Does your dream job look like this? One self-taught cook and gardener tells how everything went right

Mark Diacono is a multi-talented writer, cook, photographer, recipe-developer, teacher and grower with a particular – no, visionary! – interest in unusual and forgotten foods.

His latest book, Sour: The Magical Element That Will Transform Your Cooking (Quadrille, 2019), has been widely lauded – Food Book of the Year according to the Sunday Times’ Culture Magazine.

But perhaps that’s no surprise given his earlier work, A Year at Otter Farm, won the prestigious André Simon Prize in 2014, and A Taste of the Unexpected took the Guild of Food Writers’ Award for Food Book of the Year in 2011.

Here, Mark tells fellow writer Clarissa Hyman there are few rules when it comes to forging a career in the food media, other than determination, enthusiasm and a love of your subject.

How did your career path develop?

Becoming a good writer is not like being a plumber in that there are 1,000 ways into the profession. I had no great plan in mind; if anything, it’s been a culmination of a lot of tiny accidents.

I used to be a consultant in landscape management but I wasn’t at all interested in gardening until I met my wife about 20 years ago and moved to Otter Farm. She got me started growing food although initially it was just basic staples such as potatoes. But I soon got the bug, and decided to try and grow more unusual things and foods we really wanted to eat, along with the best of the familiar.

What sort of things?

Lots of crazy stuff such as medlars, quinces, pecans, Szechuan pepper, kiwis, mulberries, chocolate vines, Japanese wineberries, mulberries and Japanese coriander. I did a lot of it just for fun, to see if and how they would grow.

How did that lead into writing?

I started to develop a book idea that connected food with landscape. I wrote to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall simply out of the blue and, to my amazement, he replied. I have to say it’s not something many celeb chefs/writers do these days! But it was a lucky break and when we eventually met up, we hit it off and I made a connection that was to be incredibly positive.

What did you do next?

I started writing a blog around 2002, as much for my own benefit as anything else, to keep a record of what I was doing. I didn’t realise blogging could be important at the time but then people started following me. I also got into Twitter pretty early on, which brought me into another community arena.

What do you think is the benefit of blogging?

Blogging allows you to be a crap writer without too much investment. By that I mean you have to write the best you can in the time you have before you press ‘send’. You quickly find out if this is something you can or cannot do, especially if you haven’t done any writing before. But, if you want to be a food writer, there are few short cuts.

How did you move on from there?

My connection with Hugh and River Cottage developed to an extent that I was able to give up the day job, the consultancy, and concentrate on what I loved doing best: growing food and developing recipes for them. But it’s a tricky thing. You’ve got to be lucky to move from what you have to do to what you want to do.

What message would you send to aspiring writers?

Being good is not enough. The tough thing is there is not always a correlation between how good and how successful you are. You’ve got to put yourself out there, and be good and keep getting better: you can’t just sit back and wait for the work to come to you.

Of course, it’s a temperament thing. Some people are just better at it than others, but if it’s what you really want to do then you’ve got to embrace all of what it entails, not just a little bit. And self-promotion is part of it. It’s not easy, you’ve got to be out there but you don’t want to become a nuisance either. You’ve also got to be able to take rejection, get a thick skin.

As Monty Don has said, he became an overnight success after ten years of hard work.

What’s the best way of dealing with editors?

You have to remember most editors are under great pressure and are just looking to get the job done. And there are lots of people pushing for space. So, if you get a commission, you need to tick the boxes such as getting in the piece on time and to length. You’ve also got to do your homework: don’t pitch ideas they’ve already done, read the publication you’re pitching to, angle your pitch to fit in with what they do, don’t send ideas they’re simply never going to run however much you’d like to do them.

You have many strands to your work life, how do you manage your time most effectively?

With difficulty! But it’s got better, and if you love what you do then the line between work and your own life blurs. I’m really lucky. In the past I’ve had some crap jobs and now I really appreciate where I’m at.

Do you have any background in food?

None at all! I’m self-taught in the kitchen but I have had a lot of help and have been influenced by the people at River Cottage. There’s something of a myth about technique but in the end really good ingredients are the key.

How do you develop your recipes?

It’s very hard to come up with new recipes. Occasionally you come up with an idea that just pops into your head or is sparked by a Twitter conversation or similar. A recipe for medlar sticky toffee pudding came about that way. Often recipes are like a musician playing their own version of someone else’s song. It’s very rare to find something totally original. In fact, at the end of my new book, I say that writing it made me feel like a DJ as much as a songwriter. Yes, you’ve got to get inspiration but so many chefs’ books go wrong because they feel they have something to prove about their own incomparable creativity.

All recipe writers are part of a continuum, we don’t work in isolation. Without others we wouldn’t be doing what we do. We are indebted to those who have gone before. Why pretend otherwise?

Can you chart the evolution of Sour?

Diana Henry and I run food/cookery writing courses, and out of this came my idea to do a book about skills such as fermentation and making sourdough, plus the recipes that derive from them such as kimchi and sourdough crumpets. I tried to place it but the response from publishers was it was too dry, not sexy enough!

Finally, I rethought the concept to focus more on the role of bacteria in cooking. Quadrille then expressed interest, and the concept morphed further into the whole nature of ‘sour’ in cooking. It’s such an important element: knowing how to use ‘sour’ well is at the heart of being a good cook, and every culture has its own version and uses.

Once it was pitched that way, the idea of the book became easier to grasp and opened it to a broader audience.

Do you have help testing the recipes?

It’s very important to have the recipes tested by someone else either in your own or another kitchen. If you’re trying something new, you can’t always tell if it’s going to work – it’s the same with planting and growing.

I have a good friend, a chef, who I work with a lot in developing the recipes. It’s a very collaborative process and another creative input into what I am doing. He can also cook on shoots, which is a great help if I’m also styling and photographing. Between us, we can work really fast. We can do up to 15 dishes a day.

Do you think it is an advantage to style and photograph your own recipes?

I find it is. You’re so much more in control even if the pressure is a lot greater. However, the danger is that you get caught up in your own clichés, so you should also be open to other views and opinions.

How much does growing complement the cooking?

It’s such a lovely coming together. Understanding one really helps with the other. It makes complete sense.

Follow Mark on Instagram @mark_diacono, or Twitter @MarkDiacono

Photo Jason Ingram