Spectator Life

Some say it not only looks like something you might be encouraged to down in order to soothe an irritating cough, it tastes like it, too. But that hasn't stopped the Negroni - the vibrant concoction composed of Campari, red vermouth and gin - being adopted as the drink of choice among the more chic members of the Instagram generation.  The true origins of the somewhat fey but often deceptively punchy 'standard' Negroni are as hazy as you're likely to feel in the morning after one too many.

Until this week I don’t think my mother had ever in her life watched a football game. Wednesday changed that, marking the start of her new-found frenzy and puns about England’s 'Sterling effort!' (to squeals of laughter from her female friends gang). Now they’re in a state of hysterical excitement and are busy planning their match day. Football really is coming home. With nobody – including mum – minded to spend all day slaving away in the kitchen, food for Sunday’s game needs to be quick, easy and ideally unhealthy. Here are some ideas. Baked cheese A baked brie or camembert – or even better a British cheese like Baron Bigod or Tunworth – is one of the very easiest and most satisfying things you can make.

Some dishes are just meant to be shared. I’m not talking about those items you buy on a hangover from the corner shop that sanctimoniously declare ‘meant for sharing’ or ‘share size’ on their passive aggressive packaging (I’ll be the judge of that, cheese and onion crisps and chocolate fingers). I mean something that you’ve invested energy and love into, something which demands to be passed around, praised and enjoyed; something impressive and delicious. A homemade cassoulet. A perfect chocolate cake. A batch of scones. A gala pie. The moment of cutting into a gala pie, and revealing the perfect row of eggs suspended in meat minced by your own fair hands is one of serious culinary pride.

Dust off the novelty apron, dig out the rust-flecked spatula, and get the golf umbrella on stand-by –barbecue season has arrived. As a nation, we’ve come a long way from the carbonised sausages and long-life rolls that defined the Great British Barbecue™ in years gone by. However, it’s no good cooking like a Texan pitmaster if your drinks offering lets the side down. Butcher Lyle Wheeler of South East London institution Flock and Herd has seen first-hand the way our cooking habits have changed in recent years and he has some great advice on what to drink when your grilling. These are some of the best barbecue and booze pairings to impress your mates with this summer.

Graphologists have long busied themselves studying Prince Charles’s handwriting in the ‘black spider memos’ for clues as to the personality of our future King. And in recent months kinesicists have been wheeled out from obscurity to sit on breakfast show sofas to opine on Harry and Meghan’s body language in that interview. But perhaps royal watchers are looking in the wrong place for insight. 'Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.' So declared the celebrated gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Diana apparently liked to wander into the royal kitchens to cook her own pasta and chat with the chefs which provides a glimpse into the discomfort she felt at the perceived constraints of her position. But what of the other royals?

On a balmy summer’s day, few things can beat a lazy lunchtime spent beside the sea. Just ask the G7 leaders, who enjoyed a leisurely barbecue on the beach during their Cornish escapades. Stand-out seafood, unspoilt views across the waves and that care-free atmosphere particular to British seaside escapes await those clued up on the best beach eateries. From Cornish cliffsides to Scottish shores, here’s a pick of the best cafes, shacks and restaurants along the 30,000-odd kilometres of British coastline. The Hut, Colwell Bay, Isle of Wight If the past is a foreign country, then a summer trip to the nostalgia-soaked Isle of Wight might pass as a far-flung holiday adventure this year.

I have never been a huge fan of cold soup. It has always seemed to me to be contrary to everything good about soup: soup is inherently warming and cheering. It demands large portions and an accompanying doorstep of bread. Who on earth would want to chill it down and serve it in tiny portions – and without bread and butter? Madness! Historically, I have made an exception for gazpacho and salmorejo on the basis that they hail from hot countries, and that they aren’t thickened with dairy. But I drew the line at what I thought of as hot soups served cold. Vichyssoise was doubtless the worst of them: give me a vat of hot leek and potato, but spare me the cold stuff. Sometimes, we don’t get what we want, we get what we need.

