Stranger Kitchens: The Secret Ingredient is Not Confidence

Contrary to every phone/zoom call Olivia and I have ever had, this one actually started on topic; we were talking about Pringles. Joining us were Ed and Hal, two cousins who together have a cooking show called Stranger Kitchens. The format is simple: they choose an area of London, knock on the doors of strangers (as many doors as they need before someone lets them in), and offer to cook them lunch in the stranger’s home. Yes, you heard correctly. Ed and Hal bring the food, the stranger brings the kitchen. We just get to see the magic. When I discovered their channel I was around three G&Ts in, I was alone in the house, and I was just wandering around laughing hysterically to myself. I’m not sure how much the G&Ts had to do with it, but what I do know is that it is comedy gold like no other.

There was definitely some tension when it came to the Pringles issue. Olivia would go for original, I’d go for BBQ, and both Ed and Hal opted for sour cream and chive. Thankfully we could all agree that you must steer clear of salt and vinegar Pringles. Those things will burn a hole right through your tongue. I would say you have to be as brave to eat a salt and vinegar Pringle as you would to go and knock on a stranger’s door. But that’s just me. Ed and Hal feel otherwise. Hal: We’ve had days where it’s the second door. We’ve had days where we just don’t get in and we end up going back to one of our houses and quite solemnly cooking what we were planning on cooking for someone else. I’d say it probably averages out to 40 doors before someone lets us in. There was this one door, it was reinforced steel and had four locks on it. It looked very off. E: Yeah, yeah! A big thick metal door that was painted to look like wood, with a bolt and four locks. And there was a dog… so we just left. H: We can sort of tell from the outside. We’re like “I like the look of that.” Knocking on the doors is quite a good in-built filter. The type of person who’s just going to spontaneously let two people into their house to cook for a couple of hours is quite likely to be quite interesting.

“Everyone’s got that thing that they actually really care about, and regardless of what it is, it is just nice to listen to people chat about something they’re really passionate about. It’s pretty intoxicating.”

We were curious as to whether there was a lack of things to talk about with a complete stranger, or an abundance; Hal said, “I watched a couple of episodes back, and I noticed we take a lot of cues from the house. But there are times when I think, ‘god, we are really crap at making conversation’. I think cooking in general, and eating with people is a good way to be quite open, because it’s something you tend to do with people you’re closer with - if you do it with a stranger your mind kind of tricks you into still being quite open, just because that’s the norm when you’re eating with people. And before they know it, we know them. Then we’ve got them.” In one episode, brilliantly titled ‘Pop-Up Cooks and Pop-Up Books’, after the host shows them into the kitchen, he starts very proudly showing off his kitchen knives. Hal says, “I feel like everyone knows two or

three dads who have an absolute hoard of kitchen utensils that they’re very proud of. Everyone’s got that thing that they actually really care about, and regardless of what it is, it is just nice to listen to people chat about something they’re really passionate about. It’s pretty intoxicating.”

I sometimes get nervous cooking even for friends and family, especially when I know the person I’m cooking for is not going to hide their disgust. One particularly painful time, I made a risotto with probably ten times the amount of bouillon required and I made my grandma vomit. I wanted to know whether or not they’d ever cooked something truly terrible on the show, and sure enough, their answer was comforting. Ed: There was one where we made a very sub-par pad thai. Hal: That pad thai was so terrible. Oh my god. It was all going fine until the eggs. We put in way too much egg and it was horrible. E: That was probably the worst one. H: In another one we did that never got released - that was TERRIBLE. E: That had the same problem pretty much. We’ve now learnt the lesson that you can’t just stir fry a raw egg into an existing stir fry. You can’t just chuck it in there. H: The secret ingredient is not confidence. E: The problem with doing the show is that people now assume that we can cook. H: When you tell people that you do a cooking show, they’re immediately like, “oh WOW, you must do good cooking”. I mean, I can cook well, but I’m not great. E: Hal’s not great. H: No I’m not. That can be the headline of the article. know what goes fucking nice with that?’” We hear groans coming from Ed. “But then Ed has the inverse problem, where if he’s cooking for both of us, he’ll just put the most out there, asinine ingredients in dishes that just- oh my, it’s RIDICULOUS.” Ed: Hal is kind of likeHal: Ed’s about to say I’m unadventurous, but the adventurous he’s talking about, it’s not adventure, it’s just WRONG. E: Actually, I was gonna say Hal’s a purist. H: Yeah, no I like that. That’s nice. E: He’s very, um, scared. Basically the one guaranteed way to annoy him- ok, let me set the scene: we’re making tomato pasta or whatever, just a dash of soy sauce, just to likeH: No, no, not soy sauce; fish sauce. E: Fish sauce! Y’know, different flavours… H: Yeah you’re right; I’m deeply scared of fish sauce.

