A Stranger in my Mother’s Kitchen

Made over five years, A Stranger in my Mother’s Kitchen is an intimate exploration of absence, memory, personal history and grief, born from a yearning to reconnect with my mother after her death. Told through photographs, writing and the act of cooking her recipes, the work explores a personal experience of loss while also preserving a remarkable food legacy.

My mother, Sue Miles, was a pioneering chef whose career spanned some of the most significant shifts in British food culture. Described in her obituary in The Guardian as ‘Doyenne of the British restaurant revolution’. As her daughter, I learnt to cook simply by watching her. I took for granted that we would have many more years to cook together and, after she died from cancer in 2010, I feared much of that history had disappeared with her.

While clearing her home, I discovered a collection of handwritten recipes that I had never known existed: scruffy, stained pieces of paper, some carefully written, others little more than lists of ingredients or fragments of instructions. Faced with this archive, there seemed only one thing to do. I began to cook.

As I slowly worked through the recipes, the smells and tastes brought back memories with an immediacy that photographs alone could not. Cooking her food allowed me to experience something of being nurtured by her again. Alongside this process, I wrote about grief and travelled to places connected to our shared history, including Italy, where we had lived when I was a child, and across America, where she grew up.

In 2015, after five years of making the work, I travelled by train across America. After four days I stepped off in New York knowing, for the first time, that the project had come to an end.