Food writer is backing the Big Help Out and says volunteering saved her in the past.
Royalists and republicans alike can enjoy a cut-price coronation quiche as the food writer and campaigner Jack Monroe has revealed her own twist on the official recipe served up by Buckingham Palace chefs.
Monroe, the Boot Strap Cook, famous for her low-budget and store cupboard dishes, has dived into the Big Help Out, which is encouraging people to sign up for volunteering opportunities over the coronation weekend, to inspire the next generation of food bank, surplus food and community kitchen volunteers.
Together with The Felix Project, FareShare, City Harvest and London Community Kitchen, Monroe will be helping out with a community cooking challenge.
But her main contribution is a budget take on the royal chef Mark Flanagan’s official broad bean, spinach and tarragon quiche. Replacing broad beans with frozen peas, fresh spinach with frozen, and double cream with cream cheese, she has cut the cost down to just 41p a portion.
“I looked at the royal chef’s recipe and actually there is nothing to criticise here, really. They have chosen a recipe that was not too difficult, used ingredients fairly easy to source; [it] doesn’t take a disproportionate amount of time or require great skill,” said Monroe. “I have never made a quiche before in my life. But I wondered if I could make it more cheaply.”
She has served her version to an army of the Big Help Out volunteers “who loved it”, and even her son, her harshest critic, had given it his approval, she said.
Monroe said the Big Help Out would create a great legacy for the coronation. “The scale of need at the moment for voluntary organisation and the services they offer is staggering,” she said, urging people to “be part of the social moment feeding people and looking after people who otherwise are slipping through the gaps of the welfare safety net”.
She said: “I don’t think a lot of people have until recently realised how precariously close to the edge many of us live. The pandemic brought that home for a lot of people, how perilously close we are to personal disaster, and a real volunteer movement seems to have grown.”
Volunteering had saved her in the past, Monroe said. As a young single mum, using food banks, unemployed and on benefits, she had fallen into “a real depression”, unable to give her young son any treats, and constantly applying for and failing to get jobs. “It was just a Groundhog Day of ‘no’. It really chipped away at my self-esteem as a human being. And I was suicidal, I was chronically depressed, I felt I didn’t have a place in the world any more.”
But through volunteering, she said, “I felt a part of something again, a part of my community, it gave me hours to keep to routine and structure, a reason to get out of bed, jump in the shower and put on clean clothes. Gradually I regrew my self-esteem.”
Monroe said her own leanings were towards republicanism, though her family was more royalist. “But that’s OK because we can get around the table together and have the best discussions. We will no doubt be doing a lot of that over the coming days.” And, obviously, over quiche.