Spectator Life

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 chocolate, anything from three to five eggs, a boatload of sugar (rarely simple granulated). It’s a commitment.

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.  Colomba cake [iStock] 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 top. Made with homemade marzipan, which is easy, it’s a thing of beauty.

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 for 24 hours in a low oven next time to unleash its inner umami. It’s enough to put anyone off.

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, but without the distinctive brittle ceiling of the crème brûlée, these are a make-ahead wonder, fantastically impressive, and really, completely delicious.

In June last year, King’s College Cambridge made more than £1 million from an auction of just 41 lots from its wine cellar. Not bad for a college that until just a few years ago had a hammer and sickle flag hanging in its student bar. But the Marxist sympathies of some of its legendary fellows and students stand little chance against the viticultural genius of the cellar’s buyer: Peter de Bolla, a scholar of 18th century literature and aesthetics. Included in the bonanza sale were 12 bottles of 1999 Echezeaux, an apparently legendary grand cru from Henri Jayer, for which someone bid £100,000. De Bolla had bought them on release and, to give some indication of the return on his investment, when he bought the 1996 vintage he had paid £31.11 per bottle.

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.  https://twitter.com/ParliScran/status/1625869677711839232 A cursory doom-scroll through Parliscran would be a cathartic deviance to anybody who enjoys food.

London has always been dogged by the canard that the Guinness here can’t compete with what’s served across the Irish Sea. It is certainly difficult – perhaps impossible – to replicate the quality of the pints in Mulligan’s on Dublin’s Poolbeg Street, or at the Gravediggers by Glasnevin Cemetery. However, there are pubs here that do it admirably – if you know where to look. Whether you’re a lifelong aficionado, or you’re merely observant on St Patrick’s Day, these are some of your best bets for a great London Guinness: The Auld Shillelagh, Stoke Newington A stone-cold classic of a pub, the Auld Shillelagh’s deceptively small frontage on Church Street leads to a longitudinal bar that serves some of London’s finest pints.

There are only so many times I can watch Lord Sugar swivelling in his chair and reusing put-downs from three seasons ago before enough’s enough, so I’ve dropped in and out of the latest series of The Apprentice. But one contestant that has caught my eye is Victoria Goulbourne, the flight attendant turned online sweet shop owner (note: not sweat shop, despite what one unfortunate online review might say) from Merseyside. And while I pass no judgment on her business acumen, it did get me thinking: what a miserable thing an online sweet shop must be. Victoria’s company markets itself as the ‘UK’s most Instagrammable pick ’n’ mix'. Quite apart from why sweets that belong in your gob needs to be camera-friendly, it was the selection that left me wondering.

Anna, the daughter of friends of mine, is in her final year at university and keen to enter the wine trade. Clearly, she is wise beyond her years because it’s a hugely engaging career. She will never get rich but will always be happy. Oh, and a glass of something tasty will never be far away, and nor will someone congenial with whom to share it.  Wine is made in beautiful places – just think of Bordeaux, the Douro Valley, Western Cape, Yarra Valley, Napa, Piedmont, Mendoza, Central Otago and even the rolling South Downs of Sussex – by delightful people (well, with just the one exception). It’s a warm, friendly and collaborative world to be in.

Are you – along with nine million other households in Britain – the proud owner of an air fryer? Amid promises that it could cut energy bills in half, slash cooking times and turn French fries into a bona fide health food, the kitchen gadget soared in popularity last year, with sales increasing by 3,000 per cent on 2021. At one point – much to the consternation of social media chefs, TikTok-ing their every interaction with the machine – there were even fears of a national shortage (mercifully, this never came to pass).

When did it become an inalienable human right for 65 million Britons to have a cucumber in March? When did we suddenly regard the possession, weekly, of a half kilo or so of vine-ripened tomatoes as fundamental to our very being, when our corner of the northern hemisphere is still essentially frozen and has been for months? If we were in southern Italy or if London were transposed with Madrid – so 800 miles closer to the equator – then one might begin to think that a leafy salad or a few tomatoes could or should be a daily staple, even in these darker days. But up here, at 52 degrees north, in an archipelago off the last landmass before you have the void of the swirling Atlantic?

Certain foods taste and look better in the sun, with the sea lapping against your feet. Fish and chips on the pier, oysters from a shack right by the water, or a supermarket sandwich, held with one hand while the other holds on to a tin of ready-mixed gin and tonic, sitting on a beach blanket and watching the windsurfers. A restaurant that does amazing food and offers a proper sea view will be a goldmine, booked up for weeks on end not just by locals, but city dwellers escaping the sound of juggernauts and police sirens in favour of seagulls and ghettoblaster music. In search of that perfect destination by the ocean I found that you can have the amazing food or the sound of the waves – but getting the two together is trickier.