Just as there are cat people and dog people, there are dishcloth people and dish brush people. Sometime around the age of 30 (usually after marriage), arguments surrounding the merits of brushes versus cloths seem to take on great importance and ferocity, but our own collection of washing bowl beauties are sure to stop the
… … Make a genuine ‘Sugo’ by Gareth Jones Tomatoes weren’t cultivated in the place we now call Italy until the late 16th century. Like chocolate, corn and Columbus’s other South American bounty, the Spanish held onto tomatoes for decades. It’s said tomatoes made it to Southern Italy with a Spanish chef to the Spanish
KOPAPA CAFÉ AND RESTAURANT 32-34 Monmouth Street Seven Dials WC2H 9HA 020 7240 6076 by Will Vaughan Covent Garden and Leicester Square has long been a restaurant-goer’s no-man’s land. That is, until now, because fusion supremo Peter Gordon has opened Kopapa, situated conveniently on Monmouth Street, moments from the Donmar and the Royal Opera House.
Ever found yourself drowning in a sea of newspaper recipe clippings you never find time to sort through? A nifty iPhone app, Chef’s Book, gives you the facility to record what you cook and file each recipe into personalised categories. MODERN MENU Ever found yourself drowning in a sea of newspaper recipe clippings you never find
Spectator Scoff – Spring 2011 View online version | View print version 9th April 2011 It’s been a long cold winter, but here we are at last in the blossom-laden, golden days of spring. There’s plenty of seasonal produce for food and wine lovers to enjoy within our pages, much to excite and inspire, and
I moved to the country at Easter and have been planning Christmas ever since. Our house is groaning with home-cooked food, beautifully wrapped presents and table decorations that I’ve made with a hot glue gun. I love hot glue and want to glue everything to anything — apples, ribbons, small animals; nothing is safe. I
If you have ever received a hamper, you will be familiar with that delicious quiver of anticipation as you unbuckle the creaking wicker lid to see what lies within. How often have you then suppressed a twinge of disappointment to find that, apart from a pretty tin of lapsang souchong and a bottle of decent
At a House of Commons cocktail party I suddenly noticed a friend’s face contorted like ‘The Scream’ of Edvard Munch. Could it be yet more bad news for Labour? No, she was being offered a plate of smoked salmon, probably her thousandth munch for the year. I entirely sympathised; the stuff usually served up is
What passes for summer is finally upon us in the British Isles. Between bouts of rain, we can finally inhale the sun-tan oil, note that last year’s swimsuit seems to have shrunk over the winter and fire up the barbecue. Cooking outdoors connects us to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and, while the Oxford Culinary Conference undoubtedly
Recently I enticed my niece to a gastronome’s dinner during the London Food Festival. She is about to enter university, and I thought it was about time she learnt to taste. The evening proved a disaster; after a lengthy discussion of saffron she turned to me and asked, with quiet rage, ‘How can they carry
This week’s column should be guest-written by Hillary Clinton, who has shown herself a master at sinking the knife into Barack Obama’s all-too-yielding flesh. But at home we can learn valuable lessons in wielding the knife from our own politicians. The knife itself is not, sadly, a glorious child of Britishness. The first knives made
‘No buffalo-thyme pizza?’ The grazing grounds around Naples are poisoned, grounds on which herds of water buffalo feed to produce Italy’s most delicate cheese. This ecological disaster has had a knock-on effect even here in Texas, where a rather-too-elegant youth and I are taking a snack break from the rigours of the Obama campaign. Sales
‘Ecraser l’infâme!’ Voltaire proclaimed in his war on corrupt priests and crooked government officials. Delia’s Smith’s new book How to Cheat at Cooking opens up a whole new field of infamy: the culinary crime. As in 18th-century politics, so in 21st-century cuisine, it’s the public who gets cheated. Madame Smith’s sassy title is meant to
In the midst of an author tour for a new book, I am confronting both the worst evils of fast food and some surprising exceptions. Writers today cannot simply write books; readers want to see you in the flesh, talk to you, send you thoughts or their own fledgling manuscripts. I actually enjoy the human
The new champagne bar at St Pancras Station — sorry, St Pancras International — is said to be the longest in Europe, which is fine, although I pity the poor person — a workie, probably, they get all the duff jobs, if they get any jobs at all — who had to find this out.
With the holidays approaching, foodies are grumbling again about turkey. The domesticated bird is overweight, too fat to fly; in cooking, turkeys easily dry out; their meat, especially the breast, is tasteless. Why bother? So I thought many years ago, when I served instead at Christmas a suckling pig, beautifully stretched out on the platter,
My partner has bought a wood. Seriously, he has. He simply came home one day and said, ‘I have something to tell you.’ Oh good, I thought, he’s leaving me. Now at last I can get on with my life. ‘I’ve bought a wood,’ he said. My partner likes the outdoor life and camping. He’ll
Do you remember when, the other week, I went to St Alban, got lost and ended up in the wrong restaurant entirely, where I said, ‘Am I in St Alban?’ and was told, ‘No, we’re Divo, a Ukrainian restaurant. St Alban is over the road’? Well, what I didn’t say was that while in Divo
Since I wrote in The Spectator a fortnight ago about the ‘Say no to foie gras’ campaign, my email has been flooded with protests. Animal-rights groups have claimed that I am wet, limp, cravenly judicious; I should have said that force-fed geese are a symbol of the evil Man everywhere does to animals. Partisans of
St Alban, 4–12 Regent Street, London SW1 St Alban is the latest restaurant from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who have almost mythic status as restaurateurs, and rightly so. They are, after all, the team that at various times have been behind The Ivy, Le Caprice, J. Sheekey and The Wolseley but never Garfunkel’s, which