To watch Rosie Kellett move around a kitchen is to see her in her natural habitat: she is fluid, she is alert, she is calm. That she is calm is unsurprising, really, because Rosie is used to cooking for much bigger groups than the three of us (with photographer Sophie) around the table today. As a cook and culinary content creator, feeding a crowd has become her thing, so much so that she has written a book on the matter; In For Dinner, published this week, promises “101 delicious recipes to batch cook, share and enjoy,” an ode to her life spent cooking for people.
The book is titled in homage to the five years Kellett spent living communally in an east London warehouse as one of ten housemates. There, they took it in turns to cook for one another every night and shared a WhatsApp group, on which whoever was cooking that day would ask, ‘Who’s in for dinner?’ It is a cookbook that pays tribute to the impact that warehouse life had on Rosie, which she credits with “changing the way I live in London.”
Given how naturally cooking and hosting comes to Rosie – we are greeted with caramelised banana loaf, still warm, thickly spread with salted butter – it is remarkable that she hasn’t always done this. Also that she hadn’t seen the signs pointing to a career in food all along: from her early years in her grandmothers’ kitchens – one was a cook, the other a baker – to her first job at the Bakewell Tart Shop near her childhood home in Derbyshire to administrative roles at high profile London food businesses, like the Violet Bakery, where she project managed the royal wedding cake for pastry chef Claire Ptak in 2018. And which supported her dream of becoming an actor and writer for stage.
But the year before she turned thirty, Rosie radically reassessed what she wanted to do. “I just wasn't enjoying [theatre and film] anymore, and it wasn't making me any money,” she says, “And I thought, my god, I feel like I'm in the shoes of a 21-year-old: nothing has changed, and this hamster wheel of London is breaking me. I just need to figure out a way to be happy.”
Astrology refers to the period in a person’s life between 27-30 years old as their ‘Saturn return’, when the planets align exactly as they were at their birth. When they do, it is not unusual to feel drawn to laying firmer foundations and experiencing a kind of self-review. Who do you want to be? What will make you happy? Kellett watched as her then boyfriend, a musician four years her junior, bounced out of bed and into his studio in the morning - “he was living such a fulfilled life,” she says, “and I remember thinking, ‘I need to feel like that’.”
It didn’t take long, she tells me, to realise that the answer was “obviously food”; despite the exhausting rat race of her London life – regularly, hers were 18-hour-days of auditions and script redrafts and hosting events – she would spend every spare moment cooking for people. The bigger battle, she tells me, was in closing the thespian door in order to open that new, edible one: “it took some bravery to actually say ‘I'm not an actor or a writer anymore’, to put that part of my life to bed and say, ‘I’ll just be someone that cooks now’. I felt like such a failure.”
Kellett got a job at e5 Bakehouse, a cult bakery in Hackney where she spent a year “on vegetarian mains”, cooking enough lunch for 80 portions every day with British seasonal produce. “That’s quite a niche little corner to occupy,” she says, but its limitations pushed her creativity and taught her how to cook well at scale: “I’d spend hours at home thinking what I could do with, say, chickpeas that week, that was more interesting than what I’d done with chickpeas the previous week.” Kellett still has the recipes she wrote at the time, many of which have been scaled down and adapted for In For Dinner.
Together, we visit e5 where she is greeted with huge fondness by, some might say, an achingly cool crew behind the counter. Kellett has that all-too-rare ability to put you at ease and, despite a background in performance and, now, a large online following, is distinctly real; in a world of content that is increasingly competitive for likes, comments, engagement and views, this approachability, and good instinct for what chimes with people, is what I’m sure makes all the difference. She picks up a loaf of Hackney Wild sourdough – the final ingredient in the lunch she is preparing us from her book.
Not long after she started working at e5, her relationship ended. She and her boyfriend had been living in guardianship properties for four years – a very cost-effective way for two creative types to live in London, she says, and the prospect of finding somewhere affordable on her own was not just daunting but seemed increasingly impossible. She looked without success for three months. And then, “very last resort style”, she saw on a Facebook group that a room in a warehouse was available in east London. When she visited, she was met by a man who bounded out warmly (“and I thought, this might be okay”). She had a half-hour interview with all 10 housemates who told her about how they cooked and lived communally. Everybody paid £25 a week towards food, and everybody cooked for the whole group on one night of the week. “I think that might have put some people off,” says Kellett, “but for me, it was like a ding, ding, ding, a light bulb went on. I knew I wanted to be doing that. And I just really pitched myself.” She moved in and didn’t leave for five years.
