food friends : cat sarsfield

and her love of roast chicken

next up in this series of wonderful food friends is my sweet friend, cat sarsfield.

where do i begin to explain my love for this wonderful woman? cat reached out to me a year or so ago and asked if i might be interested in being interviewed for her brilliant substack, since no one asked. after reading over her substack, i jumped at the chance. cat writes so beautifully about so many things, many of which include food and nostalgia. she writes in such a thought-provoking way, and i find myself sinking into wherever i am sitting (when reading her writing), and i, too, get transported back to my own food memories or loves from long ago. there is a romanticism to her writing but also a true sense of realness. and, indeed—so much of her writing revolves around food, feelings around food, friends, dining together, and even more fundamental (and relatable)—solo dinners.

the questions she asked me were so interesting and nuanced, i genuinely enjoyed answering every single one.

and after that, we became firm friends. <3

she messaged me to let me know she was coming out to california earlier this year, and we made a plan to finally meet in person. not only that, but we planned a little road trip to los alamos, too.

we bonded over our love of roast chicken, past loves, cold pints, london, alfresco dining, swimming in the sea, cornwall, travel in general, family ties and so much more.

she is coming to stay with us again next month, and i could not be more excited to have her back in LA, and have a proper catch up!

but now, without further ado, welcome to the wonderful world of my darling friend, cat sarsfield.

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darling! how is life? you’ve just spent the last two months in cornwall, after escaping london for the summer. how are you feeling? 

My love! I’m doing so well - currently on a flight to Vancouver and in a few weeks I’ll be seeing you in LA! My Cornwall summer was exactly what I needed: nourishing, wholesome, quiet and a return to nature. It’s such a cliché to say how good it is to get out of the city but I didn’t realise how much I needed it. I was lucky that a friend needed to be in London for the summer for work, so we actually house swapped, which meant I got to explore Penzance and Wild West coast a bit better. I used to live in Cornwall about six years ago and had been contemplating a return to the coast, and this was the confirmation I needed!

were there any differences in how you lived your day-to-day in cornwall, as opposed to london? and alternatively, any similarities? 

I’m the kind of person you’d expect to have a pretty solid day-to-day routine, but being a freelancer and constantly moving means I don’t, although I guess I’m pretty grounded in smaller rituals that I can translate from city to coast. I guess the difference between me in London versus Cornwall is the pace at which I go about my day, especially how much time I spend with other people. In London, it’s not unlikely that I’ll be seeing about four different sets of people a day for coffee, a walk, meetings, a lunch, drinks or dinner. I’ll always try and squeeze in as much socialising as possible because there are simply too many good people and good things to see! So when I landed back in Cornwall, I had about two full days where I didn’t have any plans with friends down there, and it really affected my nervous system. I suddenly panicked and felt like I was really lonely or that I was a total loser for not using up every inch of my time. That’s the strange thing about London; it gives you a complex about spending time alone. But after about a week, I really leant into it. My days down there were mainly filled with long beach walks, driving to the local farm store, soaking up the sun at a local hidden spot, going to my friend’s sauna, eating at another friend’s restaurants, meeting my friend Sarah and her baby Solly for happy hour round the corner, looking after my other friend’s dog Alfie and cooking lots of meals for myself and others. In London, it’s a lot more meals out and martinis and pints and cycling around Shoreditch/De Beauvoir/Stoke Newington and going to my friends’ pilates classes!

you and i have talked before about how much we love to live in nostalgia. tell me a little more about your thoughts on that. why do you think it brings you/us/people in general so much joy to to be nostalgic?

I always feel like I’m constantly floating in that liminal space between nostalgia and novelty. I have a tendency to view the past with rose-tinted glasses, often curating the best memories or perhaps even choosing to ignore any of the darker moments that might have tainted them. Equally, I think there’s something so beautiful in harking back to earlier times and reminding ourselves how lucky we are. I wonder if we are simply more nostalgic than say our parents’ generation because we’ve had the luxury of time slowing down a little for us. We weren’t forced to grow up as quickly as our parents, and even though millennials love to talk about how boomers managed to get on the property ladder earlier than we could, we can’t forget we’ve also been afforded more choice and opportunities. This is obviously coming from an incredibly privileged perspective - I feel so lucky that I was able to travel and work abroad in my twenties and didn’t have too much pressure to settle down quickly. I think this is why I’m nostalgic - I genuinely love the life I’ve lived. But I’m also so excited for future moments – and I’m dreaming just as hard about the cabin in the woods and the big dog and partner cooking next to me, as I am about my solo adventures and years spent living in a little shed at the bottom of a boat builder’s garden.

talking of nostalgia, what was your favorite thing to eat as a kid? 

