Food

My dangerous flirtation with veganism

I have a confession to make to Spectator readers. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s time to come clean (no, I haven’t become a Labour voter – the Tories have been bad, but not that bad). I’ve been experimenting with using meat and dairy substitutes. Hear me out. I’m not proud of what I’ve done. As a right-of-centre comic, indulging in anti-woke sentiment, eating animal products is a badge of honour – the unspoken custom of our movement. Ceasing to do so is the kind of thing which could raise alarm within the ranks, like a bite on the neck in a zombie film. My main motivation for this possible

How to bake a no-chocolate chocolate cake

This week’s recipe is for a chocolate cake that is not a terribly traditional chocolate cake. But that is its charm. It uses only one egg, no butter and, most magically, absolutely no chocolate. Instead, it uses cocoa powder and boiling water: the boiling water releases a deeper, rounder flavour from the cocoa, which is enhanced by vanilla, a little strong coffee, and a pinch of salt. The cake’s flavour is a little like that of a packet mix of brownies – which is not to diminish it, but to signal its fudgy darkness. Feel free to swap the sugar for whatever you have: caster, granulated, even dark brown sugar would

Are you man enough to eat raw offal?

The dominant wolf gets the liver, at least according to the American podcaster Joe Rogan. In one episode, a bodybuilder called ‘CarnivoreMD’ (real name Paul Saladino) tells him: ‘If you eat liver, you get to be an alpha male… or alpha female.’ Offal has taken a markedly macho turn in recent years. No longer resigned to memories of the postwar school canteen, organs have become the preferred food of a certain type of gym bro. The word offal implies wastage – from the Middle Dutch for offcuts – but it can also be a delicacy. Recently saved from a government ban on cruel foods, foie gras is only the most

Tanya Gold

Food ruined by an existential crisis: Fallow reviewed

I was going to be jolly this week, for variety and denial, but I changed my mind. Instead, I wonder if, when Vladimir Putin – insert your own nickname, mine is unprintable – talks about the weakness of western civilisation (I paraphrase) and, therefore, our unwillingness to resist tyranny in the shape of a balding paranoiac unwisely given Botox by a beautician who lied to him because everyone lies to him, he means Fallow, which is a new restaurant in St James’s. I wonder if Putin has been to Fallow wearing a prosthetic head and, if so, did he do the soft launch or the hard one? Did he steal

The trouble with boycotting Russian food

As the war in Ukraine worsens, the horrific scenes filling our screens have prompted a visceral reaction from the British public: 78 per cent now support Russian sanctions – up from 61 per cent in late February. Economic sanctions have undoubtedly hit the Kremlin’s spending power ­– and that’s to be encouraged. But what should we make of the broader cultural boycott of Russia that is rapidly gaining pace? So far, Britain’s boycotts have had a peculiarly culinary bent. While Putin continues his onslaught, British shoppers have been encouraged to shun vodka and caviar. Lockdown revived an intense interest in cooking amongst the house-bound middle classes. And, seemingly emboldened by their banana bread and sourdough starter kits, many

The ultimate spaghetti and meatballs

Spaghetti and meatballs is an iconic dish: whether it’s Lady and the Tramp that springs to mind at the name, cosying up over a shared bowl of the stuff, facilitating their canine kissing, or Henry Hill describing the prison meatballs that they make to remind them of home in Goodfellas, while Paulie slices garlic paper-thin with a razor blade, there’s no denying that this pasta dish is one which has taken on significance beyond the sum of its parts. I rather hope that I never find myself in the position of either Henry Hill (imprisoned for mob crimes) or either of the romantic leads in Lady and the Tramp (snogging

