on, I actually kind of found a shop in Sheffield and you had to
write a business plan as part of the course and, uh, Kind of was like,
Oh, we'll, we'll look at rents.
We'll look at shops and see what's around.
And it kind of turned from a complete made up scenario to actually a reality.
So yeah, I went from not thinking, yeah, it's a bit kind of.
ridiculous, I think, and not the ideal way to start a business.
I think like, go and work in bakeries, get lots of professional experience,
make mistakes in other people's businesses, do you know what I mean?
Like, rather than your own.
But yeah, so I left the course in July 2012 and opened in
September, uh, in November 2012.
So I just kind of got the keys literally like a month after leaving.
And yeah, opened up you.
tiny bakery.
It was kind of in a retail shop.
So it was all one space.
So I wasn't kind of having to bake somewhere else and then transport it.
It was just a single room.
Everyone could see the process.
Everyone could see what was going on, but that kind of felt manageable.
You know, it wasn't big, scary, rent, big, scary production unit.
So yeah, Yeah, set up, was in that shop for two years, moved to a bigger premises,
opened a cafe, opened kind of a restaurant y cafe upstairs, expanded into the shop
next door, did bread classes and supper clubs and pizza nights and markets
and it just kind of grew organically.
over time.
And actually a lot of what I enjoyed about it was the business development
as well as the kind of, I guess there's that creativity in that, and then
there's also the creativity in the production and the product development.
And they were the two things I kind of loved the most.
It was never that I was particularly interested in being a business owner.
That was just, um, a thing that, that happened and quite significantly as well.
Yeah.
So I did that for, for 10 years, kind of had 30 staff, uh, kind of across three
floors of a building and out in the yard and everyone was kind of packed into
whatever little space we could have.
And yeah, I've run through COVID really well, but I think like that really kind
of, Weighed on me and took it out of me.
And while I really wanted, I had so many exciting grand plans for the business,
I think I kind of got to the point where I was like, I think I probably
need to start thinking about life outside of the bakery and what else.
I could do or have headspace for.
So yeah, I sold it after 10 years, had a bit of time off and then found
myself back at the school last summer.
So kind of summer 2023 saying, what kind of jobs have you got?
Have you got anything?
Like, I'm just quite interested in, like, I could just come and
help out or is there teaching?
And then they were like, Oh, actually we need a patisserie and vinnoiserie
teacher on our foundation degree.
And so I was like, amazing, that sounds great.
So I've been back at the school since last summer teaching, but also
working as a technician, kind of supporting other tutors on courses,
um, doing that kind of organization.
And I've really enjoyed both.
I really enjoy that kind of organization side and then kind of, I guess I
know what what teachers need because I'm also doing the teaching, um,
which is a really nice balance.
And so when
Lucy: you started teaching.
Yeah.
What was that like to go from kind of student to teacher?
Martha Brown: I think it definitely again took me a little while to really
understand the kind of points in the day where like, someone was going to go and
do something before I'd said, and that you need to kind of catch those or give those
little tidbits of advice, like, before something happens, because it's not like
if you're stood in front of a class and you're saying things to people and you're
hoping that they understand all your, your, your kind of thinking they are.
When you're, when you're teaching a practical class, everyone
has to go away with a product.
And actually if someone is falling behind, you can't just abandon them.
I mean, it's like, we've got to move as, as fast as the slowest person
in the room, which is, which is.
Totally fine.
And actually there's a problem with being effectively too quick and
not listening at the same time.
So it was a hundred, it was a massive learning experience for me, but
also, I guess I knew what had been useful for me when I was learning.
So I could kind of try and, Yeah, like I even think that from when I was learning,
I remember kind of scribbles on bits of paper that tutors did to describe
kind of fermentation or a wheat berry.
And like, every single class I would draw the same image that I
think is probably ingrained in my brain from when I was learning.
Lucy: Yeah.
Martha Brown: Because, but that doesn't mean, that doesn't mean to say that.
everyone in the room learns the same way as I do, so I think you've
really got to have a range of ways of explaining things or demoing things.
And that's also the nice thing about being in person, you know, if something's
not working for you, the teacher should really be able to be like, okay, try
this instead and offer that range of, of different methods and techniques,
because there is so many in Brad and everyone probably teaches in a different
way and everything will kind of.
Yeah, things will click for people, I think, in a different way.
Lucy: What is it, do you think, that makes people really good at that?
I
Alison Swan Parente: don't know.
I think some people are good at teaching and some people aren't good at teaching.
I mean, I think that's true if you go to any school in the country,
you'll see there are good teachers and not such good teachers.
But I think in order to be even begin to be a good teacher, you
have to really be interested in your subject and like your subject.
And you have to be able to transmit that enthusiasm and, and all of those feelings
about what you're doing to other people.
One of the things we've been incredibly lucky about with this school is that,
The people who started teaching here, really from the beginning, started
teaching because they really loved their subject and they really didn't
want to leave the world without having taught it to other people,
taught their skills to other people.
And so we've pretty much always had very good, very enthusiastic teachers.
Lucy: I think I agree with this idea that some people are good at
teaching and some people aren't.
And I also think that Some people love to learn, and some
people aren't that bothered.
