Food

My local gastropub, which is very popular, serves a hot, freshly made and runny-yolked scotch egg. It’s billed as a ‘Cackleberry Farm Scotch Egg with Maldonado Salt’ because part of hospitality is marketing. If you just chalk up ‘scotch egg’ on a board, it doesn’t entice the appetite in quite the same way. But call it ‘œuf écossais enrobés de chair à saucisse’ and serve it on a cracked slate tile – you’ve got yourself a stampede. A couple who live in the village visited the pub and ordered two of them. Shortly after being served, the husband of the couple returned the plates to the bar and asked the

It’s somewhat risky to make the case for lard for a publication whose cookery columnist is the author of a book on butter. But so be it. Because lard has generally been at best overlooked and at worst openly maligned, and that is madness. The cost of cooking oils has rocketed in the past couple of years – sunflower oil has trebled in price, olive oil doubled. Butter is much dearer too. Yet inexplicably no one has suggested lard might step in to save the day. The cheapest pack of butter at Tesco will currently cost you £1.99. A block of lard is 50p. It has long been a slight

You could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into Oz: in the past couple of years, the whole world has gone green. Pale green, to be precise. Suddenly, pistachio is everywhere: it’s in our pastries, our chocolate, our coffees, our puddings, and even showing up in perfumes, paint charts, scented candles and on our fashion runways. Where has this sudden lust for pistachio come from? In one way, pistachios are old news: they’re an ancient crop that has grown in the Middle East and been used as an ingredient in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cookery for as long as can be remembered. They’re even referred to in Genesis: ‘Take some

Recently in Spectator Life Rob Crossan laid bare ‘the unpalatable truth about British food’ – namely that it is, er, in some establishments he’s been to, done badly. Leaving aside the fact he’s looking for his fish and chips in the wrong place (outside the M25 it wouldn’t be such a struggle), encountering a few dodgy versions of British fare is not a good reason to sit idly by and allow our culinary heritage to disappear. British food can compete with the world’s best – if we allow it to. In many ways we have had to develop a thick skin when it comes to the loss of treasured bastions

Just when it seemed as though January in Britain couldn’t get any bleaker, along came ‘Veganuary’. Cue loads of puny, blue-haired wokerati spending this month preaching about how we should give up on two of man’s greatest pleasures – meat and cheese. If you’ve been finding it irritating, you’re not alone. In surveys of public opinion, vegans are hated more than any other group, with the exception of drug addicts. So when a chef tells the newspapers that he’s banned vegans from his restaurant, or a magazine editor jokes that they should be killed, do you feel justified in allowing a smirk of amusement to cross your face? After all, in an era when we are

I’m sure my mum would forgive me for saying this, but cooking is not one of her many strengths. Raising three children, and with a husband who worked shifts in a steel mill, she was feeding people round the clock, so cooking became a necessity rather than a pleasure – as it will have been for the majority of working-class women in the 1960s and 70s. Since this was before convenience food really hit the shelves, things were cooked from scratch, and in winter, steak and kidney suet pudding was on the menu in our house most weeks. As were liver and onions, mince and potato pies and anything else

John F. Kennedy opted to serve New England lobster, Ronald Reagan a California-inspired garden salad – and James Buchanan 400 gallons of oysters. Held at Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, the inaugural luncheon for a new president is as much part of inauguration day as the swearing-in ceremony and the inaugural address.  Nixon enjoyed pineapple slices topped with cottage cheese and washed down with a glass of milk First time around, in 2017, Donald Trump’s inaugural meal featured dishes including Maine lobster and Gulf shrimp. But for those not on the guest list to find out what he serves tomorrow (McDonald’s ice cream, perhaps?), there are plenty of other

Partridges, purveyor of ‘nice things for the larder’ to the well-heeled, will close the doors of its Chelsea shop for the last time next month. After 53 years of serving SW3 delights such as ox tongue, macadamia nuts and glace cherries, the shop, run by the Shepherd family and in possession of a royal warrant, will soon carve its last slice of wafer-thin mortadella. Its landlord, the Cadogan Estate, has thanked Partridges for helping to ‘make Chelsea so special’. What Cadogan Estates omits to say of course, is that a branch of Whole Foods, that artisan behemoth beloved of American bankers and vegan, coeliac Gen Z-ers, is soon to take its

Last year a friend who lives in Lyon came to visit me in London. It was only her second trip to the UK and she was determined to venture deep into our indigenous food culture. ‘So, where can I get good fish and chips?’ she asked me. Now, if I was a citizen of Vienna and she was asking me where to find really good sachertorte, I suspect I wouldn’t struggle to reel off myriad cafes. If I lived in Athens and was questioned about where to get decent souvlaki, I would probably have a list as long as Hercules’s personal meat skewer. But fish and chips? In London? I

On 2 October 1814, a grand feast was held at the Hofburg imperial palace during the Congress of Vienna. Famed French chef Marie-Antoine Carême was charged with cooking and didn’t disappoint. But when it came to the cheese course, a lively argument broke out among the assembled statesmen, each advocating for the superiority of their national cheese: the Italian for Stracchino, the Swiss for Gruyère, the Dutchman for Limburger, and so on and so forth. The UK foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, championed Stilton. French foreign minister Talleyrand snapped an order (‘Send the despatches to the chancellerie’) and a large piece of Brie de Meaux was duly brought out: ‘The Brie

It is now not unusual to find ‘bone broth’ in the refrigerated sections of supermarkets or delis, on sale for more than £7. Who can afford this stuff? If you have the time to make your own stock then all credit to you. But if not, the concentrated stock in little cubes or tubs is perfectly acceptable. Knorr and fancy upstarts such as Kallo pose as the superior products. But Oxo has stood the test of time. In a flooded stock market, their cubes remain my choice. Beef is the classic (the name ‘Oxo’ is thought to come from the word ‘ox’). Retailers seem to have taken the lamb version

‘It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ’em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.’ (A Christmas Carol.) And there is exactly the problem with festive fowl. In most cases, we get turkey. And usually we get it far too big, which leads to all the problems of using the thing up over the course of a week. It may have been fine for Bob Cratchit’s large family but for most people, the mammoth turkey isn’t the way to go. A turkey is a fine bird (one of the trinity of actually useful things, with potatoes and tomatoes, to