The graduate: Claudine Watt

From her boutique cookery school in Santa Monica, Claudine Watt is speaking at 9am LA time. Abundance and Co, as it’s known, focuses on seasonal, market-led food. She has already been up for hours, which, she says, is simply how the days run here. Her signatures run from a Whipped Ricotta with Honey, Pistachios and Aleppo Pepper to a Little Gem, Avocado and Snap Pea Salad with a Yuzu Dressing people talk about for weeks after her classes. Her core conviction is firmly held. ‘A big part of my teaching has been to take out any intimidation,’ she says. ‘You’re not a bad cook. You may have just followed bad recipes.’

Behind her as she speaks hangs a framed article from 1974, introducing her mother as the new food writer for a South African magazine, and in the photograph her mother is pregnant with Claudine. ‘Food was kind of in my DNA,’ she says. Her mother, an untrained but wonderful cook, later taught small groups from the family’s London home, and her grandmother cooked beautifully too. ‘It was just always amazing food around.’

Watt’s own first career was in television news, as an assignment editor in the London foreign bureau of ABC. It was her mother’s death, in 2004, that turned her towards food. ‘I had this moment of, this is my opportunity to do the thing that I really love. Life is short.’ ‘I thought, I’m going to leave ABC. I want to do something with food. And that’s when I did the Diploma.’

The newsroom has been more helpful in her career in food than you might think. ‘My training at ABC was really good training for working with food,’ she says. ‘So much of it is crisis management, time control, staying calm, working with big groups of people.’ Preparing for a news shoot, she found, was not so different from preparing for a class.

Claudine chose Leiths for its standing as much as its teaching. ‘I wanted something that people took seriously,’ she says. ‘I wanted that validation, having the Diploma and that name behind me.’ ‘It gave me a scientific grounding, a technical expertise I didn’t have, especially with baking.’ The Leiths Baking Bible still sits on her shelf, and she still reaches for it when she wants a classic done the classic way. She is candid, too, about the finer, more decorative work of a culinary training in the noughties that was too fussy for a cook who prefers something natural. ‘I think you have to do the things sometimes that aren’t right to figure out the things that are,’ she says.

She wrote to Yotam Ottolenghi, a fellow journalist turned cook, and spent a few weekends in his Islington kitchen. Restaurant life, she knew quickly, was not the plan. ‘I knew that this was a young person’s game,’ she says. ‘I did not want to still be in a restaurant kitchen at midnight.’ She went instead to teach at Cookery School at Little Portland Street, under the ‘formidable’ Rosalind Rathouse, who taught her a great deal. There she first worked alongside Claudine Boulstridge, one of her contemporaries on the Diploma, who joined her as a teacher.

Los Angeles was meant to be temporary. Her husband, whom she met at ABC, was offered a posting, and they went with two small children. ‘That was 13 years ago.’ For a while she could not work at all, waiting on a green card. ‘I don’t like not working,’ she says. Starting again meant starting from nothing. ‘No network here, no one knowing who Leiths is, none of my food contacts. It was really starting from scratch.’ She rebuilt it from her own kitchen.

What she has built there is as much about people as food. ‘I love talking to people. I love finding out people’s stories,’ she says. Strangers often arrive not knowing one another and leave having swapped numbers. ‘There’s just such connectedness. Every class feels like a party.’ That instinct came into its own after the Los Angeles fires, when she opened her classes for free to people who had lost their homes. ‘It was like group therapy,’ she says. ‘These people had been through trauma. But sitting down outside, eating together, having a glass of wine, people sharing their experience. It was really amazing.’

For Watt the point is always the same: to keep moving forwards, building community and finding new ways to do it through food.

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