Jack Monroe, Bootstrap Cook interview - spilling the beans on tins, Twitter and talking about gender

The campaigning cook is on a mission to help everyone on a budget find the fun in feeding themselves
Jack Monroe, Bootstrap Chef, champions food banks and value brand cooking after living on benefits. Picture: Greg Macvean, thanks to Edinburgh Grand Hotel, EdinburghJack Monroe, Bootstrap Chef, champions food banks and value brand cooking after living on benefits. Picture: Greg Macvean, thanks to Edinburgh Grand Hotel, Edinburgh
Jack Monroe, Bootstrap Chef, champions food banks and value brand cooking after living on benefits. Picture: Greg Macvean, thanks to Edinburgh Grand Hotel, Edinburgh

He’ll be down shortly,” says the barista in the fancy hotel where I’m waiting to interview Jack Monroe. “She,” corrects the photographer. “Jack’s a she.” I remain neutral, since I know my interviewee was one of the first in the UK to come out publicly as non-binary in 2015 and it’s not the first thing I want to talk to her about – that would be the popularity of her no-nonsense low budget, healthy cookbooks, blog and website. Although campaigner, food writer and activist Monroe is never far from discussions about gender, austerity, foodbanks, homelessness and fair pay too.

“Use ‘she’ for writing up the interview,” instructs Monroe pragmatically later, “and make sure you say I’ve given you permission to do that, or you’ll get loads of stick from people that get upset about it.”

Hide Ad

OK, she. That’s that out of the way, apart from noting Monroe’s appearance when she arrives today as it’s markedly different from her picture on the cover of her last book, Cooking on a Bootstrap, where she’s in a blue shirt, jeans and a toolbelt stuffed with utensils, dark hair cropped short. Instead she bounces into the room in a fitted pink jacket over a black corset top, skinny jeans and leopard print heels, subtle make-up and much longer hair tied up in a ponytail. However, the full sleeve tatts are there, all 47 of them, as is the lightning flash smile.

Monroe, who identified as non-binary in 2015, thinks an open debate about gender is important but is also very busy cooking up a storm on the kitchen frontMonroe, who identified as non-binary in 2015, thinks an open debate about gender is important but is also very busy cooking up a storm on the kitchen front
Monroe, who identified as non-binary in 2015, thinks an open debate about gender is important but is also very busy cooking up a storm on the kitchen front

“So sorry, but I had to change – I’d spilt my lunch down my jumper! Then coming downstairs they said it was for the cover and I was thank f*** I’ve not got my lunch down my front.”

Monroe talks in exclamation marks and is a bundle of energy. For the photos she gamely hops up onto the window ledges, lies down on a sofa, and is all cheeky charm and chat.

Author of four books, the latest being last year’s Bootstrap, with one due out in May and another simmering away, Monroe’s mass appeal comes from her championing of low budget cookery that is good for us.

In these times of austerity, cookbooks for those who don’t have a kitchen full of equipment, a well stocked larder and hours in which to create, sell like hot cakes on the reduced shelf after 7pm, and her blog attracts thousands.

Cooking on A Bookstrap, by Jack Monroe, Bluebird, £15.99. From Self-Love Stew to Pint-Glass Bread, Monroe proves cooking on a budget without fancy gadgets isn't a barrier to great foodCooking on A Bookstrap, by Jack Monroe, Bluebird, £15.99. From Self-Love Stew to Pint-Glass Bread, Monroe proves cooking on a budget without fancy gadgets isn't a barrier to great food
Cooking on A Bookstrap, by Jack Monroe, Bluebird, £15.99. From Self-Love Stew to Pint-Glass Bread, Monroe proves cooking on a budget without fancy gadgets isn't a barrier to great food

Fancy green juice, but don’t have a juicer? Only have a tin of spuds, a no-longer green stick of celery and a heel of cheese? Monroe has the recipe. And it’s not just cheap, it’s comfort food too, Monroe being open about her struggles with depression and alcohol and life in general, so there’s Self-Love Stew with root veg and a tin of beans for when you’re too overwhelmed to cook or I Cannot Get Enough of This Five Minute Thing with peanut butter, spinach and a tin of chickpeas.

Hide Ad

All these recipes will feed you when you’re skint, something Monroe knows about, since back in 2011-13 she was a single parent with little income and became dependent on foodbanks to feed herself and her now eight-year-old son Jonathon. Using the packets and tins she picked up she began writing a blog, A Girl Called Jack, now renamed Cooking on a Bootstrap, and her accessible recipes and entertaining posts became her first book. In 2014 she released A Girl Called Jack: 100 delicious budget recipes, closely followed up the same year with A Year in 120 Recipes. She followed those with Cooking on a Bootstrap and May will see the publication of Tin Can Cook: 75 Simple Store-cupboard Recipes, “an entry-level cookbook for people who never learned to cook, but mostly to restore some dignity to a foodbank box” as Monroe has it.