How to cook with wild garlic

In British cooking we have traditionally had a complicated relationship with garlic. Let the french use it to their hearts’ content: fine in a Toulouse but no thank you in a Cumberland. Suggestive of this wariness is wild garlic’s many names – ‘devil’s garlic’, ‘gypsy’s onions’ and ‘stinking Jenny’ amongst others. But in recent years British cooks have taken to wild garlic with unabashed relish (and indeed it makes rather a good one, as seen here). Food always tastes better having foraged or hunted for it yourself and so it is with wild garlic. The leaves appear in March and you will find them throughout spring but they are best

London’s most unusual dining spots

With around 15,000 options to choose from, how can a London restaurant stand out? Some have pulled out all the stops – setting up kitchens on water, in the air or offering something completely new. Here is our selection of the venues that best combine uniqueness with top-notch cuisine. Hawksmoor Canary Wharf This new East London joint sits on a floating pontoon that softly rises and falls with the tide. Diners must walk the plank (well, bridge) to enter the sleek lounge, which is complete with the 1920s-style sconce lighting, leather banquettes and marble-top bar we’ve come to expect from Hawksmoor’s restaurants. The group’s new eco-friendly pavilion just next to Canary Wharf station is

The giant pancake that feeds everyone

With Shrove Tuesday upon us, I am forced to face my annual pancake day gripe. It is, inevitably, the cook’s gripe: standard crèpe-like pancakes should be eaten as soon as they are cooked, each doled out to waiting mouths as soon as it’s ready. Yes, recipes tell you you can keep them warm in a low oven, but doing that tends them towards the rubbery and luke-warm. This means that the cook is standing at the stove ladling batter while everyone else eats. As a greedy cook, I resent this. But there is a pancake solution: the Dutch baby. The name does not point to a Holland heritage: instead, the

A victim of its own mythology: Langan’s Brasserie reviewed

Langan’s, a brasserie off Piccadilly with curling orange neon signage calling its name, is under new management after it fell into administration in 2020. It is a famous brasserie — London’s version of La Coupole — once owned by Michael Caine, a famous actor, and Peter Langan, a famous drunk, who would crawl across the floor and bite customers’ ankles and who once put out a kitchen fire with champagne. It opened in 1976 on the site of Le Coq d’Or and was treated by the diary columns as a person in itself, as famous as Annabel’s, Peppermint Park and the Ritz Hotel. Lucian Freud and David Hockney and Princess

The trick to making blueberry muffins

I don’t quite know how the Americans got away with it: convincing first their own people, and then the rest of the world that a muffin is a suitable breakfast food? A foodstuff which is, let’s be honest, cake. But then, we are quite happy to sprinkle our worthy porridge liberally with demerara sugar, to use yoghurt in our overnight oats or alongside granola, to combine butter and flour in any manner of breakfast staples from toast to pancakes, what’s so different about combining all those things? In any event, I’m not one to complain about an excuse to squeeze more baked goods into my life; and seeing as those

Why restaurant food at home beats eating out

‘The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.’ That’s Niels Bohr. Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: ‘In art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.’ Like physics and art, many other fields require that you embrace contradictions — because you can’t avoid them. Take innovation. Yes, a great deal of progress is combinatory: two or more technologies are combined to accomplish some hitherto impossible task. But, as the Soviet-era scientist Genrich Altshuller noticed, much innovation follows the opposite path, separating things

London’s best restaurants for British food

There was a moment, about 20 years ago, when Londoners began to realise, and then boast about, the transformation in our food scene. No longer deserving of mockery compared to other global centres, our restaurants were suddenly producing delicious food every bit (well, almost) as good as that associated with the likes of New York. The revolution began with fresh takes on exotic cuisines, especially South and East Asian, Spanish and Italian. But soon another, delightful development emerged: the reinvention of British food. Gastropubs began taking ploughmans and sausage rolls and roasts very seriously indeed, and posh restaurants began to show that homegrown food, when it comes from domestic seas

