Kitchen Cupboards #4: Liberty Mendez
The former BBC Good Food recipe developer and Parliamentary pastry chef who shapes the way many of us cook without us even realising it.
Welcome to Kitchen Cupboards, a monthly ingredient column where, rather than exploring some of my favourite ingredients, I’m taking a peek into some of my favourite food writers, creators and producers kitchen cupboards to talk about which ingredients shape their everyday cooking.
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It drives J around the bend, but I hoard food magazines like they’re cookbooks, and if you were to saunter over to my shelf and pick an issue of BBC Good Food - which I think I can safely call Britain’s food magazine of record - from the past couple of years to cook from, chances are the recipe you’re about to embark on has been either written by, tested by, or even styled by Liberty Mendez.
Before she joined the food magazine I grew up learning to cook from she was a pastry chef in the House of Commons, which essentially means that whilst I was shovelling cafeteria jerk pork into my mouth hunched over my desk drafting policy positions, she was somewhere on the other side of the building doing what I really ought to have been doing instead: helping craft something delicious for others to enjoy.
Now, she’s a freelancer covering recipe development, food writing, recipe testing and food styling with an Instagram account filled with current projects that always manage to make me hungry, a client list I’m rightly envious of, a podcast series focusing on funny stories from interesting workplaces, and a newsletter that always helps lift my spirits when it drops into my inbox.
So, it only seemed natural that I turn to Liberty for December’s Kitchen Cupboards where she answers a key question I’ve always had since I attempted it when I’d only just left politics: how on earth can you make working as a freelance recipe developer work in a shared kitchen?