Tin Can Cook does what it says on the tin – Tinned Spud Fishcakes and Carrot Cake Overnight from a tin of carrots – and the book after that will be mostly vegan, and vegetarian.

Hide Ad

Born in Southend-on-Sea in 1988, one of four children of David Hadjicostas, a firefighter and Evelyn, a nurse turned foster carer, it was a Greek Cypriot and Northern Irish household.

Jack Monroe has another two books due out this year, one focusing on cooking from tins. Picture: REX/ShutterstockJack Monroe has another two books due out this year, one focusing on cooking from tins. Picture: REX/Shutterstock
Jack Monroe has another two books due out this year, one focusing on cooking from tins. Picture: REX/Shutterstock

“As a kid we would eat moussaka with mash. We had a real fusion of two cultures that no-one has dared to fuse since. You don’t see very many Irish-Cypriot pop-up restaurants kicking about!” she says.

“It was a big, busy house, lots of traumatised children and a revolving door and I learned to be empathetic and simultaneously detached.”

Meal times were a busy, noisy affair, and Monroe grew up associating cooking with love and nurture.

After working in a chip shop, “selling shots in her underpants in a nightclub”, a coffee shop, and a supermarket, she took a job as a call handler for Essex County Fire and Rescue Service in 2007-11, a job she loved. She was training to be a firefighter, but after the birth of her child, couldn’t do the shifts and left. “I’d go back tomorrow, but I doubt I’d pass the medical,” she says and laughs.

The writer and blogger wins damages at the High Court from columnist Katie Hopkins after suing Hopkins over tweets, in 2017. Picture: Mark Thomas/REX/ShutterstockThe writer and blogger wins damages at the High Court from columnist Katie Hopkins after suing Hopkins over tweets, in 2017. Picture: Mark Thomas/REX/Shutterstock
The writer and blogger wins damages at the High Court from columnist Katie Hopkins after suing Hopkins over tweets, in 2017. Picture: Mark Thomas/REX/Shutterstock

Poverty followed when she spent 18 months on benefits, but learnt to cook with what was in her food parcels, starting the blog and gaining internet fame. A weekly column in her local Essex daily newspaper followed, then food columns for the Guardian and political columns for the New Yorker and the Huffington Post, plus the books.

Hide Ad

“I just want to be able to pass on to other people how to cook like that, and also for people to make donations of the book to foodbanks.

“I’ve had a bit of criticism for it, people who say you just want to sell books, but if I wanted to sell books I’d wear skimpy shorts on the cover and lick a spoon. I think I’m trying to do some good and sorry your mind works that way,” she says.

Hide Ad

Monroe’s ideas don’t just come from the reduced shelves and foodbank boxes, they’re also influenced by her reading, not cook books, but literature, novels, poems, newspapers, the internet and lately children’s books.

“I made my son green eggs and ham, and I’ve been looking at Enid Blyton’s picnics, and I want to do a cherry cake like the one in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The recipes are also from my imagination,” she says.

“I never learned to cook, so I’ve got no rules. I’ll put things together just because I think they belong together. I’ve run into arguments with other chefs because I don’t have rules. For example ‘you can’t use brown sugar in a meringue’. Six days it took me, and it was just pettiness. If someone tells me something’s impossible, I’m going to do it,” she says.

Monroe’s life has completely changed since her foodbank days and she now lives in a bungalow in Southend with her son and is engaged to Louisa Compton, a TV commissioning editor.

“I’ve got a much better stocked larder now I’m a professional food writer, but it’s still all the basics range.”

She talks me through how she divides up her ingredients into protein, carbs, fruit and veg and flavour on four book shelves that line her lounge/dining room/store cupboard, her kitchen being literally a ‘nook’ where she can touch both walls, then adds needlessly, “I’ve got a very analytical brain.”

Hide Ad

“And I’m autistic, which means I can be hyperfocused but also all over the place at the same time. I think I’m very lucky to have found cooking because it’s the one area where a brain like mine really thrives.”

Monroe only got her diagnosis of autism a few years’ back, prompted by her inability to learn to drive, roundabouts and junctions being a particular hazard. “I just freeze, like a blackout. It happens in other areas of my life too,” she says. “So the doctor tested me and said I have 99 per cent of the qualities of classic autism and there are ADHD qualities to it. But what do you do about it? I just say ‘I’m autistic, that means I’m a bit odd – not all autistic people are odd – but I’m a bit socially awkward, not very good at feelings. But I’m a fantastic cook, so come over and let me cook for you but don’t try and talk to me too much about how your day is going.’”

Hide Ad

Monroe has also attracted fans for her bravery in talking publicly about mental health and her struggles with anxiety, feeling empowered to do so because others had done so before her.

“When I was in the fire service you did not talk about mental health. If I wanted a day off with depression, I’d say I’ve got a migraine, because that’s easier than saying “sometimes my feelings overwhelm me and I just want to cry in my duvet because I can’t move, I’m pinned to my mattress by grief, fear and overwhelming anxiety.”