While most parades and public fireworks displays have been called off for 4 July, it is still an excellent excuse for a good old American knees up. Good food and drink are key to any Independence Day party. From smoky barbeque joints to slinky speakeasies, here are the best places to celebrate in London. The Stafford The Stafford Hotel’s American bar was designed to dispel any sense of homesickness among visiting Americans in 1920s and 1930s London. Day-to-day items donated by visitors over the decades, from baseball caps to toy aeroplanes, dangle haphazardly from the ceiling. It is one of the longest surviving American bars in the city and a plaque on the wall commemorates world war two resistance fighter Nancy Wake, who stopped by every day at 11 a.m.

Wimbledon is back. Having been cancelled last year, it is now one of the pilot events chosen as part of the Government Event Research Programme, with 50 per cent capacity crowds on the main courts at the start rising to full capacity for the semi-finals and finals. What is more, organisers have said Murray Mound will also be open to spectators and the grumpy Scot himself has been given a wildcard qualification for this year’s tournament. Those attending can look forward to suffocating in their face masks as they move from court to court in the June heat. Thankfully, masks will not be required once seated in the stands and so spectators can swig at their Pimms and scoff their strawberries and cream with abandon.

There aren’t many veggie stews that can lay claim to being immortalised in popular culture. Fewer still that could then complain about being grossly misrepresented. But then ratatouille is no ordinary vegetable stew. Ratatouille is a Provençal dish, made by gently cooking aubergine, courgette, and red peppers, with a tomato sauce flavoured with onion, garlic and herbs. It is, in many ways, extremely simple. But for all its simplicity, it remains the subject of confusion. If you watch Pixar’s Ratatouille, you will see the terrifying food critic, Anton Ego, reduced to a Proustian state of rapture when served what we are told is ratatouille, making him recall his childhood and his mother’s cooking.

Back when the dinosaurs still thought they were the bees-knees, another little creature was gently making its way into the big wide world. And now, more than 150 million years later – having withstood at least one planetary-wide annihilation (the one that knocked T-Rex off his perch) – the humble oyster may be on the cusp of making history itself.That’s because this simple bivalve mollusc, cultivated on our shores since Roman times, really could help save the planet, albeit this time from an annihilation of man’s own making.

I don’t know about you, but I find that many of the things I enjoy eating most in the summer, those things I crave when the weather is blazing hot or just plain muggy, still require some level of cooking. Those chilled soups, or sticky ribs, or even ice creams still mean standing over a hob or a barbecue or turning on the oven. Mostly, I embrace it: a hot means to a greedy end. As someone who finds relaxation in baking and cooking, I’m not big into no-bake dishes. I’m willing to turn the oven on if it means soft, baked fruit that I can chill and serve with swoops of cool softly-whipped cream, or to light my barbecue if it means beautiful, charred fish alongside a sharp, zingy dressing.

HP Sauce is a glorious thing. The French may have their five, gastronomic Mother Sauces but we in this sceptered isle have HP and that’s what counts. Because nobody wants a pool of hollandaise with their Full English. It first appeared on our dining tables in the late nineteenth century and has since grown to account for three-quarters of sales in our brown sauce market. Its story begins in 1884, when a Nottingham grocer, Frederick Gibson Garton invented the sauce in his pickling factory in New Basford (later also the home of Cussons Imperial Leather soap). It was a classic culinary product of Empire, with tomatoes, tamarind, dates, molasses and soy amongst its ingredients.

It’s thought that meatballs were brought to Sweden by King Charles XII. After a disastrous attempt to invade Russia in 1709, he fled in exile to the Ottoman empire. There he fell for a dish very similar to the Swedish meatballs we now know and, when he returned from exile five years later, he took those meatballs back with him. The meatballs grew in popularity and eventually became so closely associated with the country, that they took on the ‘Swedish’ name. But it would be disingenuous to write about Swedish meatballs and not mention that bastion of storage, that flatpack palace: Ikea. It’s no exaggeration to say that Ikea brought the Swedish love for meatballs to the rest of the world.

Father’s Day is rarely observed in our house for some reason, unless you count that time I was let off dishwasher duty a decade or so ago. Mother’s Day, on the other hand, is greeted with bells, whistles and klaxons, my boys having had it drummed into them that flowers, breakfast in bed, a spa day and matinee constitute the bare minimum considered acceptable by their mother. This ghastly year, though, dad deserves a bit of a fillip too (hint, hint boys). Buy him a fine bottle, one that you wouldn’t mind drinking yourself. After all, he’d love a bit of company and a natter and nothing warms the cockles better than decent liquor shared. Here, then, are my top ten tipples for Father’s Day. Drink them with the old man and make him feel special.

