The graduate: Cate Walton

For several years, Cate Walton cooked dinner every Friday for the same family. Up to fifteen of them would gather at the grandmother’s house at the end of the week, and she would have the meal ready for them to sit down to. The job came about, as most of hers have, through someone she had met on another job. ‘All of my jobs have come from being on another job and meeting somebody there,’ she says. Twelve years into a career in food, she has learned to trust that pattern.

Walton came to Leiths after university, drawn to cooking but unsure how to turn it into a living. ‘I loved cooking and I wanted a career in the food industry, but I didn’t really know how to forge that,’ she says. ‘It felt like a stepping stone.’ She had looked at the alumni who came before her and found the work they were doing inspiring. ‘The jobs they did were things I just thought sounded amazing.’ The Diploma, she hoped, would give her the same footing.

It gave her a running start. With a job lined up for the summer, she went straight into private cheffing, cooking for families in Ibiza and then the south of France. ‘It was a really good launching pad, just to push me into those environments,’ she says. A ski season followed, and with it a lesson that shaped everything after. Cooking the same dishes week after week taught her to pay attention to consistency, down to small things like noticing that her boeuf bourguignon had more intensity from the oven than from the slow cooker. ‘It really taught me about the importance of consistency,’ she says.

Food media came next, through a door she had already opened. Before Leiths she had done work experience with the food teams at Good Housekeeping and Asda Magazine, and after her ski season the Asda team got back in touch. Two days a week she wrote recipes and assisted on shoots in-house; the other days she spent cheffing across London. Over time the balance shifted. She tested in the in-house kitchens at Sainsbury’s Magazine, worked as a contributing editor on its themed quarterly titles and went on to write and test for Good Food and Olive, where she now also moderates the social channels and answers readers’ questions. The most common, she says, is the poached egg. ‘Even if you tell them they just need fresh eggs, no vinegar, no swirling the pan, they don’t believe you.’

What she returns to, across all of it, is recipe development and writing. She is drawn to the technical side, the reasons things behave as they do. ‘I really love the science behind food,’ she says. ‘I like understanding why things do certain things.’ Writing a recipe, for her, is a matter of thinking it through and setting it down clearly. Having cooked professionally, she is precise about who she is writing for. ‘People at home don’t cook like chefs,’ she says. The measure of a good recipe is whether someone can get the maximum result for the most realistic amount of effort. ‘If I write a recipe where I’m really pleased with the results, but I also know it’s achievable for everyday people, I find that really satisfying.’

Twelve years in, now with a young family in tow, the flexibility of this style of work suits her current lifestyle, ‘I’ve been able to mould it to where I am in life and where I want to go,’ she says. A cookery book would be welcome one day. Mostly she values the freedom to shape the job around her life. Her advice to anyone starting out is plain and hard-won: work hard, stay open and be willing to do the unglamorous parts. Food styling, her main income for years, can appear to some to be more appealing from the outside than it tends to be in practice. ‘The reality is you’re cooking ten or twelve recipes, styling them, doing the washing up, taking out the rubbish and mopping the floors.’ Say yes to everything early, she says, and keep going. ‘You could email ten people and one might reply. But that one person could be the one who opens the other doors.’

The thing she keeps coming back to is attitude. ‘You can be the best at what you do,’ she says, ‘but if you’re not pleasant to be around, people aren’t going to want to hire you.’ Her own version is simpler. ‘If I work hard and I’m nice to people and I approach things with grace, I’ve always found that my work evolves from that.’

If you’re interested in doing the Leiths Culinary Diploma like Cate did, find out more here.