Honestly, I am. No catering college, no brigade, no chef’s whites. It’s just me, one oven, a four-ring hob and a supermarket trolley, the same as you.
For seventeen years I ran The Secret Supper Society from my dining room in Oxfordshire. That meant five or six courses for up to 24 guests, three nights a week. Every plate was cooked on a hob like yours, with ingredients you can pick up on a Tuesday. If it didn’t work in a home kitchen, it didn’t make the menu.
That’s really the whole point of me. I love the TV chefs and I watch them too, but they’re cooking in kitchens that don’t look like yours. I’m the one standing next to you, topping up your rosé and saying “go on, you can do this.”
Along the way I’ve been lucky enough to cook for Raymond Blanc, Mary Berry and Tom Aikens, (no pressure, then!). I’ve popped up on a few TV shows and spent a very happy stretch talking food every week on the Adam Ball Show on BBC Radio Oxford.
When you watch Ramsay, you think “I won’t bother.” When you watch Jules, you think “I’ll give that a go.”
It was always called a Society.
It just took seventeen years to make it one.
It started in my dining room, with twenty-four people, six courses and a waiting list. It was lovely, but really it was me cooking for people, not with them.
Then came Instagram, and suddenly over 115,000 of you were cooking along. That’s wonderful, but it’s still me talking and you listening.
So this is the bit I’m most excited about. The Society brings everything together in one place: the recipes, the tips, the stories, the chat and the fun. You can talk back, show off what you’ve made, ask the “silly” questions (there aren’t any), and swap ideas with people who think about their next meal the way other people think about their next holiday.
Not a restaurant. Not a broadcast. A proper community. Pull up a chair.
17 years of The Secret Supper Society