The chance to enjoy a proper sit-down breakfast ­– or even, I daresay, the occasional breakfast in bed – on a weekday has been one of the (few) perks of lockdown. If I’m going to be under year-long house arrest then I’m going to have a three-minute egg on a Monday dammit. But as return to the office beckons for many of us, carving out time for brekky will become trickier. I’ve always been envious of the effortlessness and speed with which Romans take their breakfast: cappuccino and cornetto eaten standing at the bar counter. Somehow gulping down cornflakes or Weetabix standing in front of the mirror whilst shaving doesn’t have the same glamour about it. But breakfast can be speedy, enjoyable and sustaining.

As the weather warms up, it’s time to swap heavy dinners for fresh, light salads and outdoor dining. Often unloved and reduced to the role of a side dish, a good salad should be colourful, filling and able to take centre stage in any meal. Follow our guide to London’s most exquisite options. Zuaya The signature salad at this Latin American restaurant is a fiesta of textures. Melt-in-your mouth duck encased in a crispy batter contrasts perfectly with crunchy peanuts, silky leaves and a sticky sauce of cinnamon, cloves and fennel. The Ibérico duck is slow roasted for hours, before being rolled into balls and flash-dipped in a light tempura.

Early summer crops have been delayed in many places this year, thanks to the brutal rain and cold that preceded the recent heat wave, but finally, we’re starting to see tiny tomatoes, baby figs, and the first perfectly formed pea pods bursting into life. Of course, when it comes to seasonal eating, you can argue that it’s best to keep it simple, to allow the produce to ‘speak for itself’ – but, there is little that butter, shallots, and little cubes of smokey, fatty bacon can’t make even better. And that’s where petits pois à la Française comes into its own. The name rather gives it away: it’s a classic French dish, showcasing the best of the season’s first peas.

An iron is not your traditional cooking appliance. But then again nothing about TikTok cookery is traditional. TikTok users have grilled chicken with an iron, boiled meatballs in a percolator, and cooked steak in a toaster. And not only do they do these things, but they earn internet fame and sometimes create new livelihoods for themselves as ‘influencers’ for doing so. Dance and comedic sketches used to be the mainstay of TikTok's content but they now compete alongside cookery videos. Lockdown, which has turned all of us into home cooks, has caused a boom in cookery tutorials on social media: from amateurs looking for dinner ideas to professional chefs suddenly without restaurants to run.

Put down the shaker, screw the cap back on the Campari, stop trying to figure out how to make those big clear ice cubes in your little home freezer; it’s time to give cocktail duties back to the professionals. After a tough year-or-so for the industry it’s basically the duty of every self-respecting cocktailian to head out and support our favourite spots by getting a few rounds in. Just as well then, that London’s bartenders are offering new menus, honed over months of lockdown, and filed with new drinks to get acquainted with. These are some of the best new cocktails on offer in the capital right now. Cheers.

I am a big fan of a tea break. I don’t mean afternoon tea or high tea (although I’m never going to say no to a finger sandwich or a tiny cake), and I don’t mean a mug of tea at my desk or standing up in the kitchen while I do something else. I believe passionately in the restorative powers of just sitting down for fifteen minutes with a mug of something hot and a plate of biscuits. Tea and biscuits have always held an important place in my days. When I was very little, I had a Spot the Dog tea set that, every morning, my mother would fill with warm milk when she made her own morning brew. At college, our librarian insisted on tea breaks in her office to carve up the days of studying – or, in my case, procrastination while waiting for the bar to open.

It used to drive me mad that, whenever my husband and I would go out for dinner, no matter how fancy or lowbrow the place, he would always ignore the puddings on offer in favour of a single scoop of ice cream. He can overlook crème brûlées, lemon meringue tarts, sticky toffee puddings – even eschew a cheese plate – if ice cream is a possibility. It just always seemed quite a boring choice to me – you can keep a tub of ice cream in your own freezer, or maybe get a cone on the beach. Why would you plump for something so simple (so boring!) when there were so many more exciting options? Of course, as is so often the case, I was wrong.