A British kitchen exploring American soul food
Soul food, made from scratch in a British kitchen
Real recipes, honest ingredient swaps, and everything I’ve learned cooking this food from 3,000 miles away.
“I’m not from the South. I became obsessed with this food and figured out how to make it work in a British kitchen — one recipe at a time.”
Start here — everything I wish I’d known
What the holy trinity is, why collard greens need low and slow heat, and where to track down the ingredients you can’t get at Tesco. Everything I figured out so you don’t have to start from scratch.
Read the beginner’s guide →Latest Posts
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No Grits in the UK? Here’s the Substitute That Works
If you have ever tried to find grits in a UK supermarket, you already know the answer. They are not there. Grits just are not a British staple, and most shops have never stocked them. The good news is that a UK substitute gets you very close, once you know exactly which one to reach…
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Southern Black-Eyed Peas Recipe (Soul Food Style)
Ask anyone from the American South what they’re eating on the 1st of January and there’s a decent chance the answer involves a pot of black-eyed peas. It sounds humble on paper, a bowl of beans in savoury broth, but it carries a lot of tradition and family history in every spoonful. I’d never so…
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Sunday Soul Food Dinner: A Full Menu
There’s a particular kind of Sunday where the whole point of the day is what’s happening in the kitchen, not what’s happening after it. I didn’t grow up with this tradition, but the more soul food I’ve cooked and learned about, the more I’ve come to understand why the Sunday dinner holds the place it…
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Smothered Pork Chops in Rich Onion Gravy: A Southern Classic
Smothering is one of those techniques that sounds fancier than it actually is. It just means braising: searing meat first, then simmering it low and slow in a gravy until it’s completely tender. For pork chops, that gravy is a rich, from-scratch brown sauce built right in the same pan, and it turns what could…
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Easy Soul Food Peach Cobbler
Cobbler has deep roots in African American home cooking, traditionally built from whatever fruit was on hand and topped with a quick biscuit-style dough rather than a rolled pastry crust. That’s the detail that separates a soul food cobbler from a British-style crumble: the topping here is soft, pillowy, and slightly bread-like, closer to a…
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No Buttermilk? Here’s the UK Substitute That Actually Works
If you’ve ever stood in the baking aisle looking for buttermilk and come away empty-handed, you’re not imagining things. It’s not a fridge staple here the way it is in the US, and most UK recipes just quietly assume you’ll work around it. The good news is that a substitute takes minutes to make with…
