Food

My grandmother, and many like her, kept an account book for household spending. This was not the product of an overbearing marriage or mistrust on anyone’s behalf – it was simply how things were done at a time when habits had been formed during rationing after the second world war, and banking was manual and slow. I spent a lot of time observing her kitchen on childhood visits. It was where my lifelong obsession with cooking began, and I can still recall a sense of balance in how she shopped and cooked; she was fond of naughty treats and lavish cuts, but she kept a stock pot, knew her way

It would be an insult to call rice the staple food of Japan. For centuries it has been so much more than that. In Japan, rice has long been treated with a respect that borders on reverence. The emperor blesses the rice crop each year and in Shinto culture rice and rice-based sake are two of the most common ceremonial offerings to the gods. Rice has supernatural power: the red glutinous variety will protect you from evil and bring good luck. And it must be handled with great care: the worst thing you can do during a Japanese meal is plant your chopsticks in the rice – a symbol, if

Choux pastry can inspire fear in even the most confident of cooks. There’s a good reason for it: it’s difficult to give a very precise recipe for choux pastry, as the amount of egg needed to create the correct texture depends on the flour you’ve used, how long the choux has rested, and how fast and how thoroughly you have cooked the choux mixture out. It’s the water content in the egg that primarily causes the choux to rise and puff in the oven into those distinctive domes or elegant eclairs: not enough and they will fall flat, but too much and the pastry will be too sloppy to pipe

Burn the formal white tablecloths and fling open the kitchen doors. The latest craze in restaurant culture is open-fire cooking – where chefs sweat it out over roaring flames in full view of their customers. And the simple, raw nature of this method of food preparation seems to have set diners’ imaginations alight.  ‘Cooking outside over flames is primal and in our DNA as human beings,’ says Andrew Clarke, co-founder of Acme Fire Cult – one such restaurant in Dalston, north London. ‘The smell of woodsmoke and animal fats hitting the hot coals stirs up something deep inside.’ For Tomos Parry, chef and co-owner of Brat – another open-fire restaurant

Whenever it is suggested travelling south or north of the Thames to visit an ‘amazing’ restaurant I usually start conjuring up excuses. Across London seems a journey too far for food – but going across an ocean for it can be worthwhile. In NYC last year, I found myself with an evening off and, staying in the Lower East Side, made my way to the Bowery Meat Company. The menu was perfect: steak and seafood, excellent cocktails, and sides which included sublime creamed spinach and whipped potato that threatened to float off the plate. I usually eat oysters naked, but Bowery’s version – baked under a parmesan crust – was

Even Michelin-starred chefs, it seems, aren’t immune from the cost-of-living crisis. In a bid to make fine dining more affordable, Jason Atherton has cut prices across the board at Pollen Street Social, his flagship Mayfair restaurant (the three-course set lunch now costs £49.50 – down from £75 – and wines start from £7.50 a glass). At two Michelin-starred Kitchen Table on Charlotte Street, the cost of a 20-course set menu has come down by a third (from £300 to £200).  But even before we all started squeezing our belts, there were options for enjoying high-end food at not-so-high prices – if you knew where and when to go. Follow our

Early on in his biography of the novelist Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader quotes a hilariously misanthropic letter Amis wrote to the poet Philip Larkin, one of his closest friends. Amis, at the time in his early thirties, was complaining about a three-month stint he and his family – including his son Martin, then five years old – spent abroad, as required by the terms of the Somerset Maugham Prize, which he won in 1955 for his first novel, Lucky Jim (Martin would also win it in 1973 for his debut, The Rachel Papers). Clearly not impressed with his surroundings in Portugal’s Algarve, Amis listed a ‘sort of basic kit’ of

Barbecue is a fact of life in America. Long summer evenings and reliably good weather make it an easy choice – plus turning on the oven heats up the house to an intolerable level, so if you want a hot meal, outdoors it is. When I was a kid my mom wouldn’t turn on the oven for the entirety of July and August. It was burgers, salads or quick quesadillas on the grill every night of high summer. Americans have been barbecuing pretty much since before the nation was a nation. The tradition came up from South and Latin America with the invading Spanish. Barbacoa they called it, and they’d use green

The days when ‘barbecue’ meant a lukewarm beer, bun and burger are long gone.  We’re putting more effort than ever into our outdoor dining – from whipping up zingy marinades with ingredients you’d barely heard of five years ago to diligently waiting for that perfect halloumi char.  All this extra effort on the food front surely warrants some attention to your drinks choices, too. Here are the ten best wines to whip out for a summer barbecue – and the foods to pair with them.  A Growers Touch Durif 2020 Wickhams, £12.20 (or £10.98 when buying six bottles)  This punchy red wine has bags of fruit and touches of spice, so it

Do you ever find yourself holding forth on a topic you hadn’t realised you cared about? You know, someone asks you an innocuous question in passing about the merits of slow cookers, or the best way to grow cabbages, and before you know it, 20 minutes has passed and you’re still grandstanding. There are a few topics that have crept up on me like this during my life: I have found out that I feel extremely strongly about pyjamas (pro), low-calorie cooking spray (anti) and the TV show Stars in their Eyes. And, it turns out, burger buns. I truly didn’t believe I had anything approaching an opinion on burger

Sad things, cheese sandwiches, especially in their most basic form. Most would add a garnish: pickle, tomato and onion are the most popular. Cowards. The point of a cheese sandwich is its beigeness. This is fuel, not food. Consoling sad corporate workers at their desks. Rows upon rows of sandwiches on Tesco shelves: ‘Cheese – no mayonnaise.’ No mayonnaise is important. That would be too much fun. Everyone knows how the Earl of Sandwich repurposed bread and beef and started an eating revolution. No one really knows who first put cheese into the mix, however. The first mention seems to be from William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Nym refers to

I have been reading Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature which came out in October, just a few months before the great man’s death aged 100. And so a weekend holiday in Suffolk was calling to me. I went to Aldeburgh, on the coast, north of the river Alde. The town appears to be thriving – full of bustling cafés and London money. It is fashionable and chic. In many respects it is a world away from Blythe’s Akenfield. But there is much here to charm you. I lingered by a wonderful second-hand bookshop, Reed Books 4, its window display with Peter Kent’s Fortifications of East Anglia, George Ewart Evans’s The

When George William Wilton opened his shellfish-mongers close to Haymarket in 1742, he could never have imagined that his business would still be thriving 280 years later. The place has outlived ten monarchs and is as old as Handel’s Messiah. Before visiting, I imagined a typically Hogarthian scene with portly gentlemen in dandruff-flecked suits feasting on potted shrimp and vintage port. Perhaps they had dropped by for a ‘spot of luncheon’ before toddling off to their various clubs at nearby St James’s.  Up until relatively recently you might well have witnessed just such a quintessentially English scene; sadly, the agreeable old buffers who would once have frequented places such as Wiltons no longer exist in