Spectator Life

Ask someone south of the border for their thoughts on Scottish cuisine and they’ll inevitably offer up thoughts of two Gaelic gastronomic inventions: haggis and deep-fried Mars bars.  Despite the wealth of produce available – and exported – from the country, Scottish fare has struggled to shake its tartan-clad clichés Despite the wealth of produce available – and exported – from the country, Scottish fare has struggled to shake its tartan-clad clichés. Take a table in London and you’ll find Orkney scallops, Isle of Mull oysters, highland venison and Outer Hebridean whisky on restaurant menus, while bonnie chefs like Quo Vadis’s charismatic Jeremy Lee and industry darling Adam Handling lead the capital’s kitchens.

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 not harbinger, of death. Rice, prepared and served in the correct manner, has been called the essence of Japan. For purists, occidental curiosities, such as instant rice and rice pudding, are abominations.

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 properly. It’s the Goldilocks of pastry recipes. I am not unfamiliar with choux-dread.

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 – the flavour that can be achieved from this style of cooking adds an extra dimension to most dishes.

It was the afternoon of the first day of the second Ashes test at Lord’s. In the brief lull between overs, the camera panned, as it often does, to a recognisable face in the crowd: Jacob Rees-Mogg. The traditionalist Tory presented exactly as you’d expect: Savile Row suit, tie and cufflinks. But there was one wrong note: he was drinking from a plastic glass.  Say what you like about Mr Rees-Mogg – and people do – but one attribute that I think we can all agree he possesses in abundance is that he’s in touch, almost viscerally, with his own sense of how things should be done. And this sense, as I perceive it, would very much preclude drinking from a plastic cup.

British media wouldn’t be British media without endless stories of possible health risks in food and drink. The news cycle turns and we land on whether butter is good or bad, or whether having a glass of red wine in the evening is toxic or therapeutic. Another long-running, oft-studied and frequently-discussed topic of debate is aspartame, the artificial sweetener found in the likes of Diet Coke and Coke Zero. The latter is a favourite drink of mine.  Aspartame has suffered its fair share of derision in the past, but it is now being officially declared a ‘possible’ cancer risk by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a World Health Organisation body.

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 irresistible. The steak was thick, juicy and cooked to perfection, the fries hot and crunchy.

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 guide to the best-value Michelin-starred meals around the UK.

Considering its status as the canon’s most iconic cocktail, it’s remarkable that the martini doesn’t have a single agreed upon recipe. Like many great drinks it comes with more of a template than exact specifications, which basically dares us to riff on the formula. Historically, this has meant altering the garnish – swapping the olive for a cocktail onion, perhaps – or adding a dash of bitters. Today, though, a whole generation of bartenders is using the martini to channel their creativity, introducing bespoke ingredients and flavour combinations to this old favourite. But just how many times can you remix the martini and still retain its essential martini-ness? Gamely, I investigate.

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.

They’re now such common ingredients that you can buy them in all but the smallest shops: halloumi, pesto, couscous, salsa, roasted peppers. But their origins as culinary staples can be traced back to the publication 30 years ago of Delia Smith’s Summer Collection. This book and the accompanying TV series changed British cooking forever. Delia didn’t invent much but she brought things to the mainstream. The unprecedented success of Summer Collection – both the book and the show – also made Smith into the biggest figure in British cooking for a decade or more. The follow-up, entitled, rather obviously, Winter Collection, built on Summer’s success to become one of the best-selling books of the decade in any field.

Walking into the Sedlescombe Sainsbury’s superstore recently I passed a girl in tracksuits carrying a stack of steaming pizza boxes. ‘I didn’t know Sainsbury’s does takeaway pizza,’ I said to my husband. ‘Anniversary dinner?’ (two days away). Why not?  Sainsbury’s has been toying with made-to-order takeaway food for a few years, while shutting down their butchers, fishmongers and delis. It is opting for fast food in place of skilled, knowledgeable customer service. And it really shows.  Testing its products wasn’t quite as easy as I’d anticipated. I can’t attest to all Sainsbury’s but the level of disorganisation and incompetence at the Sedlescombe branch on the A21 astounds me.