Exciting Updates for The Black Butter Club

Those of you who have been here since the beginning will likely know that I started writing here to fill the book-shaped gap in my life when my first book went to print. I’d well and truly fallen in love with writing, and knew there was still so much I wanted to explore that didn’t make it into the book. Back then there were only about 3,000 of us here at The Black Butter Club, with no idea how this little corner of the internet would grow or take shape.

There’s now roughly 18,500 of us. That’s huge.
That’s not far off the maximum capacity for the London O2 Arena.

The thought actually makes me hesitate before pressing publish sometimes. In fact, my way round this is to schedule articles ahead of time and distract myself with work on something else for the rest of the day. Sometime later, I remember it’s sent and cross my fingers there weren’t too many typos.

I always find my best proofreading takes place after clicking publish.

For a long time I’ve wanted to do more here. But I only have so much time in a week, and my days of drinking an espresso at 11pm to speed through cleaning a kitchen after service are long behind me.

Am I getting… old?
Or wiser?
Don’t answer.

My first attempt to turn this newsletter into something more than just the notes of a restaurantless chef was the rebranding into The Black Butter Club we know and love today. That was officially announced May 27th 2025. Back then, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to share, but little overall vision or direction of what the blog / collection of articles would eventually become. I was stuck thinking post-by-post, topic-by-topic, without stepping back to consider what beckoned on the horizon.

I consider my role to steward and share, to research forgotten ways and develop new ones, because I believe such things are important. But what I didn’t anticipate was the feedback.

There is a small section of the website where paid members can offer notes in response to why they’ve become paid members, and it was only recently that I discovered this section filled with lovely messages from all over the world.

I am so grateful to those of you who are willing and able to support my work as members of The Black Butter Club. Because of you, this archive of newsletters, recipes, and essays makes a real difference to what I do, and enables me to dedicate the same sort of time and resources to it as I would if this were a book I was writing in real time. That’s also huge.

Reading through your notes, it became apparent that, whilst many of you may have originally come here for fermentation, it’s actually only part of the story.

Of course, many of you mentioned the recipes, practical techniques, gardening and preserving, and I’m incredibly proud that those have become useful parts of your kitchens and gardens. And they’ll always remain a part of The Black Butter Club.

But what surprised me most was how many of you wrote not about fermentation at all, but about curiosity. You spoke about creativity, storytelling, philosophy, photography, history, flavour, writing and seeing food differently. Several of you said the articles had changed the way you thought, not just the way you cooked, and it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that was even a possibility.

It made me step back and ask myself a much bigger question. What is The Black Butter Club actually for?

I realised I’d been thinking far too narrowly. I thought I was writing about recipes, fermentation, gardening and flavour as though they were separate subjects. But they’re really all different ways of exploring the same thing.

Food sits at the crossroads of almost everything. It’s biology and ecology, certainly, but also history, anthropology, memory, culture, ethics, economics and the simple pleasure of gathering around a table. Sometimes the best way to explore those ideas is through a practical guide to miso, homemade pie, or a bowl full of fresh apricots straight from the tree. Sometimes it’s through the musings of a question about roses at midsummer, or why long tables seem to appear across so many cultures. All belong here.

So that’s the direction I’d like to continue growing towards.

Balancing the practical with the more thought-forward pieces, and allowing the feedback from the members who keep this publication going to shape the future of it.

And whilst we’re on the subject, that direction also comes with one practical consequence.

The kind of articles I’m increasingly excited to write aren’t usually the sort that appear after an afternoon at my desk. They’re the ones that begin with a simple question and somehow lead me down rabbit holes. They involve stacks of books, conversations with interesting people, experiments in the kitchen, observations from the garden, and the occasional realisation that I’ve been asking the wrong question all along.

Some questions are simply too interesting to rush.
Some techniques take months to learn.
They take time, lots of it.

Time is the limiting ingredient in almost everything I do. If I’m serious about building The Black Butter Club into the publication I believe it can become, whilst continuing the conservation work, writing books, teaching and everything else that fills my weeks, then I need to be a little more intentional about where I spend it.

I’m not going to lock free subscribers out of what is already shared with them, nothing like that will change, but I am going to start sharing more for paid members. If that’s you, please consider it part of my sincere thanks for your support over the years. If it isn’t you, then you can think of it as a tantalising treat I’m unashamedly dangling from a stick in front of you. Assuming you’re into dangling fermented stuff.

Alongside this, I’ll be introducing The Letterbox. Members will be able to ask questions they'd like to see explored. Sometimes that might inspire practical techniques or recipes, sometimes essays, which might become investigations that wander far beyond where the question first began. Whenever I think the finished piece would be valuable to everyone, I'll publish it freely for all to enjoy. So please don't be shy. If something has been on your mind, I'd love to hear it. Good questions have a habit of leading somewhere unexpected.

Put simply, I’m not interested in perpetual growth, I’m interested in longevity. I want The Black Butter Club to become an ever-evolving, living library of flavour, fermentation and the living world. A place where cooking, gardening, history, science and curiosity all meet.

That doesn’t come from endlessly increasing subscriber numbers. It comes from the security of paid membership.

So, moving forward, I’m going to divide my writing between the two. I’ll continue sharing the essays, observations and seasonal pieces that have always been free, alongside larger investigations and more ambitious projects for the members who keep The Black Butter Club alive for all of us.

More than anything, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for reading, for questioning, for sharing your own thoughts, and for making this strange little corner of the internet what it has become. I feel as though The Black Butter Club has finally found its direction, or perhaps more accurately, it’s always had its direction; I’ve simply caught up with it at last.

And I can’t wait to see where it takes us next.

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