If e5 taught her how to cook for big numbers, living at the warehouse expanded her culinary horizons. Suddenly, she was learning about flavours and dishes that were new to her from housemates who were Polish, Chinese-Filipino, Italian. Lots of their recipes have found their way into Kellett’s book, from Korean-inspired marinated eggs to scallion pancakes, pierogi and erbazzone Reggiano, a pastry pie encasing cheesy, buttery, oniony wilted spinach. “Not only could I not afford to be in London before,” says Kellett, of communal living, “but it was so lovely to have that side of my life – dinner – looked after on six nights a week.” There was great comfort to be found in the system, she says, “it saved so much time, so much money, and there was never any pressure to be social. And if you happened to be out one night, you could request a ‘late plate’ to come home to with your name on it.”
Comfort, affordability, large groups and, obviously, deliciousness are the pillars on which In For Dinner and, more broadly, Kellett’s editorial work (mostly published on Substack) are built. I ask about her phenomenal success on social media – her Instagram following totals just under 300, 000 – which saw exponential growth in a short space of time. She tells me that she’d committed herself to post three cookery reels on Instagram per week and that, for several months, “nothing happened”. “I only started talking about living and cooking communally because I needed to make dinner for my housemates and hadn’t done a reel yet that day,” she says, “so I made one in the warehouse.” She threw together Alison Roman’s caramelised onion pasta, to which she added tuna, and talked about her living set-up. “The idea of communal living really divided the internet. Half the people thought it was disgusting, said we were probably all sleeping together, that there was no way we were living on £25 each a week – lots of trolling – and the other half loved the idea of it and asked to move in.” The reel went viral.
For lunch today, Kellett has made us confit cherry tomatoes with labneh on toast, a recipe which appears simple but where there is a symphony of flavours at work – the rich, peppery olive oil in which the sweet tomatoes have slowly cooked, the lemon zest-spiked strained yoghurt, the chewy, pillowy vessel of that e5 bread. That bread doesn’t come cheap, but Kellett is committed to giving readers options for making any of the recipes on a shoestring, and tends to favour cheaper ingredients. The spinach in the erbazzone recipe, for example, comes from a frozen bag; scan any recipe in the pages of her book – from black bean chilli with charred corn salsa and brothy fregola with tomatoes to white chocolate and burnt caramel cookies and citrus mackerel spaghetti with pangrattato – and seemingly high-end food feels suddenly achievable on a budget, at home.
When we meet, Kellett is between homes and staying with family. After five years at the warehouse, it is due to be redeveloped and she and her housemates have had to move out. But they are staying together, and have found a house to share in north London, where they plan to continue living in the same communal style – a way of life that has arguably changed Kellett’s own life for the better. Before long, the WhatsApp group will once again be lighting up their phones with that all-important question, “Who’s in for dinner?”
Rosie Kellett’s Confit Cherry Tomatoes & Labneh on Toast
Serves 4–6 as a substantial breakfast or light brunch.
Ingredients:
400g cherry tomatoes
200ml olive oil
A pinch of sea salt
700ml full-fat yoghurt zest of 1 lemon
1⁄2 tsp sea salt
To serve:
6 slices of good bread
1 clove of garlic, peeled
Sea salt and ground black pepper
Recipe:
1. Put the cherry tomatoes, olive oil and a pinch of sea salt into a medium saucepan over the lowest heat possible and leave to confit for at least 1 hour, and anywhere up to 3 hours.
2. To make the labneh, mix the yoghurt with the lemon zest and 1⁄2 tsp sea salt.
3. Place a sieve over a bowl and line the sieve with a large, clean piece of cheesecloth, muslin or a fresh dishcloth. Pour the yoghurt mix into the lined sieve and tuck the mixture in with the excess cloth.
4. Leave to strain like this in the fridge overnight. In the morning the bowl will have collected all the milky excess liquid from the yoghurt (which you can discard), and you will have a thick labneh in the lined sieve.
5. When you are ready to serve, toast the bread and rub it lightly with the garlic clove. Top with the labneh and then the tomatoes, drizzling over some extra confit oil and sprinkling with salt and pepper.
Rosie wears the TOAST Cotton Linen Canvas Top and the Cotton Linen Canvas Wide Leg Trousers. The TOAST Acacia Wood Rectangle Board, Faro Stripe Linen Napkin, Wonki Ware Side Plate and Rounded Moroccan Glasses Set are also featured.
In For Dinner by Rosie Kellett is available now.
Words by Mina Holland.
Photography by Sophie Davidson.
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