It seems that cooking comes very naturally to both of them. For Hal, “I think it’s probably my favourite thing in the world to do to just have the kitchen to myself, I can just take a lot of time and relax cooking something - it’s my favourite way to destress in the world.” Ed agrees, “We’re both people who enjoy just pottering around. I mean, I’m in the kitchen now, it’s 4:30 and I’ve been in here most of the day, just kind of standing around, picking something up, putting it down. It brings me peace. I never really cooked as a child if I’m honest. We always ate what our parents ate, they didn’t make different meals for us. I watched them cook for 20 years, so by the time I moved out there were some things that I could just kind of make, not really from memory or practice but just because I’d seen them cook it so many times. After coming out of school I actually got a job in a kitchen that I used to wash up in. They said they had a position that had just opened up in the kitchen,

and I was like, I can’t cook, and they said they’d teach me. And I was like fantastic! Let’s go. My mum told me recently that she now hates cooking. But I think that’s on account of having done almost 30 years now of preparing at least two meals a day for between one and four children. I feel like after running basically a bed and breakfast for that amount of time I’d also be kind of done with cooking.”

“I think for me the main thing I remember doing quite a lot when I was a kid was baking”, says Hal. “There’s that trope that baking is more of a science and cooking’s more of an art. Good cooks can just improvise and play it by ear, but it’s a lot easier to understand when you’re a kid that this amount of this goes in here with this amount of this. It’s a really good, lower barrier to entry. I’ve got really fond memories of doing that with my mum. Cooking cooking wasn’t really a big part of my childhood until I was 16 or 17, but my parents both love cooking, so caring about food and being interested in what I’m eating was always there.”

Having already established that food, and eating together was a big part of both Ed and Hal’s childhoods, we asked whether there was one specific dish that stuck out in their minds as particularly special. I could barely even finish before Hal had his answer. Hal: SAUSAGE PASTA. Obviously! Ed has the same one, he will absolutely cosign this. Print this cos this is a brilliant recipe [We did print it, you can find it on page 78]. Maybe I’ll make it tonight actually. Ed: I would probably include maybe some sunflower seeds or something as a garnishH: Why would you even- that’s not even a compatible flavour. Like you’re just doing that to annoy me. I know you are. You’ve got that grin. This isn’t so much a specific recipe, it’s just a massive memory - this is actually from Ed’s family, which was that every single Sunday they just for some reason had a soup tradition, which I just thought was so cool. Like every Sunday. If you were round there on a Sunday, it would just be soup. And I was round there almost every Sunday for a long time. E: That’s kind of what I was talking about: having watched my parents cook for so long, soup being a great example. Once you’ve seen someone make a soup that’s some kind of substantial vegetable with some stock and onions and stuff then you basically know how to do that with any ingredients.

Now we were onto family there was no way we couldn’t tackle the behemoth that is Christmas dinner - possibly one of the most divisive meals going. Ed: Was it this Christmas or last Christmas that we were together? I tried to petition the family to get a hog instead of a turkey. Hal: Some people were really on it, but then obviously no one wanted to build a spit to rotate it, and also NO ONE wanted to slowly rotate a whole hog for probably, like, twelve hours. E: My grandma actually is a bit of a purist, so it would have to be turkey for her, no matter how tasteless. H: I’m the youngest of three, and as we’ve got older the sides of Christmas dinner have got more experimental. One of my favourite things that tends to happen each year is this sweet potato thing with a horseradish sauce, which my mum makes. I love that so much. E: I feel like this is a really unpopular one but I really like carrots in white parsley sauce. We don’t have it any more, cos I think my mum was getting a bit bored of it. Obviously the food that our parents made for us, they’ve

been eating for a lot longer already, so that’s disappeared off the menu, but I might try and bring it back this time around. Wow, it’s nearly Christmas already.

