With a little help from some celebrity friends, Ryan Riley has launched Life Kitchen – cooking classes for people living with cancer, with a focus on intense flavours – in memory of his mum.
When Krista Riley was undergoing chemotherapy to treat her lung cancer, one side-effect hit her harder than any other: losing her sense of taste.
‘My mother really loved food, but we would go out for family meals and she would sit there, absolutely miserable,’ recalls Ryan Riley, Krista’s son. ‘The only thing she could taste was really sweet, artificial ice pops, and if these awful sugary things are the only thing you can enjoy, what sort of life is that?’
Two years after her diagnosis, Krista died, aged 47, in December 2013. ‘She was such an amazing woman, and obviously it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me,’ says Riley, ‘but I started thinking about how I could turn my grief into helping other people.’
Fast-forward four years and Riley, a food writer and stylist, has founded Life Kitchen – free cookery classes for people living with cancer – in her memory.
But there’s a twist. Rather than concentrating on nutrition and health, he’s specifically showing his guests how to cook up intensely-flavoured foods that might just bring a zing to the taste buds.
‘I wanted to create recipes that not only taste delicious,’ he says, ‘but that give people like my mum, whose sense of taste has gone, or become dulled, a moment of joy in a dark time.’
Riley, 24, who taught himself to cook after his mum died, had been mulling the idea over for a while when inspiration struck. ‘One night my boyfriend called me and said “I’m going to be quite late, I’m just buying a homeless guy some food”, and in that instant it was like “He’s doing something good for someone, why can’t I now turn what has been in my head into something?”
‘So I tweeted one little tweet, saying I was thinking of doing some cooking classes for people living with cancer, and it went wild overnight with 150 retweets. Then Nigella Lawson got behind me through a mutual friend, and it blew up from there.’
Astonished but galvanised by the response, Riley embarked on a year of fundraising and research. He discovered that half of all people undergoing chemo experience a loss or change of taste, with many complaining of a metallic or chalky taste in their mouth.
After seeking advice from Professor Barry Smith, director of the Centre for the Study of the Senses at the University of London, he then began developing dishes that packed a flavoursome punch, including a twist on a classic carbonara.
‘You start with sweating down some onions, garlic, chilli and smoked lardons with salt until the onions completely disappear, and you’re left with a delicious-looking mush,’ says Riley. ‘That gives you a really intense, smoky base that you can use across so many dishes.’
He then mixes in an egg and parmesan sauce before adding a key ingredient – mint – to give a powerful sensory hit. Mint, he explains, registers with the mouth’s trigeminal nerve, which controls the facial sensations: ‘If you think of toothpaste, it feels burny and hot, but menthol is not actually a hot flavour.’
Another food that awakens the senses is heavily-caramelised mushrooms, which Riley prepares with lentils and gremolata – a garlic, lemon and parsley condiment. Mushrooms are known to give the rich savoury flavour of umami, the “fifth taste”, ‘and it’s very good at boosting all of your other taste receptors,’ adds Riley. ‘So you’re not only getting the ultimate savouriness of umami, you’re getting the boost on the salt, sweet, sour, and bitter too.’
With these and other dishes developed, Riley hosted his first Life Kitchen at Devon cookery school River Cottage in February, with help from a rather special guest – Sue Perkins.
The TV presenter, whose father Bert died of cancer last year, had contacted Riley via Twitter: ‘Her exact words were “If you need a speccy-eyed twonk to help you, then I’m here”! So I went to her house, and we sat down at her kitchen table and talked about our experiences. She said she wanted to do something meaningful, and when she came on board I couldn’t have been more pleased. She’s a very lovely person.’
Forty guests – 20 with cancer, who each brought a friend or family member – came to one of the two sessions held on the day, ‘and I was absolutely terrified, because I’m a food writer, not a cookery teacher! But everyone loved it.
‘I’d say it was 40% food, 60% social,’ he adds. ‘Cancer can be isolating, but when you’ve got a room full of people who are all going through the same thing, you get to see that you’re not alone in this.’
Riley is now applying for charitable status, and is adamant that Life Kitchen must always be free, ‘because cancer is an expensive thing. My mother had to leave her job, and my dad had to fight so hard to keep his because of all the days he had to take off for her hospital appointments. We faced an incredible financial struggle, and I know that other people are in that situation. If you start charging, you don’t open it up to everyone who needs it.’
He’s secured some high-profile support along the way: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall let him use River Cottage for free, Jamie Oliver gave space at his London cookery school for classes in March, and Daylesford Farm in the Cotswolds, which hosted Life Kitchen classes last week, was offered free of charge too.
What would his mum make of it all? ‘I think she’d be incredibly proud,’ says Riley. ‘I could stop now and be very happy with what I’ve achieved, but I’m just so determined to take this out there.
‘When you get the emails that I do, where people include pictures of their daughter, or sister, or grandmother, saying ‘They’re really struggling, I really need your help’, you think well I can’t stop. I have to do this. You’ve got to go for it and hope for the best.’
CASE STUDY
Ali Beattie, 55, who has Stage 4 breast cancer, went to the inaugural Life Kitchen class in February.
‘I was first diagnosed seven years ago, and the chemo was really horrendous – it completely removed all my taste buds,’ she recalls. ‘I loved pasta, and my husband would make me things like spaghetti bolognaise, but all I could get was the texture, and the texture of pasta without the taste is absolutely horrible. I survived on ice-cream and pineapple, because they were the only things I could taste.’
After treatment, Beattie was cancer-free for five years, but the disease returned in her stomach two years ago. She’s currently on her third round of chemo, ‘and this time my tastes haven’t completely gone away, but they’ve definitely changed, and I’m missing particular flavours I had before.’
Spotting a tweet by Sue Perkins about Life Kitchen, Beattie immediately applied, ‘and when I was accepted I was so excited. I was a wee bit shy about it, but I love cooking, and it just ticked all the boxes.’
With her sister in tow, she flew to the West Country from her home in Belfast, ‘and the lesson was absolutely brilliant. Ryan’s got a great sense of humour, and Sue Perkins was interacting with everyone as well, so we all had fun. There were lots of people at different stages of cancer, but there was a real buzz in that room.
‘The recipes were great,’ she adds. ‘The very next night I made the carbonara for my husband; it worked perfectly, and it was absolutely gorgeous. I’m using onions and mushrooms in practically everything I do now: I get them on first and let them cook down for 20 to 25 minutes – Ryan is right about that intensity of the taste if you do that, so that’s a great technique.
‘With cancer you’re up and down, and sometimes you’re not in the mood for cooking. But this has really reawakened my interest in food, and I’ve got all the cookery books out again.’
An edited version of this feature appeared in Waitrose Weekend in April 2018. (c) Waitrose