For the people that love to learn, for them, us maybe, would I tentatively say
this about myself, it's impossible to ever really stop wanting to learn new
things, to throw yourself into them.
Martha's back in the classroom herself.
You've now Gone back to learning full time, well, full time again.
What prompted the decision to study interior architecture?
Martha Brown: I think, so I did, I guess I ended up doing
a lot of it in my own business.
I kind of, I guess, well, a lot of people.
Who, I don't know how, a lot of people seemingly have the money to employ kind
of interior design stuff, but like I didn't, but also I really wanted to do it.
I really enjoyed designing the spaces, even the kind of really functional
spaces, the kitchens and working out the workflows and how we could be
efficient because we weren't in a big kind of rectangular warehousy type shape.
We were in kind of small, old terrace shops where it was really important to be.
I just think I really enjoyed getting geeky with it and working tessellation of,
you know, how things would fit together.
And actually as part of the, the kind of application for uni, I had to write
a personal statement and I am really terrible at writing anything like that
or about myself, but like the kind of, it was quite weirdly cathartic to think
back and think actually food and design or spaces have always been really part
of my existence, even as like, a child, like I designed my room when I was 11 and
picked all the colors and the furniture.
And then when I was 14, I wanted to move into a bigger room downstairs.
So I was like saved up and bought the furniture.
Like I poured over the Ikea catalog when I was like in my early
teens and would kind of draw over furniture and then like redesign it.
And then, and I just hadn't really thought that that was, It's not a strange
thing to do, but like an interest, it was just something that I did.
And then when I look back, I was like, Oh, actually, maybe I've actually
been into this for quite a while.
And yeah, I, I kind of, I, I didn't finish my A levels, um, cause I got,
I started feeling well after GCSEs.
It's about 16 and then it took a year and a half, I was
diagnosed with chronic fatigue.
And so actually when everyone else was going out into the world
and going to uni, my kind of life and world shrunk quite a lot.
And actually then home became really important and it was where I could create
things and where I could, it was the thing that I had control of, I guess.
So actually cooking and my house or my interior space.
yeah, was the thing that I had access to, which now makes a lot of sense
that maybe that's why I'm interested.
I'm also very affected by spaces, whether it's like architecture or the
design of things or the feel of things.
I think that's always, um, part of my Yeah, uh, part of the world that I
kind of feel and see, I see the like little things, um, and so it's quite
nice to be delving into that now.
But definitely feels related.
Lucy: You have been doing this work with the school for quite a while now,
and on sort of reflecting back, what do you think was it about everything
you'd learned as a psychotherapist that made it such a logical step?
Alison Swan Parente: I think that I'm very interested in what makes people
tick, but I'm particularly interested in the social conditions, not just the
emotional conditions, but the social conditions that make people tick.
Because I, I started off as a psychotherapist working with children,
but then I did a lot of work with the Women's Therapy Centre in London.
And so, that was in the, it was founded in the late 70s.
And we were a particularly feminist enterprise.
We were thinking about women's psychology.
Not just because of, um, parental influences and psychodynamic
influences, but also the social influences that meant that women
were showing so many more psychiatric symptoms under certain conditions.
And so we were thinking that if you're thinking about women's psychology,
you have to think about it in a social context and in a political context.
And I think that I've always been interested in looking at
food in the same kind of way, that it isn't just for eating.
You have to look at how it's produced, why it's produced, who it's produced
by, and think about it both socially and politically in order to understand
how to get rid of barriers to health and to think about how we can think
about, for example, the food system And how it affects things like climate.
All of these things are not just to do with eating or farming or producing
food, they're to do with big systems.
And I don't think you can teach the slightest thing around food without
knowing a lot about its context.
So I think that, that's a really torturous way to go from psychotherapy
to food, but it is to do with thinking about very visceral things, which is how
we feel and how we, but also to think about how many different influences
there are over those primary processes.
Lucy: Lekker is hosted and produced by me, Lucy Dearlove.
Thanks to Martha Brown and Alison Swan Parente for being part of this episode.
And also to Sally Ann Hunt, Kevin Roberts, and everyone else at the
School of Artisan Food, especially Emily Leary, who organised us all being
there on the day that we were invited.
It was such a great day, I loved it.
You can find out more about the School of Artisan Food and the courses
they run on their website, as well as the diplomas and longer courses.
They do lots of short half day courses in things like ice cream and pork pie making.
Not together, yet.
And Just a really, I think it would just be a great way to spend a bit of
time in the beautiful countryside where the school is on the Welbeck estate.
There are also still places on this year's four week summer school, though
accommodation is now full you can still do it as a non residential student.
Takes place in July and August and is led by the three tutors.
that we met Martha Brown, Sally Ann Hunt and Kevin Roberts, so we'll
cover lots of fascinating stuff relating to meat, wheat and dairy.
Again, you can find out more about that on the School of Art
Assigned Food website, and if you're interested, get a move on because I
think there's only a few places left.
The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.
Before I go, I One reminder that you can sign up as a paid subscriber
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Hello to any paid subscribers who are listening here.
I'm so grateful for your support.
Thank you.
And thanks to all of you for listening.
I'll be back very soon.