Food

Thursday

Olivia Potts

How do you make a tart that doesn’t really exist?

From our UK edition

There are few things more delicious than falling down a rabbit hole. No, don’t worry, I’m not serving up a second recipe for rabbit in a row. I mean discovering a recipe or dish which, not only have I not cooked or tried before, but haven’t even heard of. A little while ago, a reader asked me about Hawkshead cake, which Beatrix Potter used to make with her husband at Christmas. Hawkshead is the village Potter grew up in, in the Lake District, and the cake is actually more of a tart, made with puff pastry and filled with currants and syrup. This is where the proverbial rabbit hole came in, because I couldn’t quite stop there.

Wednesday

Tanya Gold

‘An adequate meal for a Cornish giant’: Brasserie Angelica reviewed

From our UK edition

Brasserie Angelica is the – is the word signature? – restaurant inside the Newman, Fitzrovia, a new hotel that has landed in the capital like a spaceship containing aliens who are into menswear. I don’t mind buildings that look like they don’t belong. Fitzrovia is charming because it feels like remnants left by other places. We have too much Edwardiana already: in the Aldwych– formerly the best surviving medieval part of London after the Great Fire – I feel like I am stomping through cakes of stone. The Newman is a wail in glass and brick on a quiet lane near Gower Street. There are pale awnings, brass fittings and uplighting: Manhattan in its last boom. It is attached to a Victorian house renovated to the standards of a grouter with OCD.

Matthew Parris

Tomorrow belongs to the vegetarians

From our UK edition

Can there be any thinking person who has passed a lorry filled with live animals peering out through the slats on their way to slaughter, without a momentary shudder? How many of us would take an opportunity to inspect what happens there? Be honest: you recoil from the thought. ‘Slaughterhouse’. So unpleasant we frenchify it as ‘abattoir’. Hunting leaves me cold yet has an honesty about it: you see and choose your prey, and kill it yourself: morally a million miles from the systematic industrial slaughter of creatures we never look in the eye, couldn’t bear to see killed, and so turn away, pay others to do the killing, and deny our own agency. There are things we’d rather not think about. Take note of them. They’re the first signs of rejection.

Julian Glover

Treasure Britain’s last railway dining car while you still can

The 17.48 from Paddington does not, on first sight, seem exceptional. Over-hard seats, over-bright lights and a scrum at the ticket barriers: none of these is special. The modern Hitachi trains are solid but dull. Only Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s great arching iron roof adds splendour to the scene. But pause by coach L on the daily London to Carmarthen express and you might notice a small miracle. This train is one of the very last in Britain to carry a proper dining car. To its immense credit, GWR, the route’s operator, cooks and serves decent meals on six services a day: three at lunchtime and three in the evening, on its lines from London to Wales and the West Country.

Tuesday

William Atkinson

School dinners are glorious

From our UK edition

I don’t much miss being a teacher. A pathological dislike of teenage boys, a congenital inability to remember historical facts and an unwillingness to spend my spare moments lesson-planning rather than go to the pub meant that a brief career diversion to pay off my overdraft did not become a lifelong vocation. But there is one thing I do hanker for, that makes me briefly wish I was back in the classroom: the daily delight of school dinners. After four hours of trying to wrangle the Year 10s into memorising the membership of the League of Nations, sitting down for a steaming hot plate of fish, chips and jam roly-poly was a godsend. It was a little patch of civilisation between shepherding the droogs and staring at PowerPoints.

Thursday

Olivia Potts

Gentleman’s Relish is no more

It is the early hours of the morning and an email drops into my inbox. Lacking any kind of willpower, I open it. Now I’m wide awake. Because this isn’t the usual PR slop that starts my days. It’s a tip-off. A big one. A reader has discovered something about a company and they are urging me – me! – to investigate. Adrenaline surges. This must be what it felt like to be Woodward and Bernstein. Only my informant is pointing me in a slightly different direction. Their intel is on Gentleman’s Relish: the incredibly niche spread is disappearing from our shelves. It has been available in the House of Lords dining rooms but for how much longer? Online supermarkets and delis are showing it as out of stock. What is going on?

