Baking

Grasshopper pie is an unlikely dish: bright green, mint-flavoured, combined with obscure liqueurs and set with marshmallows, all sitting in an Oreo crust. It feels like the fever dream of a sweet-toothed teenager who’s been let loose on their parents’ drinks cabinet, and will regret it tomorrow. The pie is based on the cocktail of the same name, which combines equal parts crème de menthe, crème de cacao blanc and cream. It’s a heady mix of mint, white chocolate, dairy and alcohol. The cocktail hails from New Orleans and its origin is claimed by Tujague’s in the French Quarter, where it was supposedly invented by the owner, Philip Guchet, in 1918. It tastes exactly as you’d imagine and is, forgive me, far better suited to a pie filling than it is to a drinks party.

Everyone knows the story of the Earl of Sandwich: keen not to interrupt a late night card game at his club, he asked for roast beef to be sliced and put between two slices of bread, to allow him to eat it with his hands without stopping his game. And lo, the sandwich was born. But perhaps less familiar to us is that 140 years later, some 4,500 miles away from the Earl’s cribbage game, another problem was being observed, and was solved in a strikingly similar way. The turn of the 20th century saw an influx of Sicilian immigrants to New Orleans; almost 300,000 arrived in the city between the 1880s and 1920s, setting up shop (literally) in the French Quarter, in an area that became known as Little Palermo.

If you’ve stuck out my cookery writing for long enough, you’ll know that I am a bit of a Labrador when it comes to different dishes: greedy, ready to try anything, and likely to enjoy it. Food is where my general cynicism and air of ennui gives way to unbridled enthusiasm. There are very few dishes that, when done well, I won’t chalk up in the ‘good’ column. For a long time, crème caramel was the exception to that rule. To be fair, my experience of it had been limited: childhood self-catering holidays in northern France meant that my introduction to the crème caramel did not show it at its best.

When it comes to home cooking, we’re obsessed with optimisation. Today this manifests itself in reels on Instagram offering a ‘hack’ to make the time you spend in your kitchen shorter and your dinner to arrive more quickly. Harder, faster, better, stronger. None of this is new: there was a time when every Jamie Oliver cookbook shaved ten minutes of the promised cooking time off the last. Delia Smith’s How to Cheat at Cooking caused a public outcry (can you believe she advocated for frozen mashed potato?). The whole appeal of air fryers is that they’re fast, and while slow cookers don’t exactly get to their destination quickly, they do so with as little intervention as possible from the cook.

Ihad a culinary revelation this week. I like to think I’m an egalitarian when it comes to food – I like beautiful, fancy restaurant stuff and home-cooked one-pot dishes, I like punchy, in-your-face flavour, and subtle, softer flavours. I love trying new-to-me dishes from around the world, and I love the comfort of eating suppers my grandma would make. You can put virtually anything in front of me and I’ll be thrilled. But as I contemplated this week’s recipe subject, I realised that I avoid foods that ooze. Doughnuts splurging out their jam, uncontainable ice-cream sandwiches, croissants or Danish pastries with custards or compotes that blob onto my clothes. Even really juicy stone fruit or a particularly ripe soft cheese makes me nervous.

We all did mad things during the first Covid lockdown. For some it was getting a dog or starting up a microbakery. For me, it was signing up for a NVQ Level 2 in butchery. I’m still not quite sure how it happened, but, once the schools reopened, I spent my Tuesdays in a cold butchery store in east London, socially distanced from my septuagenarian master butchery tutor, who would teach me how to break down whole carcasses, the art of seam butchery and the trick to linking sausages.

‘It’s just a hot dog bun with icing!’ the iced-bun detractors will shriek. I’m a lady with a lot of opinions about fairly esoteric foodstuffs, many of them declamatory, immovable, or strident, but I do not understand taking against the iced bun. I’m not sure what awful bakery-based trauma must have happened to you during childhood to make iced buns the target of your ire, but they are undeserving. For anyone not a self-proclaimed detractor, iced buns (also called Swiss buns or iced fingers) prompt reveries: forgotten childhood memories of plump buns in trollies and sticky fingers holding grown-up hands.

Contrary to popular conception, I’m not a great baker. I was hired by Bake Off for my judging experience, not my baking skill. I’m a good cook and I know what’s right and wrong about a cake, but I suspect my own baking efforts would not often get Paul Hollywood’s nod of approval. On the day before Good Friday I decided to make hot cross buns. They were a total disaster. Analysing them, I could hear myself say: ‘No flavour. How old were the spices you used? And when did you buy that yeast? You do know you should chuck out spices every year and that instant yeast does not last for ever?’ So, we went to Tesco and bought new spices and yeast. The second attempt was much better, but still not wonderful. We went late-night shopping and happily the Co-op still had hot cross buns.

Roast potatoes shouldn’t be complicated. We’re talking two ingredients, plus some salt and maybe herbs if you’re feeling fancy. It’s just shoving some parboiled potatoes in a hot oven, right? Yet I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve had a decent roast potato in a pub or restaurant. Bad ones are to be found all over the place. I don’t just mean school dinners, mass-catering, hospital-canteen potatoes here. The most carefully prepared Sunday roasts at charming establishments feature beautiful melting meat and thoughtfully cooked veg, all sitting alongside miserable roasties. Clammy. Dark brown. Soft (but not in a good way). A waste of a good potato. No one doesn’t like a roast potato; they’re practically our national dish.

A pecan pie has been on my kitchen table for the past few days, due to circumstances rendering every other surface or shelf unusable, thanks to badly timed building work and an absent fridge. A mixing bowl sits over it, protecting it from dust and sticky fingers. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned: everybody loves pecan pie. Everyone who has walked past it has stopped dead, done a double take, and then rhapsodised unprompted about the pie’s virtues. At one point, excitement was generated simply by the pie being in the background of a video call. Pecan pie, one of America’s traditional celebration (especially Thanksgiving) puddings, is adored by children, but it has a dark, complex sweetness that wins over grown-ups too, and the toasty nuts bring texture as well as richness.

My theory is that sachertorte is a victim of its own success. Over the past 150 years, it has become an Austrian icon and, as such, can be found throughout Vienna. And that’s the problem: its ubiquity means that inferior versions abound. It has developed an unfortunate reputation for being dry, dull, tasteless – a pale imitation of a chocolate cake. It is often described – even by its supporters – as a ‘grown-up’ chocolate cake or an ‘elegant’ chocolate cake, but I feel like this does it a disservice. Both feel a little like euphemisms for ‘not that nice’, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.