She stretches out her legs, and groans a little, mid sentence. “Arthritis,” she explains. “I’m going through all the A’s at the moment. ADHD, autism, arthritis, anxiety… can’t wait for the bs, botulism...”

There’s also anthrax, or rather “social anthrax” as she was labelled by broadcaster Katie Hopkins, who had to pay her £24,000 in damages plus costs when Monroe fought back in court.

Monroe sued Hopkins for libel in a case she won in 2017. Hopkins had refused to apologise after confusing Monroe with another commentator in a Twitter spat about vandalising war memorials.

Listing the A’s also brings us to alcohol, which Monroe gave up last year because she found herself drinking more than she was comfortable with.

Hide Ad

“It was partly through getting thrust into the public eye, having to deal with a lot of new social scenarios, and partly through having worked in kitchens where there’s a macho beery culture. I just got in the habit and found it really hard to get out of. So I completely cut it out, zero, nothing, not a drop, and I’m just going to carry on. I decided to do a year sober.”

Cutting out the booze has seen Monroe’s productivity increase, along with her energy, focus and creativity.

Hide Ad

“I am in my absolute stride at the moment. And my food is better than ever which is the thing that gives me the most happiness, working for my readership. I consider my work to be almost a service in the way the fire service is. I am giving something to people.”

With her huge online presence Monroe tweets a lot, with 170,000 followers, about 500,000 across all social media and her website has had over 40 million hits. Recently she’s cut her online media time, aiming for 15 minutes a day.

“To have that many people demanding your attention – if I wanted that kind of bloody nonsense, I’d have been a primary school teacher at a pupil referral unit! It’s like being playground monitor, all these unruly people expecting me to keep them under control. I’ve walked out the gate now, you can all do it yourselves!”

Monroe is cautious around the web, having received death threats ever since she became well known, from “far right types, stalkery types, because I’m a woman, I’m a lesbian, I wrote a passionate defence of a black politician [Diane Abbott]. If you’re an irrational, unreasonable hate-monger, because I’m a reasonable, rational nice person, that’s infuriating.

“I just make cheap cans of beans into meals for people that don’t have much money or heating, I’m not really sure where this stream of hatred comes from sometimes, because I’m all right, I try to be nice, and I’m a genuinely decent-minded fair person.”

For the future, now that she’s sober and focused, Monroe would like to do some television work, having turned it down in the past.

Hide Ad

“I wasn’t in the right place, but now if the right thing came along that wasn’t pompous or exploitative I’d do it. I think there is a hole in the market for my type of cookery on TV, simple, accessible, but commissioners are terrified of it because it’s so ordinary. They’re like ‘can you get potatoes in tins?’ This is why I need to do this show, it’s an education!”

With cooking her main focus, although Monroe still has her opinion on gender issues, these days she doesn’t always rush into the Twitter debate.

Hide Ad

“I think it’s important to keep an open debate going about gender, but at the moment I’m not the right person to be talking about it, because it can sometimes feel like I’ve got an opinion on everything. I was one of the first to come out in the public eye as non-binary and I’ve got nothing but crap for that really,” she says, then reconsiders, “but also a lot of nice letters from people who say they have finally been able to put a name to who they are and what they are.”

Monroe is comfortable in her own skin, but when she appears in public she still faces a dilemma.

“If I have a public event I have a long-running debate with myself, am I going to wear a suit or a dress? But I’ve finally dusted that off and gone ‘bollocks to it!’. If I literally want to go out in my underwear (today’s corset top) and some leopard print heels, I’m going to do it because you only live once.”

When it comes to her son, Monroe was keen that he knew he could be whatever he wanted to be.

“He knows mum’s like a boy sometimes and like a girl sometimes. We had a discussion and I told him he could do or wear what he wanted and if he ever thought he wanted to be a girl I would support him. He laughed in my face and said ‘I’m a boy!’ I said that’s very interesting because when I was your age I was very convinced I was a boy too – and I’ve never grown out of it.

“When I was eight, I called myself Adam and was convinced I was a boy. I wanted short hair, wore my brother’s clothes. I think things are better nowadays and if I’d grown up now, I’d have grown up a lot more confident with less angst about it all.”

Hide Ad

There’s also a wedding to plan, some time next year, which gave Monroe pause to reconsider her tattoos.

“I had a very fleeting aww, I’m not going to look like brides on the front of magazines,” she says. “But then I thought I’m going to look bloody awesome, I’m going to be punk as hell!

Hide Ad

“I’ve always ploughed my own furrow, I’ve always gone against, I’ve thrown tins into cookery books, I was one of the first to come out as non-binary, and I can plough the tattooed bridal furrow as well. I’ll just go my own way as usual. Sometimes that’s lonely and weird, but basically it’s great fun.”

@janetchristie2

Cooking on a Bootstrap by Jack Monroe is published by Bluebird Books, £15.99

Tin Can Cook, will be published by Bluebird Books in May, £6.99