Nine Years of This Needs Hot Sauce
Nine years ago yesterday, I sent the first issue of This Needs Hot Sauce to about 40 people. It came via Tinyletter and I moved to Substack the following year, when it was a very new platform. It’s not an overstatement to say this newsletter completely changed my life. I’m so grateful for the people and opportunities it’s brought me and its function as a public diary of sorts. It’s special to get a glimpse into my twenty something mind and what I thought about something or someone. Since nearly the beginning, I’ve mentioned people in my life by name (I first tried calling everyone “my friend” and it sounded so weird) so it’s also an accidental catalog of relationships, for better or for worse.
I love writing to you every week and I love hearing from you even more. Thank you for being here and let’s take a look back, shall we? I’d love to hear from you in the comments—say hi and let me know when you first joined this community. This one gets long but there’s lots of juicy archives to explore, which paid subscribers have full access to.
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2017: I started This Needs Hot Sauce when I was 24 years old, living in Williamsburg with Julia. I was working at a non profit job that I hated and desperately wanted to pivot. I had applied for some food media jobs but didn’t have relevant post college experience so I wasn’t getting too far. In August 2017, I was in a cab with a friend, a few weeks after a breakup and told her I was going to start a food newsletter. A few months later, I actually did. The format has changed very little since the beginning: I share recipes, recs, and stuff to read. I announced the newsletter on Instagram stories and went from there. I sent the newsletter on Sundays back then and it helped with my end of weekend anxiety. I shared an end of year recap despite only writing the newsletter for 2 months of the year—very Taylor Swift being obsessed with 1989 with a December birthday coded.
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© 2026 Abigail Koffler
Brooklyn, NY