I admit to feeling a little intimidated by charcuterie. I have a clutch of books on my shelf all laying out in step-by-step detail how to craft your own salami or whip up a perfect pancetta. They’re well-thumbed, but not a single one has a cooking stain on it. I’m just too nervous when it
I am, for the most part, a rule follower and a people pleaser. It’s one of the reasons I love baking, which essentially amounts to a set of instructions designed to make something to be shared and bring joy. But if someone recommends something to me, I can be resistant to it for ages. The
Salad cream makes me feel oddly patriotic. It’s one of those products that is so distinctively British that it has not travelled. Elsewhere, it is eschewed as a poor man’s mayonnaise. Its chief ingredients are hardboiled egg yolks, English mustard, vinegar and thick cream, and it was, in fact, the first product that Heinz produced
A few years ago, a friend wrote a cookery book for the UK market, full of gorgeous dishes, many of them esoterically British. It was snapped up by an American publisher who, as well as converting my friend’s careful metric measurements into loosey-goosey volume-based cup measures, queried a couple of her more British ingredients, one
‘Sausages,’ my son says to me, leaning forward from the back of the car, with the authority and confidence only a three-year-old can truly muster. ‘Sausages?’ I reply distractedly, while navigating a particularly awkward roundabout. We’ve been talking about my job, but I assume his train of thought has taken a lunchier direction. ‘Yes, sausages.
‘Nothing will surely ever taste so hateful as nursery tapioca,’ wrote Elizabeth David. She’s not alone in her hatred of the stuff: tapioca pudding has become a shorthand for those childhood dishes we look back on with horror. It’s exactly those dishes that I’m trying to restore to their former glory – if such a
Iam standing in my kitchen preparing kidneys for devilling. Snipping their white cores away piece by piece until they come free and I’m left with just the wibbly, burgundy kidney, ready for their spiced flour, I pause. There is no denying that even fresh raw kidneys can smell a little… challenging. And for one moment
I have never seen a baked Alaska in the wild. Have you? I knew what they looked like, of course, all meringue cheekbones and technicolor interior, but I haven’t actually come across one. For whatever reason, they seem to be an endangered species – so I took to making them myself. The pudding was invented
In 1999, a relatively unknown American chef wrote an essay in the New Yorker uncovering the secrets of restaurants. ‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This’ lifted the lid on both the underworld of professional kitchens and the mentality of chefs. In it, the writer meticulously took down ordering fish on a Monday (old), eating steak well
The Italians have a phrase: ‘brutti ma buoni’. It means ‘ugly but beautiful’, and it’s the name they give to their nubbly hazelnut meringue biscuits, which – as the name suggests – taste lovely but aren’t lookers. The phrase came to me the other day when I lifted the lid on my pan of golden
Picture the scene. The year is 2004. The setting, a British field or maybe a beach. There is a small open fire burning with a single cast-iron pan perched on it. A male TV chef – dressed in a striped shirt, open at the neck, chinos, possibly red, leather shoes – is standing over it,
I will admit to having been dismissive of red velvet cake in the past, considering it to be bland in flavour and garish in colour. It tended to come in cupcake form with towering hats of super-sweet buttercream, which made it unpleasant and difficult to eat. The cult love for red velvet, inspiring scented candles
You may be forgiven, if you are a regular reader of this column, for thinking that my primary motivation in cooking is showing off. I’m always banging on about lovely dishes you can serve to unsuspecting guests that will guarantee plaudits and amazement. But while there is more than a kernel of truth in this,
Isn’t it awful that the older you get, the more you know yourself? It’s supposed to be a good thing, attributed to wisdom, experience and a deeper understanding of our place in the world around us. But good lord, self-awareness can be a cruel mistress. I have realised that my greatest culinary goal is simply
Pub food in Britain has had a mixed reputation over the years. For a long time, the most a pub would have to offer as food would be some pork scratchings or a pickled egg. There certainly wasn’t a brigade of chefs in white coats in a shiny chrome kitchen. This is midweek-teatime cooking, it’s
January kitchens are my favourite. This isn’t anything against Christmas – I love the spice, the frenzy, the ritual of festive cooking, but I also love the aftermath. There’s something calming about the kitchen once it’s all over – nothing is made through obligation, or with a deadline. I embrace the cosiness of autumn and
For as long as we’ve been serving food, we’ve been unable to resist a bit of culinary deception. Making one thing look like another thing – especially if it makes a sweet thing look savoury or vice versa – seems to have universal comedic value. There’s something Willy Wonka-ish about the visual wrong-footing, the surprise
There is a gentle irony to the dish coquilles St Jacques: a decadent, rich preparation of one of our most luxurious seafoods takes its name from a saint who has inspired centuries of pilgrimage, and whose emblem came to symbolise modesty. The eponymous St Jacques is St James the apostle, or James the Great. The
Sometimes, when it comes to culinary history, Britain is its own worst enemy. For a long time, British food has been seen as a joke among other nations, but also nearer to home. Even when the dishes are near indistinguishable, we’re still happy to poke fun at our own fare: we love panna cotta but
I often think of the first time I ate brown bread ice cream. I know how that sounds: it’s the exact sort of pretentious nonsense a food writer would say if they were about to press a recipe for brown bread ice cream on you. But it was long before I became a food bore,
