Our new Featured Five
These engaging, food-focused Substacks each offer something very special.
I’m excited to present to you a new batch of Featured Five Substacks — the newsletters I’m currently recommending. The previous Featured Five have moved to their new permanent home at CWB’s Stackroll, where you’ll find a juicy list of other Stacks to explore.
As a group, the new Featured Five are global in scope and varied in approach, focusing on a fascinating range of culinary cultures — including the culture of cookbook creation.
Going forward, I’ll be doing many more live videos with Featured Five authors, as I had such a great time conversing with Memorie di Angelina’s Frank Fariello in April. If you’re an author featured this month (or if you were featured in past months), and you’d like to join me in a live video, feel free to reach out to me and we’ll get it organized. (I’ll probably reach out to you as well, but maybe you’ll beat me to the punch.)
Our new Featured Five
describes himself as a “Semi-retired restaurant cook in Finland sharing everything I know about great modern British and Nordic food.” It might sound less-than-relevant to many of us, but the description is kind of a red herring: Reidie is a wonderful writer with a beautiful sensibility; his essays and stories often speak to things more universal. Check out his recent post, “Pot Coffee.” I also love this smart essay about recipe attribution, intellectual property and the “tech bros” whose mission it is to devalue it, “Recipes in the Age of Meme Capitalism.” Those stories, essays and recipes are free; paid subscribers also gain access to his serialized book.If you’re a cookbook junkie, you’re in for a treat with this Substack launched in April from the outstanding team behind the terrific, long-running Everything Cookbooks podcast. The podcast’s hosts —
, , and — are all esteemed cookbook authors in their own right, with many awards under their belt. They take us inside the cookbook creation process, with cookbooks authors and industry experts as their guests. Molly Stevens spearheads the Substack newsletter, which previews the podcast episodes and provides additional material. All the content is free.Here’s an exciting project that just launched last week with its first post (a video, actually). Randy Lau, who won a James Beard Emerging Voice Award last year for his broadcasts, is a YouTube phenom: In 2020, he launched a cooking channel featuring recipes from his family, particularly his father, a Toison, China-born Cantonese chef, and (according to its Wikipedia page) in two short years it reached a million subscribers. To commemorate his father’s 80th birthday, he launched this
Substack — a free weekly recipe and video sent out every Friday. In it, Lau will be chronicling the cookbook he’s in process of creating, featuring “the best nuggets of wisdom, recipes, techniques, and stories as I learn from my dad, in hopes of making the most helpful, timeless book on Chinese cooking possible.” , an American expat who moved with her husband to France in 2019, published a book the following year called Yeah, No. Not Happening.: How I Found Happiness Swearing Off Self-Improvement and Saying F*uck it All — and How You Can Too. Her irresistibly smart and funny newsletter presents her new life in France through that lens. If you fantasize about moving to France, this is definitely for you. Its tagline is “The newsletter for people who long to say no.” How great is that?She may not be Turkish by birth, but
Arıbeyi approaches her main subject — Türkiye’s culinary culture — with uncommon depth, passion and energy. Jo, as she calls herself, married into a Turkish family six years ago, and she lived for six years in Izmir and Istanbul. Jo balances an academic’s seriousness (she holds a Masters of Liberal Arts in Gastronomy from Boston University), with a breezy, relatable style, making Taste Jo Food a lovely place to lose yourself in Lamacun (some call it “Turkish pizza,” but we shouldn’t), Perde Tatlısı (“curtain baklava”), or the foodways of the Turkish Black Sea region.[Books purchased from links to Bookshop.com in the post above may earn me an affiliate commission.]
I absolutely love what Randy is cooking up on Made with Lau!!
Honored to be included in this smart roundup!