Food

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

Alison Roman’s cooking is a counsel of imperfection. She serves dinner late (fine, as long as you have snacks), gets her guests to pitch in on the washing up and won’t make her own ice cream – ‘it simply will never be better than what you can buy, sorry’. ’Her ‘pies leak, cheesecakes crack and pound cakes are pulled from the oven before they’re fully baked. Lopsided and wonky, occasionally almost burned, unevenly frosted, my desserts are consistently imperfect’. In her new book, Sweet Enough, Roman wants to free the home cook from the dessert ties that bind them. ‘My hope for you,’ she tells her reader, ‘is that you

There is something very equalising about a street party. At one gathering I attended last year on a central London mews, a trust fund baby peered nervously out from his living room window before deciding to emerge, carrying two bottles of champagne and a flower vase filled with a tumultuous mess of a Platinum Jubilee trifle. When the lemonade for the Pimm’s ran out, the champagne was mixed in instead. He didn’t seem to mind. It’s good for us British to be thrust into these social settings. I get the impression that some of the Mediterranean peoples do this sort of thing every weekend: long balmy evenings help I suppose.

The big bank holiday weekend is about to begin. You’ve made that spinach and broad bean quiche. The bunting’s ready for your street party. You’ve crafted a coronation drinking game. But there’s something missing, isn’t there? An itch that just needs to be scratched. Where’s the pizazz? Where’s the cake? As the oft-misattributed quote goes: a party without cake is just a meeting. I know, I know: a quiche can be fun, but is it celebratory? No, what we need is a good old over-the-top, lily-gilded showstopper of a cake, that you can cut into with appropriate levels of pomp and circumstance. And, boy, do I have the pudding for

Lots of things seem to get described as ‘once in a lifetime’ experiences nowadays, but for many of us the coronation really will be just that. So, how to make the most of the historic long weekend? Clock off from work at a reasonable time on Friday and while getting dressed into your glad rags pour yourself a glass of English sparkling wine. Nyetimber and Hattingley Valley both have appealing coronation edition cuvées. Have some friends over – as with Christmas or new year, I think the tantalising eve of the big day is always the most fun time for a party. Serve some nibbles, such as Tyrrells’s coronation chicken

There was nothing actually wrong with coronation quiche, Buckingham Palace’s suggested dish for a coronation lunch. Spinach, broad beans, cheddar: all fine. The trouble was, it wasn’t coronation chicken. When you’re following an actual classic, it’s impossible not to be overshadowed. And coronation chicken is that marvellous thing, a recipe which feels as though it has always been around because it’s so right as a combination of flavours and textures. But like every classic dish, it’s been traduced: take commercial mayonnaise, stir in curry sauce and a bit of mango chutney and a few raisins… and it’s cropping up in all sorts of weird combos now (CC scotch egg, anyone?). The

I’m standing in my kitchen aiming a hairdryer at a pan of uncooked brownie batter and feeling like I might have finally lost my mind. I’ve done a lot of strange things in pursuit of recipe perfection, but even for me, this is an odd one. Brownies are a funny old beast. We think of them as quite straightforward, both in the making and in the eating. But actually, that’s not fair. There are countless variables which can produce anything from a dry chocolate cake to uncooked fudge. And – more importantly – for a glorified traybake, they’re pretty damn expensive to make. A whole pat of butter, lots of

When it comes to Easter cake, there are two possibilities. From the home front, there’s simnel cake, which has 11 marzipan balls on the top – one for each of the apostles, apart from bad Judas. Or there’s colomba, the Italian dove-shaped panettone-style cake, with all its symbolic resonances. Not that the colomba actually looks like a dove, unless you try very hard – more like a cross with round ends (the wings and tail) and a wonky top (the head). Anyway, that’s the idea.  So, which is the more perfect? Simnel cake is a lightly spiced and fruited cake, with marzipan in the middle as well as on the

In a world of ultra-convenience, I think making the argument for home cooking is important. Because a lifestyle of takeaway delivery apps, ready meals or eating out every day is not a recipe for health and happiness, no matter how easy the modern world makes it.   One of the downsides of the cult of the ‘foodie’ is that it can make food and cooking more intimidating than they need to be. If you’re a Londoner, invite friends over for a dinner of lasagne and garlic bread and you’ll have one guest asking if the pasta is fresh or dried and the other telling you to try roasting the garlic

I am pretty capricious when it comes to puddings. I’m always ready to declare my most recent success the king of all desserts, swearing blind I will never make anything else, and just falling short of sending a newsletter to my entire address book informing them of the new love of my life – only for a new pretender to take its place a week a later. So you would be forgiven for feeling a little dismissive when I crow about my new favourite pudding. But listen, this really is my new favourite pudding. Maybe I will never make anything else again. Baked custard pots: richer than a crème caramel,

Anyone who finds themselves gazing at a parliamentary samosa for two minutes or more (me, for the avoidance of doubt) probably has a problem. Sadly, this is what my life has become since the Twitter account @Parliscran arrived on the scene. The reason the samosa was so mesmerising is because I was trying to work out whether it had been covered in balsamic glaze, a long-held obsession of mine. The sauce, dark and sticky as it appeared, was more likely to be some sort of tamarind situation, but nevertheless I found it beguiling.  A cursory doom-scroll through Parliscran would be a cathartic deviance to anybody who enjoys food. It is