Don’t remind us.

H: The way we’ve always done it in my house is that each person takes one thing, so I feel like I’ve got all of the sides down. I’ve got all the constituent units, except the turkey. That’s the beast. E: We can probably both cook everything. Maybe not the turkey - that’s not a claim I’m comfortable making. H: Maybe we should make turkey on the next episode. Just a whole turkey. “Excuse me, do you have eight hours to spare?” E: Yeah what we’d do is we’d go round at 8 or 9 at night and be like “do you mind if we leave this here for 12 or so hours and we’ll be back tomorrow morning for it?” Just a more prolonged experience.

The next few questions were under the category ‘Fantasy Foods’ in my notes, which was not representative of what followed. What actually happened was we asked increasingly mean/obscure questions without giving them any time to prepare an answer. We started off talking about who their dream dinner guest would be, and what they’d cook for them. Ed: I’ve been reading a lot about Muhammed Ali recently, he seemed like a pretty cool guy. I’d love to have a chat with him, cook him something - I don’t think I’d have enough food for him. Maybe some Vietnamese or Thai food? Hal: I love Steve Carell, I think he’s brilliant and he sounds like a really cool guy just generally. If this is a fantasy, I’d probably do this octopus stew my mum sometimes makes. It was tomato based with potato, a couple of different types of fish. It was just unbelievable. I reckon I’d probably cook that. Some foods if they’re too showy, they don’t facilitate a warm, relaxed atmosphere - this dish definitely has that warm quality, but it’s also interesting enough to impress Steve and maybe he’d want to be my friend. E: On my first day in the restaurant, I walked in and the head chef and the guy I was going to be replacing, one of them was holding a plastic bottle and they were both just forcing an entire cooked octopus into the bottle. And I was just like “what is this gonna be like?”

Now the tables were turned. What would their dream meal be? I can’t pretend this idea wasn’t heavily (completely) borrowed from the Off Menu podcast, where comedian hosts Ed Gamble and James Acaster ask their guest what their dream starter, main course, side, drink and dessert would be. The difference is the guests on Off Menu have a chance to actually think about their dishes, whereas this was sprung on our guests with no warning. Still, they had some pretty delicious answers. Hal went first: “For a starter… if I see it anywhere and I’m near the sea, I’ll get calamari, with a bit of lemon. Really simple. Ah, it’s lovely. Main. I think the nicest dish I’ve ever had was this spider crab, cherry tomato, lemon linguine. It just didn’t taste like

anything I’ve ever had. I think about it a really weird amount. And then dessert... Probably a nice crumble, I just think you can’t go wrong. Probably a rhubarb crumble with vanilla ice cream. I know Ed’s going custard.” Ed: I am a big fan of all things custard, whether it’s tarts, creams, custard… Hal: Yeah, I was about to say, there aren’t that many things that custard can be. “I’m a fan of all things custard, like… custard”. E: Yeah! In all of its many forms. H: Liquid, solid, gaseous.

Next up was Ed. “I would probably go for starter, something like bruschetta, nice slice of that. I got a hand blender so I could make bruschetta at work. I went through a phase of trying to cook increasingly elaborate things in the office. Because I cook with so much garlic, I put in about seven cloves. I got through the first slice of bread and I was like, this is hot. Then I started the second one and my boss was like ‘take that to another room or throw it away, please, that can’t stay here’ and I couldn’t even finish it, it was like a spicy garlic. For main, I had the most incredible soft shell crab, probably a year ago, that was just perfect. It’s sad for the crabs, you have to catch them at the time when they’ve moulted the old shell and haven’t got the new one yet, so they’re definitely at their most vulnerable. For pudding… I have a sweet tooth, so I like things that are caramel-ish. Over lockdown, over a week or ten days I made three sticky pear puddings. So… probably something like that.”

