Food

In British cooking we have traditionally had a complicated relationship with garlic. Let the french use it to their hearts’ content: fine in a Toulouse but no thank you in a Cumberland. Suggestive of this wariness is wild garlic’s many names – ‘devil’s garlic’, ‘gypsy’s onions’ and ‘stinking Jenny’ amongst others. But in recent years British cooks have taken to wild garlic with unabashed relish (and indeed it makes rather a good one, as seen here). Food always tastes better having foraged or hunted for it yourself and so it is with wild garlic. The leaves appear in March and you will find them throughout spring but they are best

With Shrove Tuesday upon us, I am forced to face my annual pancake day gripe. It is, inevitably, the cook’s gripe: standard crèpe-like pancakes should be eaten as soon as they are cooked, each doled out to waiting mouths as soon as it’s ready. Yes, recipes tell you you can keep them warm in a low oven, but doing that tends them towards the rubbery and luke-warm. This means that the cook is standing at the stove ladling batter while everyone else eats. As a greedy cook, I resent this. But there is a pancake solution: the Dutch baby. The name does not point to a Holland heritage: instead, the

I don’t quite know how the Americans got away with it: convincing first their own people, and then the rest of the world that a muffin is a suitable breakfast food? A foodstuff which is, let’s be honest, cake. But then, we are quite happy to sprinkle our worthy porridge liberally with demerara sugar, to use yoghurt in our overnight oats or alongside granola, to combine butter and flour in any manner of breakfast staples from toast to pancakes, what’s so different about combining all those things? In any event, I’m not one to complain about an excuse to squeeze more baked goods into my life; and seeing as those

There was a moment, about 20 years ago, when Londoners began to realise, and then boast about, the transformation in our food scene. No longer deserving of mockery compared to other global centres, our restaurants were suddenly producing delicious food every bit (well, almost) as good as that associated with the likes of New York. The revolution began with fresh takes on exotic cuisines, especially South and East Asian, Spanish and Italian. But soon another, delightful development emerged: the reinvention of British food. Gastropubs began taking ploughmans and sausage rolls and roasts very seriously indeed, and posh restaurants began to show that homegrown food, when it comes from domestic seas

There’s something inherently romantic about eggs: whether you’re preparing them for another person, or being served them, they always strike me as a little act of love. Maybe it’s that they suggest breakfast in bed. Breakfast in bed is not about flirting or seduction, it’s more than that. You don’t make breakfast in bed for someone in whom you’re uninterested. Breakfast in bed is not a collaboration, it’s a gift from one person to the other, reserved for those you wish to impress, or to whom you wish to signal your love. That said, while in theory I like the idea, in practice I can feel a little allergic to

Get your credit cards out lads, it’s that time of year again when we demonstrate our love via the medium of grub. Because this year the big day falls on a Monday many restaurants have extended their Valentine menus to cover the whole weekend. With any luck, this should free up tables for those naughty boys who forgot… (to book I mean). With so many London restaurants vying for your romantic dollar, here is a selection that manages to combine an amorous aura with adventurous cocktails and food fit for wooing. L’Oscar For those who like their romantic restaurants oozing with velvet and gold trim, L’Oscar, a boutique hotel on

Hooray for Raymond Blanc for stating the absolutely obvious. He’s got an ITV series coming up, which, if I had a television, I’d be watching compulsively, called Simply Raymond Blanc. He’s an instinctively brilliant, self-taught chef, who really was a game changer on the Eighties restaurant and cookbook scene. And in an interview for the Radio Times he declared that Delia Smith was absolutely right to make use of convenience food in her most controversial cookbook, including frozen mashed potatoes. As he observed, ‘Delia Smith was the first TV chef to really simplify food. She was heavily criticised for using tinned and frozen food in her recipes, but she was absolutely

Our friend Colin is back in the news again. This time, it’s not his name that has caused a storm – Colin’s many fans may remember M&S filed an intellectual property claim against Aldi back in April in an attempt to stop them from selling their copy cat-erpillar Cuthbert. Rather, it’s the suggestion that he may have been present at the Prime Minister’s impromptu birthday party,  that is raising eyebrows. Like Prince, Madonna and Boris, in birthday party circles, Colin needs no second name, with over 15 million sales under his belt during his 30 year life. I’m only slightly older than Colin, and he’s been present at perhaps half the birthday parties I’ve ever attended,

If these chocolate chip cookies are my only achievement for the entirety of last year’s lockdown, I think I’ll be satisfied: crisp and buttery on the outside, fudgy and sweet within, with pools of dark chocolate, and just the right amount of salt. As ever, with baking, there are always substitutions you can make, if you don’t mind a slightly different (but still delicious) end product. Sub in the light brown sugar for dark brown sugar for an even deeper toffee flavour, or swap out the caster sugar for granulated or demerara. Strong white bread flour will work, if you can spare it, and rye or spelt flour will produce a

Chicken forestière Unlike loads of my other favoured stews, this one doesn’t take hours on the stove or in the oven. I can’t pretend it’s a ten minute start-to-finish dish, but it is one you can start after work and comfortably finish in time for dinner – and after the initial time investment, you can leave it to do its thing. Recipes differ as to the cut of chicken you use: I’ve used fillets here which are not normally my favourite cut, but here it helps the quick cooking process, and means that you don’t have to faff around with bones when eating. The ‘forestière’ in the dish title means

They sparked the Crusades, built Venice, and spurred European colonialism. In many ways, spices and the spice routes along which they were traded, made the modern world. And how many other ingredients can make that claim? Not avocadoes, not goji berries, not truffle, no matter how fashionable. No, when it comes to historical importance, spices are in a league of their own. In medieval times black pepper was so valuable it was used as a currency, and worth its weight in gold. As an excitable Rick Stein explained on his journey around India in 2013, unscrupulous merchants in days gone by would cunningly cut the valuable pepper with mustard husks

There’s always a bit of a post-Christmas sag, isn’t there? The presents have been piled up but not actually put away yet, the tree is dropping needles like there’s no tomorrow, and those final bits and bobs of leftovers in the fridge aren’t looking terribly appealing (a weary parsnip and some withered peas do not a Christmas sandwich make). So it’s no surprise that the French have made sure there’s something to look forward to before we pack away the festive season for another year: the galette des rois. Named after the three kings of the nativity story, galettes des rois are traditionally eaten on 6 January, or Epiphany, the