Cook. Speak. Eat.
Write. Travel. Share.
My name is Susan Hepburn and I am a writer, traveller, cook and teacher.
In this about section I want to share with you my own personal story of literally cooking my way back to life after losing my husband in 2021.
Up until that point, we had travelled the world for 15 years with our 4 world-schooled children, using a ramshackle farmhouse in Northern Italy as a base. This house, on an ancient salt trading route, had truffles growing in the garden and a great position between the mountains and the Mediterranean. It gave us not just a beautiful lifestyle and much loved home, but it gave me an enduring love of trade routes. I don’t mean the big ones, like the Silk Road but smaller, less well known ones, the ones that ordinary people used in their ordinary lives, much like we did.
After returning to the UK and having to start completely from scratch rebuilding our lives and creating an income, I turned to my love of international flavours and human geography and set up WeCookSpeakEat project. (@wecookspeakeat) which has helped me so much.
This project provides people from the migrant community a chance to showcase their culinary skills and practice their English. Every week we take a dish from a one persons country, cook it together with English as the common language, and eat it together. It is joyful, interesting and fun and has led to my students getting jobs but also given them a chance for their voices to be heard as they share their knowledge and dishes.
I know from experience how healing food and cookery can be. I’m interested in how we use food as a growth mechanism, and I don’t just mean physical growth. I mean how sitting around a table together is healing, transformative and beautiful. Its not just about the food - it’s the crossover spaces in between, made up of memory, hope and sustenance of the soul. We use dishes from our lives to tell our stories, to tempt others into the shadowy spaces of new experience, joy and generousity being the touchstones of humanity, vulnerability and strength passed around with the bread in equal measure.
This doesn’t happen through stasis - the constant movement of human beings across the world has made this possible. It is these stories and what lies beneath them that I love.
Maritime routes also snagged my imagination - the romance of moving with the wind and tides saw me signing up to crew and cook on a Tall Ship, exploring the West Country coast under sail and again, listening to stories of people that had followed these maritime routes before me and keeping the spirit of my adventurous life with my husband alive.
More recently I have taken on a project In Egypt, working with the Bedouin community. I’m excited to travel to the South Sinai peninsula and learn about Bedouin hospitality and what it is to be truely nomadic.
.And of course, there’s now this blog. I started writing about our lives, more as an aide memoir to myself and my children, to record our experiences and remember what we’ve done. I love writing so much, it’s a good way of slowing down and showing gratitude for the life we’ve led. I hope you enjoy reading it - please do leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!