Continuing the streak of hard hitting questions, we wanted to know if they were only able to use one condiment for the rest of their life, what that would be. Hal: Sriracha mayo. Easy. Just to be clear, I’ll never buy the sriracha mayo. You get sriracha and mayo and you can mix them to whatever strength you desire, there’s a lot you can do there. Ed: But that’s two condiments. H: No no, it’s two condiments that you can vary. You gotta think smarter, not harder. E: But I couldn’t say I want tomato ketchup with… I don’t know. I think you’re stupid. If you couldn’t have sriracha and mayo mixed together would you settle for sriracha mayo? H: Never. That would just feel wrong. It’d just be off. In that case I’d go for sriracha or mayo. I think on balance it would probably be mayo. No it wouldn’t, no it wouldn’t. It’d be sriracha, it’d be sriracha. Yeah, it’d be sriracha. E: I’d probably go for chilli oil or something like that. As someone who’s been into sriracha for a while now, I’ve kind of got bored of itH: That’s so indie and cool, you’re so zany. E: I’m trying some different chilli sauces out. H: *scoffs*

I was coming to the end of my notes, and the last thing we had to talk about was food and Covid-19. H: Ah, the rone zone. We haven’t really talked about how it will be bringing the original model for Stranger Kitchens back under the current circumstances. Our business model is uniquely poorly suited to Covid. It really is. Not only do you need a lack of risk of infecting someone with a virus, but you just need trust of strangers, which is just the most eroded thing right now. Unfortunately there was no furlough pay for Stranger Kitchens. E: We have a lot of ideas about stuff we want to try and incorporate, but just not knowing when any of it will be possible makes it difficult. We’d like to go to the US at some point and do that, to try and adapt that format to the experience of travelling throughout America. 76

H: We had an idea - probably slightly farfetched, but also cool. To hitchhike through America and only stay at the places where we were let in to cook. But then it gets a lot harder, because not only are you saying “can I cook you dinner?” you’re saying “can I cook you dinner and sleep in your house?” which is a slightly harder sell, although I feel like a British accent in the US can get you pretty far, but it probably can’t get you that far.

On his experience in lockdown, Hal said, “It all happened very quickly. All of my siblings came back home and there were seven of us in a house that is just not big enough for seven people. We were trying as much as possible to stay out of each other’s way, but cooking was the moment where everyone came together, so eating together was really important.” Ed seemed to have had a similar experience: “Since I’ve been going back into work, I’ve found a lot of enjoyment in cooking at the end of the day. The thing about working from home is that the day never really ended, so now it’s kind of nice to have a break, where I’m done with everything, so I can spend an hour or so in the kitchen. In summer everything tastes better, and we’ve got a little garden, so eating outside is really nice too. Although we have four elderflower trees around the garden and all of the flowers turned into berries and now the garden is just full of pigeons and shit. It does make me think that pigeon might actually be tasty. They just kind of look plump and nice.”

People have used this unprecedented time in isolation to take up cooking, with sourdough and banana bread being the order of the day. Had Ed and Hal been perfecting sourdough starters or timing their purchase of bananas perfectly to make a loaf at the weekend? What had their lockdown saviours been? Hal: I was very much the person at the beginning who was telling my parents to buy like a 20 kilo bag of rice and stock up on chickpeas and shit like that. I sort of thought I had it at the time, and it was at the point where no one could really get a test, so I had in my house in Bristol this fuck off thing of rice, and so I just had to use that before I went to London. So lots and lots of rice related stuff. I’m not sure if that was a saviour or a burden. Ed: At the same time when I was making lots of puddings, I was also making sticky toffee pudding, and I was trying to avoid the queues for the supermarket. At one point there were like a hundred people in the queue. I walked up the road a bit and found a place that I could buy dates from. So I ate a lot of dates - I think they’re one of the most dense forms of energy. I was working from home and getting really stressed out about it. I didn’t really make any time for myself. I had a horrible routine throughout lockdown, and part of that was not really eating until dinnertime. So a few times, I remember coming down at about 3 or 4 in the afternoon to get some food and just feeling like I didn’t want to spend time on anything so… three dates? H: Neither of us had very good answers there. They were a bit like world war two rations. E: None of this is doing much for our reputation. An hour and a half of us talking about how crap we are at cooking.

If this interview hadn’t taken place over zoom maybe we could have put that to the test. 2020 has been unpredictable in more ways than one; who’s to say it’s not the year Ed and Hal conquer pad thai.

Check out the kitchens Ed and Hal have cooked in so far on their YouTube channel Stranger Kitchens. Follow what they’re up to on Instagram: @stranger_kitchens.