"A Story of a Year"

Inspiration, humility and a new project.

Reflecting on the last twelve months, I’ll admit to feeling slightly overwhelmed.

I had never found the place to put down my words and lacked the inspiration to finally start to write what had been in my head for so long, until early in January this year. Natalie Goldberg and Alicia Kennedy were my inspirations for being here.

After years of writing down words, pitching numerous times to media, magazines and publishers and being ignored, I stopped and kept the words bundled up in my head. There is the renowned Guild of Food Writers which I thought might be useful to me, and after further research, over the telephone, they encouraged me to apply, though the both times that I did they rejected my application for membership. Talk about disillusionment for someone with decades of knowledge, an inquiring mind and the appetite to happily write thousands of words on my subject, week in-week out.

One month shy of the anniversary of the first year of publishing here, there are nearly fifteen hundred of you who are now subscribed to my words. That’s a lot of people who have chosen to read what I create. Every day I see new subscribers in my inbox, today at least another ten. I am humbled by this, that over the world there are folk who connect with what I write from my quiet corner of England. When I started this, I had no real idea as to who might even read this, let alone the fact that I would have to start including it in tax returns. I have had the most amazing feedback from so many of you here. Every week I scroll through comments, messages and replies, genuinely taken aback at the kindness. I try to answer everyone who leaves me a comment.

Then there’s the paid subscriber notes that you can leave when you subscribe, I thank you for your kind words and encouragement. I haven’t worked out how to answer those as yet. But know that I read and am grateful for every one.

The haters have fortunately been few, just a handful. I have had feedback that all my content should be free and unarchived, and that there should be more weekly newsletters. I have been told to be more generous with my recipes and my time, and have been called a beggar for promoting my work here. But then again as a seasoned IG user, I am used to the omnipresent malice, algorithmic vagaries and cruel games that Meta deems necessary to puzzle me with, so am used to trolling.

I have a remarkably thick skin.

Seventeen years as a Head Chef, and being exposed to opinionated broadsheet newspaper criticism by those who have never spent one day in a professional kitchen, so are wholly unqualified in my mind to criticise something they generally don’t understand, has helped me develop the hide of an ox (let it be known that the concept of the ‘Food Critic’ is something that truly befuddles me, and it is a subject that I’ll dig into somewhere next year).

The unsubscribes on Substack I accept as a way of filtering out the clicks that people might have made in haste. I really don’t mind. I’m not a newsletter that gives you dozens of recipes a month as some readers might expect me to. ‘Your people will find you’ as they say.

I write these essays as the mood finds me on that day. I try to plan ahead, though invariably I like to see where the entries take me, and I enjoy the spontaneity of how the words come (or not). I was always terrible at menu writing, not the dishes themselves you should understand, but the idea of setting it in stone for a month freaked me out, as by the time I had worded and tested a full restaurant menu, to the annoyance of every GM, Sous and maitre’d I worked with, I’d be back to square one, changing dishes as I’d already adjusted something in my head. I’d probably have been more suited to restaurants with daily changing menus in all honesty.

With writing I often sit blankly in front of my screen with a subject in mind, something I planned for a week to tell you in great detail, though my brain stubbornly refuses to tell the story from a kitchen in Paris, and instead I find myself two hours later, trying very hard not to keep scrolling through pictures of dogs online, and then deciding instead to tell you a story about pickling oak leaves.

As a chef, it appears almost expected of you to provide work for free. I was asked recently to provide full translations of my bi-weekly essays into French, as the chap reading my words didn’t like his AI translator. Explaining that this might be complicated, time-consuming and quite costly, I was met with an uncourteous email response and he unsubscribed.

I decided to use my paywall from the start of the publication of this newsletter. I think this was the right thing for me to do, as a way of taking some control over my work from the outset. I believe that this was the correct decision. I have never had an issue in sharing any of my work, The many, many cooks that I’ve had work for me would hopefully tell you that I was always more than happy to share and teach my skills and recipes, though this platform enables me to earn money through the many hours I spend, (usually very late at night) on this project through the last year. I’m always happy to provide recipes and a point of view if you ask, but I like that Substack allows me to manage the direction in how I achieve that.

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For 2024

In January, I plan to begin the serialising of a short book. One chapter a month. Twelve chapters in total. An experiment for me really. I have a working title for now and I look forward to publishing it here for you over the coming year. It will be behind my paywall, but I think it would be careless of me not to do that. I do hope that you’ll come and find it.

For now, it will be called “A Story of a Year”.

It is not necessarily a cookery book filled with pages of recipes as you might expect. It is not the The Cookbook I sort of once wrote, that I’ll keep for now, but it will be a quiet book that will walk through the evolving rhythms of the months of the calendar as they change through the year, offering you an insight into what I observe, what I cook and why. There will be recipes and techniques, some simple, some old-fashioned and some different. I will explore what inspires me, nature, where I might find ingredients and what I create over one year of work, month by month.

It will be very similar in style to how I write here for you in my weekly essays and will no doubt keep me up very late at night. I do so very much look forward to writing it for you to read.

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It is Christmas Eve for me here in England, that time at the end of the year for a step back from all that has preceded it. I imagine that many of you who read this also celebrate at this time of year, in the far-flung corners of the world that these words reach. I wish all those of you who do, a very Merry Christmas. For all of the encouragement and support that has come my way in the last twelve months, I thank you.

You spur me on.

Until next week,

William