Welsh food writer Mikey Bell has worn many hats – including Buzz recipe contributor, many moons ago – in his gastronomic journey. Now he’s written a reflective memoir about it, shaped by Valleys upbringing, sexuality, travel and family ties. And there are recipes, too! Ella Dorman asked him some questions.
How An Egg Changed My Life moves through the Valleys, Cardiff and Florence. Is there a recipe in the book that you associate most with home?
When I think of food and home, I’m immediately split between two associations. There’s my mother, in my childhood home, where there is a big, steaming pot of tender lamb cawl and fluffy, sticky dumplings on the stove. And then there’s my partner, in the home we live in now, slumped on the sofa dipping brick-sized fried cheese sandwiches into sweet, salty terracotta-hued tomato soup. Both places would not be home without those recipes, and indeed, those two people.
Each chapter ends with a recipe. In your creative process, was it the food or the writing that came first?
In my usual food writing, it’s always food first, with flavour and context guiding everything afterward. However, with my memoir, life lead the charge, and the recipes followed. It was the only way I was able to tell the story truthfully, because the book explores my journey of redefining fulfilment, and while food is such an enormous part of that, the journey itself predates my positive relationship to food and cooking. It was important for me to first pinpoint all the moments in my life where I explored fulfilment, plot all of those chronologically, shape them into a story structure, and then underpin them with my relationship to food at those specific times. It’s just pure luck that I’ve had an enormous appetite and been fed well my whole life!
Your time in Florence, we learn in the book, shifted something in you. Do you think it was Italy itself that did it, or having enrolled in cooking school there?
There was certainly an existential shift during my time in Italy, but I think it was an openness and willingness to see the world from a new perspective that caused it. Florence and the cookery school taught me so many important, precious and wonderful things, both in and out of a kitchen, but I often wonder if I would have been aware and receptive to those lessons had my heart not been craving a new perspective on life to begin with.
The potency of those lessons were heightened by the magic of Florence and the cooking school, absolutely, but I believe sometimes the world behaves to you as you behave to it, and perhaps all it took for me to realign my perspective was the pursuit of a new one in itself. I was just so fortunate to be able to find that new perspective while cooking in Italy. I do think – next to Wales, of course – that it’s the most beautiful country in the world.
The book is very candid about a difficult time in your life. How did you find the experience of writing about it?
I found it an enormous privilege, actually. All my life I have tried to make sense of the world through writing stories, but for over a decade, having been immersed in food writing, I traded self-exploration for ingredients and methods. For that reason, it felt very freeing to finally write so openly. It’s been many years since that difficult period of my life, and I think viewing it through the lens of time, distance and experience meant that I could dismantle it properly, with the respect it deserved, and put it on a page in a way that felt true.
However, the biggest privilege was not writing about it so much as it has been talking to people who have shared their own experiences of the same struggles. It’s reminded me that while my story is specific, it is certainly not unique to me. It’s turned the sometimes-lonely process of writing from a monologue into a dialogue. That’s why I hope anybody who has grappled with feelings of disappointment, obsessiveness and uncertainty in life can read this book and realise how universal those feelings can be, and hopefully be reminded that they are not alone.
Throughout the book, food is everywhere – it carries memory, comfort and identity. Did you always view food that way, or is that something the writing process helped you to understand?
Never. I only learned to view food and cooking as tools for joy in my mid-twenties, when a colleague gifted me a cookbook that changed my life. I think about this all the time, and how the course of my life could be so different had I not let a new passion find me and guide me as it did. That openness to redefine what makes you happy, I hope, is the key take away from the book, because while food is what found me, for someone else, that could be anything. Music or books or art or cosmetics or fashion or exercise, whatever. We should never be closed off.
Just recently, I started swimming in a somewhat panicked attempt to be more physically active as I’m sometimes way too comfortable lying down and snacking. It’s now become a morning ritual and an enormous source of joyful solitude for me. I truly believe there is an open endlessness to finding joy, but only if you’re willing to let it find you too.
How An Egg Changed My Life is published on Thurs 2 July via Calon.
Price: £18.99. Info: here
words ELLA DORMAN
