Phoebe! Introduce yourself to our Pasta Lovers Community.
Hi, I’m Phoebe - a fellow pasta lover and chef currently living and working in London. Feeding people brings me a lot of joy so I’m very happy to be here! I have a degree in English and Classics, which you can imagine has helped me tremendously in the kitchen, but my background in food properly began when I spent a year working at an organic farm. Here, I learned about the importance of food seasonality which has formed the basis of how I cook today. Being a chef is quite a tiring job (physically and mentally!), and I don’t have the social life I thought I would have at my age, but I love food too much to do anything else.
You work at River Cafe, tell us how that came to be.
It’s actually quite a random story! Whilst working at the farm, there was a summer festival at which one of my friends roped me into entering a cake for the competition tent - I think the category was ‘best decorated cake’. My friend and I stayed up until midnight the night before decorating this cake, and it ended up winning (not a huge feat, I think there were only three entries!). Ruthie Rogers was the judge so I got speaking to her about my cake and about working on the farm. She spoke about getting more women into the industry and said I should come to work at the River Cafe, and a couple of months later I was in the kitchen! I didn’t think I wanted to be a chef, but I couldn’t let an opportunity like that pass me by - I’ve been there a year and a half now and have learned so much.
And you have a background in working on an organic farm, tell us about your time doing that.
I did a year long internship at Daylesford Organic which meant packing up my bags and moving to the middle of the Cotswolds at the age of 22.
On the program, you spend roughly six weeks working in each of their production units based on the farm; in the creamery making yoghurt, cheese and kefir with milk from their dairy herd, night shifts in the bakery shaping sourdough loaves and viennoiserie, in the ham barn curing and brining ham which I did for a month in the lead up to Christmas, a period of time known as ‘The Hammageddon’, and I can confirm that it did feel like the end of the world was nigh with ham.
You also spend a week of each season working in the market garden harvesting vegetables, picking fruit, and mostly a lot of weeding on your hands and knees across the 30-acres of land. The time spent in that garden was my most treasured; I loved working outside throughout the changing seasons, picking tomatoes in a 30C polytunnel, or harvesting leeks in the pouring rain in the middle of January.
It was a lot of 6am starts, monotonous tasks, and hair nets, but I learned so much about seasonality, how our food should be grown and reared, and the importance of transparency in our food systems. That year changed the way I view food, and laid the foundations for how I cook, eat, and shop now.
Do you have any favourite brands? food related or not.
In the kitchen, Allday Goods make some very nifty knives using recycled plastic for the handles (I’ve got one made from Maldon Salt tubs!), Service Works for the most stylish chef trousers, and Kitchen Provisions for gorgeous kitchen equipment if you want to invest. Most of my tableware and crockery is sourced vintage or secondhand, so it’s a very eclectic hodgepodge at the dinner table!
I love using Wildfarmed flour for baking, they use wheat grown regeneratively and it makes for a delicious bread dough. Mutti for the best tinned tomatoes you can get at the supermarket, and I also always have a jar or two of Bold Beans in the cupboard in case of dinner emergencies!
We're all about ultimate comfort food, what's your favourite Friday night dinner?
If I’m cooking, then it will most likely be a big bowl of pasta (regardless of how much of it I’ve eaten at work that day!). At the moment, that would look something like some dark leafy greens, blanched with garlic and blitzed with lots of good olive oil, tossed with pasta and covered in a mountain of Parmesan. Sometimes after a long day of cooking at work though, I just need to sit down, so then we’ll most likely order Xian Impressions, which is some of the best Chinese food you can get in London - their signature Biangbiang noodles, and boneless chicken in ginger sauce is my go-to!
Sofa dinner or table setting?
Table! We ate around the table every evening growing up (no phones allowed!), so it must have been instilled from a young age.
I really enjoy laying the table, smoothing out a tablecloth, filling up a water jug, perhaps lighting a candle. I think creating a ritual around dinner and making a small event out of it, even on a random Tuesday evening, is a really lovely thing to do and gives the food you’ve cooked the credit it deserves.
I also cannot be trusted to eat on the sofa and not spill something down myself - eating at the table is precautionary!
What's your favourite seasonal produce?
At the moment, it’s got to be Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb. I just love how it’s so pink it almost seems synthetic! I love it stewed, roasted, poached, with yoghurt, custard, ice cream, or I recently made a rhubarb crumble cake for an event which was so delicious.
The grey days recently have got me longing for spring and the fresh produce it brings - peas, broad beans, asparagus, courgettes, basil - ugh, I can’t wait!
Share a bit about your newsletter with our community.
I have a substack called A Plateful. It’s mainly a place to share recipes of what I’ve been cooking that week, often pieced together with a funny story about me almost crying at work over a plate of scallops or some other kitchen disaster. You’re welcome to join and laugh along with/at me. The recipes are mostly seasonal, easy to follow and delicious, if I do say so myself!
Any places, faces, podcasts of books you want to shout out?
Can I self-plug? Daphnies Supper Club! The supper club I run with three of my friends who are also smashing it in the industry. We actually all met whilst interning at the farm, and started the supper club in the Cotswolds before moving it to London once we all started living here. We’ve got a few really fun events planned this year, so follow along and nab yourself a ticket to the next one - we’d love to cook for you!
But on a less selfish note, I’m loving that long-form written content is making a comeback, some of my favourite foodie publishings are Table, Slop, and Picnic Magazine. As for other substacks, I love reading Vittles, Florence Blair’s bits and bobs, and The Late Plate by Rosie Kellet.
And finally, what's your favourite Northern Pasta shape.
The ultimate decision! It depends what sauce I’m making to go with it, but I think it has to be Radiatori. The shape lends itself really nicely to a lot of sauces because of the pockets created by the ridges, but particularly a tomato-ey one. Traditionally, in Italy, tomato sauce is served with short dried pasta, rather than long or fresh, so radiatori is perfect for a quick tomato pasta when you can’t be bothered for too much faff for dinner!