Eggs en cocotte: the perfect Valentine’s breakfast

There’s something inherently romantic about eggs: whether you’re preparing them for another person, or being served them, they always strike me as a little act of love. Maybe it’s that they suggest breakfast in bed. Breakfast in bed is not about flirting or seduction, it’s more than that. You don’t make breakfast in bed for someone in whom you’re uninterested. Breakfast in bed is not a collaboration, it’s a gift from one person to the other, reserved for those you wish to impress, or to whom you wish to signal your love. That said, while in theory I like the idea, in practice I can feel a little allergic to

Pass on Piggy’s, head to Hide: central London breakfasts reviewed

The centre could not hold, at least for Piggy’s. The drama of being the only greasy spoon in the West End — in Air Street, of all places — was too much, and it swelled, panicked, and fell apart. Yesterday I ate a mean sliver of almost cold bacon inside hard white supermarket bread. The butter had fled, possibly in the night, possibly with its luggage. There is a good, cheap bacon sandwich — I would argue the cheap bacon sandwich is the only good bacon sandwich — but it must have soft bread, crispy bacon, and butter as plentiful as a lover’s heart. This wasn’t it. But what is

London’s most romantic restaurants

Get your credit cards out lads, it’s that time of year again when we demonstrate our love via the medium of grub. Because this year the big day falls on a Monday many restaurants have extended their Valentine menus to cover the whole weekend. With any luck, this should free up tables for those naughty boys who forgot… (to book I mean). With so many London restaurants vying for your romantic dollar, here is a selection that manages to combine an amorous aura with adventurous cocktails and food fit for wooing. L’Oscar For those who like their romantic restaurants oozing with velvet and gold trim, L’Oscar, a boutique hotel on

Olivia Potts

How to make chocolate truffles

There is a very particular fear that runs down your spine when you realise you’ve forgotten to buy a gift, be it for a birthday, Christmas or as a surprise for a special someone. Whatever the occasion, the same panic spreads through you, the social anxiety of knowing that you have failed in gift-giving etiquette, that you’re going to have to receive their present with nothing to hand over in return. Having learnt the hard way, this is why I like to have a little stash of homemade edible presents at home, ready to swerve such an occasion. Over the years I’ve done jams and jellies, fudges and toffees, little jars

Raymond Blanc is right about convenience food

Hooray for Raymond Blanc for stating the absolutely obvious. He’s got an ITV series coming up, which, if I had a television, I’d be watching compulsively, called Simply Raymond Blanc. He’s an instinctively brilliant, self-taught chef, who really was a game changer on the Eighties restaurant and cookbook scene. And in an interview for the Radio Times he declared that Delia Smith was absolutely right to make use of convenience food in her most controversial cookbook, including frozen mashed potatoes. As he observed, ‘Delia Smith was the first TV chef to really simplify food. She was heavily criticised for using tinned and frozen food in her recipes, but she was absolutely

A ghost at the feast: The LaLee at the Cadogan hotel, reviewed

The Cadogan hotel, Chelsea, is where Oscar Wilde was arrested for sodomy and gross indecency in 1895, in Room 118, which is now memorialised as the site of the arrest. Institutional homophobia is a weird thing to commemorate in fabrics, but everything is a tourist attraction these days. The hotel is a tall red late-Victorian castle incorporating neighbouring houses, one of which belonged to the actress and mistress of Edward VII, Lillie Langtry. It was, then, a hotel for betrayal on the corner of Pont Street. John Betjeman mentions this in his poem ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’, and offers disaster PR of a timeless kind:

Who survived the sinking of the Titanic?

Prime numbers As of 29 January Boris Johnson will have been Prime Minister for two years and 190 days. Currently he is 38th out of 55th in the list of longest-serving PMs, sandwiched between Henry Campbell-Bannerman, whom he overtook on 22 November, and Spencer Perceval, the only PM to have been assassinated. Johnson will have to survive in office until 1 March to overtake Perceval. If he is still in Downing Street on 6 June, he will have overtaken Gordon Brown. He would overtake Theresa May on 5 August and Jim Callaghan on 23 August. Men overboard A new exhibition challenges the idea that women and children aboard the Titanic