At Home with Morgana, food.relics

Food as a form of memory

At Home With is an original series from Honest Toil exploring the people using our olive oil in their own homes. Through conversations, recipes and personal stories, the series offers a glimpse into the spaces, traditions and rituals that shape the way we cook at home – celebrating thoughtful ingredients, shared tables and the role our olive oil plays in everyday kitchens.

For Morgana, food has never been just something to eat.

A writer working across autotheory, essays and poetry, she describes herself more broadly as a food creative – someone who cooks, hosts, styles, writes through and thinks with food.

“Food has become a medium for me,” she explains. “A way of looking at things, a form of physical memory, an edible relic.”

 

The connection began long before Food Relics existed as a project. Growing up in an Italian-Spanish household, food sat at the centre of family life. Meals were shared, time was made to gather around the table, and love was often expressed through cooking. “I always had to be home in time for dinner,” she says. “At the time it sometimes felt like a burden, but I really appreciate it now.”

Those early experiences continue to shape both her writing and her cooking today.

A former cheesemonger, she became fascinated by the idea of terroir – how food can carry the story of a place. “Cheese began to feel like its own knowledge system of the land,” she says. “It carries pasture, milk, season, microbes, cellars, hands and time.” That curiosity later led her into the world of natural wine, where she found a similar language of landscape, seasonality and place.

At home, cooking often becomes an extension of these ideas. Food is a way of gathering people together, creating memories and marking a moment in time. The dishes are simple but thoughtful, built around a handful of beautiful ingredients.

For this recipe, she prepares marinated ricotta with fresh peas, pea shoots, fried courgettes, lemon, honey and Honest Toil olive oil. A dish she returns to often when hosting, it strikes a balance between generosity and simplicity – something designed to be shared over bread at the start of a meal.

Like much of her work, it relies on a few things done well: good produce, great cheese, quality olive oil, and people gathered around a table.