My first book - The Vinegar Cupboard - was published in March 2019. By then it had already won the Jane Grigson Trust Award, and went on to be shortlisted for the Andre Simon awards, win two Guild of Food Writers Awards, and win at the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards.
I mention the awards not to brag but because I think they make for an interesting end-result counterpoint to the sheer slog that was getting The Vinegar Cupboard published at all. Because getting a book deal is hard - as it perhaps should be. Just maybe not so hard.
Let’s go back a bit. On New Year’s Day 2011 I went for a walk with my husband and confessed to myself as much as him that I wanted to have a ‘proper’ go at being a writer. Before that I’d had a pretty decent career as a West End theatre producer but taken a break from that because it was making me pretty miserable and I needed to work out just what it was I really wanted to do next with my life. The answer had turned out to be writing, and then eventually turned out to be food writing.
Back to Jan 2011 and I already had an idea for a semi-cookbook. Not a great idea as it turned out, but a decent one and more importantly one that set me on a track to finding my writing voice and confidence. That idea eventually evolved into another idea, the ‘semi-’ was dropped and by 2014 I had put together my first cookbook proposal. It nearly got me an agent too - and a good one. But neither the idea nor I were really quite ready.
Scroll on a bit more and by mid 2016 I have found what was to become the idea for me. The Vinegar Cupboard was conceived, constructed and wrestled into a proposal. I got very close to getting a deal right out of the gate! But that collapsed. I got an agent who seemed to love it and believe in it! She was a disaster. And yet I knew - I knew - this idea had legs and I firmly believed in making it happen.
My disaster-agent had either got a series of no’s from commissioning editors or failed to send it anywhere at all. It was hard to tell which given she stopped communicating with me to such a degree that I did in the end have to email her to check she was no longer representing me. I decided to have one last throw of the dice on my own. In March 2017 I sent it to Bloomsbury Absolute and by October that year had a signed contract, with a manuscript delivery date of Spring 2018.
6 months to write my beloved, nerdy, deep-dive into world vinegars. But I’d been commissioned to write it and sure as heck wasn’t going to jeopardise that by questioning deadlines. I did nothing else for those months. I only cooked, ate, wrote, researched about vinegar. Every week more vinegars would arrive from around the world. I literally wore a hole in the carpet under my desk with footmarks.
After photos and edits we signed it off in November 2018 and it was published in March 2019. (Oh and my mother died at Christmas 2018 - this really was quite a time.)
It came out to huge applause. As I said at the beginning of this, it went on to be hugely lauded at awards season and established me in the food writing world. I remain deeply proud of The Vinegar Cupboard and its position as an authority on vinegars. I also know that nothing else in my writing career would have happened without it. And yet, getting it published was hard and I could have - maybe should have - given up on it at several points along the way.
And so, what is the moral of all this for anyone eyeing up their own first cookbook? I think it is:
Take your time
Keep the faith
Don’t be afraid to ditch bad (or only decent) ideas
But if you know in your boots and in your bones that it’s the right idea, keep on going.
Angela, I'm hugely inspired by your journey—thanks for giving us an inside look at it!