I was so lucky that my mum is such a prolific cook - her talent really knows no bounds. I always used to crave a simple bowl of white rice, salty crispy seaweed and crunchy toasted sesame seeds. This felt like our version of buttered toast when you got sick - it’s so comforting. But also I remember requesting sausage and mash every year for my birthday meal for about six years. And hilariously sausages are still what I associate with coming home because my dad will always ask if I want them for breakfast, and pick up six Bucks Bangers from the local butcher, or take some Cumberlands out of the freezer bought on a trip up north to Lancashire, and he’ll put them on a low heat at 7am for almost 2.5 hours, so they’re evenly cooked and perfectly tender.

you have a new creative project, kettle objects—congrats. i would love to know a little more about it! and on the back of that, do you have any ideas on what your first object will be? without revealing too much! :)

Thank you! I’m so excited to launch something of my own after years of supporting other people with their own brands. I guess it came from my obsession and love of kitchen objects - their form, their function but also their provenance, from materials and process to the hands that crafted them. I’m so lucky to have such a brilliant community of designers and makers as very good friends, and after working on a big project that supporting emerging designers in London with IKEA and H&M, I knew I wanted to collaborate with these creatives. I’m not a designer and I can’t make anything with my hands, but I have a good eye and obviously I’m super invested in what I use in the kitchen. So Kettle is a quiet collaboration with friends who happen to be talented makers where we come up with limited edition batches of unexpected objects for the kitchen. The first product will launch in November and is a set of ceramics made by my friend Alex, using recycled clay with a really fun concept. It’s a set of two mugs, one smaller bistro style and the other a take on the American dinner mug, and their sizes represent the optimum ratio of rice to water (1:1.1). So you can use your mugs for coffee in the morning, and to measure out your rice bowl later in the day. That’s actually an exclusive as I haven’t mentioned this on socials yet!

what inspires your writing on a day-to-date basis. and similarly, what recently has been a topic of deep inspiration for you? could be more than one topic—up to 2-3 big inspo points. 

I think the past is a huge inspiration on my writing, and I guess that goes back to your question around nostalgia. I use writing as a way to make sense of past experiences and my feelings around them, and how they might have evolved over the years. I spend a lot of time writing about things that happened to me, whether directly or indirectly, fiction or non-fiction, and it’s definitely a form of therapy for me. I write everyday but often it’s for work, although my newsletter keeps me busy three times a week. I’ve been slowly working on a short novel and I’ve always got ideas for a collection of food stories swirling in my brain. Obviously food is such a significant theme in my writing, but it’s really just a vehicle to write about the topics that feel most pertinent to me: love, friendship, heartbreak, lust, desire, loneliness and connection. I guess that’s a deliberately vague answer as I’m sure most writers are interested in these topics…

how does food and cooking play apart in your life. in your substack you write about your solo dinners and indeed cooking for friends—both with so much love and intent between both processes. tell me both what cooking for yourself means to you, as well as cooking for others. 

I actually came to cooking later than people expect. I had a really tricky relationship with food in my late teens and early twenties. I was bulimic for a large proportion of that time, and I don’t think that disordered thought pattern really ever exits. So for me, cooking is my active choice to feed my body with love. Our family is deeply rooted in food experiences, from my mum’s cooking to going out for special meals or experiencing food from another culture when we’re travelling. I definitely view cooking as an act of love; I’m terrible at remembering birthdays or sending gifts, but I will always offer to make you dinner. I love cooking for others and it’s such a pleasure to bring people together around a plate-filled table. As much as I love this, cooking for myself is a much deeper passion. I think it’s how I truly learned how to be ok with being alone, and now cooking is the way I ground myself if I find myself spiralling out of control.

you have spent a lot of time travelling to the us & canada to visit friends, me included! I know how much you love california—tell me a little more about why you love it so much and what keeps bringing you back (apart from those friends).

California has my heart! I spend three months living in Mendocino on a winery when I was 26 years old, but I think my love of California started way before then. I came as a kid and I just felt at home in the heat and amongst the vast coastline, the huge forests and the sprawling cities. Maybe it was the Parent Trap that really kicked it off - I became obsessed with that all-American vision of the big house on a vineyard, the wraparound porch, the golden retriever and the bowls of chilli and cornbread and riding horses and double denim. Somehow lots of wonderful friends have found themselves in LA and I absolutely love the city. It feels so easy to exist in for me and I really feel at home there, especially in East LA. Although I will say Ojai is one of my favourite places in the world, so I always try and make a trip out there. Vancouver is another second home mainly because my best friend lives there with my goddaughter (although she’s about to move to Calgary so this might be my last big stint here - strange after so many long trips here). I love any city where you can escape into nature without having to leave it - LA and Vancouver are perfect for this. I need that connection to sun, sea, forest or mountains to feel truly myself.

lastly, you are coming back to visit in november, and coming to stay with me! what shall we cook as our first meal together? 

I cannot wait for this! So many amazing places to go but I would love our first meal together to be a roast chicken. It’s my favourite meal to cook, and usually the first thing I do in a new kitchen to feel like I’m rooted there. I’d love to make you my nurungji chicken, which is a soy-brined chicken roasted over buttery white rice until it’s rich with chicken fat and impossibly salty and crispy on the bottom. But let’s also barbecue by the pool and get all our wonderful women over for bottles of chilled red, cute little cans of Ghia, big fat salads dressed with Nour, lots of charred vegetables and bowls of saucy dips. The farmer’s market beckons…!

you can follow cat on instagram here, her new project kettle objects here or subscribe to her substack here, i highly suggest that you do all three. :)