Midway into my meeting with Karen Mattison and Robinne Collie, the founders of social enterprise Cook for Good, we spend half an hour discussing how to make chicken soup. A whole section of their new recipe book, called Soup for Good, is devoted to chicken soups. And the first of these is, of course, the traditional Jewish version.
“Obviously doing the Jewish chicken soup recipe caused the most debate, because everyone believes theirs is the best,” says Mattison with a smile. “It's like, ‘What do you mean, do it in the oven?’” Collie adds, “Tomato, or no tomato? Dill, or no dill?” When the photo for the soup was styled with dill in the frame, they were so averse to the concept of using the herb as an ingredient that they insisted on the image being reshot.
But Mattison is quick to point out there are versions other than Jewish penicillin in the book: a Thai chicken noodle and “Our Italian Wedding Soup”, featuring orzo pasta and chicken meatballs. “We decided that every culture's got a chicken soup,” she says, highlighting the egalitarian attitude that’s key to how this enterprise works.
Comfort kitchen: soup is always on the menu at the Kings Cross project[Missing Credit]
Set up in an abandoned laundry building on a housing estate in Kings Cross three years ago, Cook for Good is a community surplus food pantry that also helps to prevent social isolation and offers free cooking classes, community meals, training and work experience. People with membership pay £3.50 to come and fill their shopping baskets with a set number of items of their choice, in what feels more like a community shop than a food bank. They can then sit down to a cup of tea or coffee and donated pastries in the community space.
When I enter the round, bright sun-lit building, I’m instantly welcomed by smiling volunteers across the open room.
They started serving soup after Mattison shared a flask of her own homemade lentil and tomato soup with a volunteer called Mary at their community pantry. Mary loved it so much that Mattison took home some leftover vegetables and brought in carrot coriander soup the next day to share with the volunteers. “And then people expected it.”
The soup became so popular, that once they had opened a second, separate kitchen where they now hold corporate events to generate the funds for the social impact work they do, they would ask the visiting team to make soups to go to the pantry. Before long, they had established a weekly soup café.
The project feels more like a supermarket than a food bank[Missing Credit]
Mattison’s original soup recipe – together with her flask – feature in Soup for Good alongside the favourite recipes of the Cook for Good community. She explains that the gift of chicken soup to care for and nourish those in crises may be unmistakeably Jewish, but it also encapsulates the ethos of the enterprise.
“The principle is very linked to Jewish values, of things that are our muscle memory,” she says. “If someone's had a bereavement, you don't even think about it, you just head to the kitchen, and start making something.” But it’s not a custom that’s limited to the Jewish community. “There are so many other cultures represented in our volunteers and on this estate, and they're the same. We wanted to put together a brilliant cookbook that people would actually use, but also tell some of the stories through the food.”
Within the book there are stories of 13 individuals who have engaged with Cook for Good’s services in some way — each photographed in their own kitchen. Rhiz Chab from Morocco, for example, who had suffered domestic abuse for years and feared leaving the house until a friend invited her to the new community organisation, and everything changed for her. At Cook for Good, she received training and now works as a volunteer.
Warming red pepper soup[Missing Credit]
It is not the only way in which the enterprise does good. Their Broccoli Stalk soup is an example of their commitment to minimising waste. “All the fruit and veg that you see here would have gone to waste. When we get deliveries on the surplus food chain, there are always things that are still left over.” That’s how the soups came about: they started serving soups made from produce that hadn't been taken from the previous week.
“One of the things I noticed was every food bank I visited always had a pile of celeriac left over. Because it’s one of those things people don't know how to cook. But then we make a soup with an ingredient like that people go, ‘What’s that?’ So, we always leave the recipe, and they can make it themselves.”
Or they might come to one of their classes – on how to cook leftovers, or what to cook from your pantry basket – held in the kitchen since the enterprise began. When they found themselves with a surplus of fennel, one of the chefs made a fennel and potato soup which everyone preferred to the standard leek version. That, too, features in the new recipe book.
Cook for Good and the new cookbook stem from a love of food and of bringing people together shared by Mattison and Collie who met first as WIZO award judges and again on the kiddush rota at Muswell Hill Synagogue where they were both members. “I just always loved food, and felt it had the power to bring people together,” says Mattison, who grew up in Liverpool and learnt to cook properly when working in the kitchen of a kibbutz aged 18. "Once you've eaten with someone, and had them to your home, it's just a different connection.”
Soup for Good, and all the inspiring stories contained within it, serves as a physical emblem of the good they have done.
“When you stop and think about it, it's emotional,” says Collie, who grew up in Cape Town and was first inspired by Jamie Oliver. “To look back to our first meeting and how much we've done, it's quite awesome the impact it’s made.”
Three years in, Cook for Good has grown well beyond an idea between two food lovers, and now has an identity of its own. With a team that includes 14 people for whom the enterprise is their main job, Mattison and Collie are now at the point of looking at opening other sites and growing the fully tried-and-tested original.
“We could have just opened a pantry and a kitchen and done another one and another one. But we've spent three years going really deep,” says Mattison. “We now know what works. And to just open the door and see a team in here, or people shopping in the pantry is an amazing feeling. There's a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but it's a great thing to be able to start with an empty page and create something that works. We're definitely not done. This is just the beginning: our first book, and our first site.”
Soup for Good is available for purchase on amazon and cookforgood
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