Thursday

Jane Stannus

The joy of spring greens

Many of us, if told we must live by foraging in the wild, would quickly go toes up – from fear, not malnourishment, like the birds in Ol’ Paul the Mighty Logger, who saw snowy white popcorn bits flurrying through the air as the giant Bunyan munched, figured winter was back, and promptly froze to death. But there’s no need to die of fear at the idea of picking spring greens. True, we love our washed and bagged “spring mixes” of baby lettuce and we tremble at the thought of dandelion greens plucked from the meadow by our own inexpert hands, uncurated by the all-wise authorities of the food industry. But vegetables do, after all, grow out of the ground, and were edible before refrigeration and produce regulatory boards existed.

spring greens

Friday

Olivia Potts

This Easter, eat rabbit 

From our UK edition

Dissonance is necessary around Easter. Fluffy lambs and chicks are everywhere: on cards and decorations, in countless chocolate forms and adorning every Easter-adjacent craft, toy or activity. But, of course, we also traditionally serve roasted lamb or chicken on Easter Sunday. In some part, this is simply seasonality. We associate gambolling lambs and new chicks with spring. But that apparent seasonality is also something of an untruth: lamb, particularly, is not actually in season at Easter. I know, I know, as soon as the days start to brighten, our green and pleasant lands are filled with sentient woolly fluff wobbling about on little legs. But those cartoon-like lambs are far from ready for market.

Wednesday

Sarah Langford

Organised crime is targeting artisanal food

From our UK edition

Organised crime has a new focus: high-end food production. The latest victim is Wildfarmed, a UK-based, regenerative flour business co--founded by one half of the band Groove Armada. Last month, 50 tons of its flour were stolen, disguised as a wholesale order for the French supermarket E. Leclerc. In an audacious move, the fraudsters asked for the wording on the bags to be translated into French. Wildfarmed obliged. The 1kg bags – all 50,000 of them – were loaded into containers ready for export. Then they vanished. Wildfarmed’s disco-ball neon branding makes it a surprising target. But the real question is not how anyone hides a haul of hard-to-miss flour bags, but whether this theft is a bellwether.

Julie Burchill

Long live the bottomless brunch

From our UK edition

Bottomless brunch: it sounds disreputable, to start with. There’s the suggestion of indecency; that lower garments are optional, perhaps on the part of the poor waiting staff, like those ‘Butlers in the Buff’. And ‘brunch’ is surely the louchest of meals, invented purely so that people could roll into a restaurant after a long lie-in and commence drinking before noon. There is none of the briskness of ‘lunch’ or the cosiness of ‘dinner’. No one’s going to go for a ‘constitutional’ after brunch. No, they’re going to have ‘just one more’… I’ve had some lovely brunches in my time.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Can London’s favourite restaurateur save Simpson’s?

From our UK edition

When you think about Simpson’s in the Strand (never Simpson’s on the Strand), it is impossible to consider the 198-year-old restaurant without remembering its literary antecedents. P.G. Wodehouse praised it as ‘a restful temple of food’ in his 1910 novel Psmith in the City. It has popped up in everything from Sherlock Holmes to Howards End and, when that epitome of thespian Britishness David Niven wished, in the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone, to speak wistfully about a golden idyll to a dying friend, Simpson’s was the idyll he chose.  Yet all good things decline at some point. Before Simpson’s closed in 2020, another victim of the pandemic, it had been weakening.

Wednesday

Tanya Gold

In days of war, we need trifles: Mezzogiorno reviewed

From our UK edition

Mezzogiorno is a very serious, golden Italian restaurant inside the Corinthia London Hotel on Northumberland Avenue. Restaurants are increasingly gold these days, as if for a crocodile of Scrooge McDucks trooping through the wreckage of liberalism looking for money, nuts and guns. It follows the trajectory of my beloved Raffles at the OWO [Old War Office] round the corner. What was once a Ministry of Defence building – though formerly a hotel – is now a (quite good) pizza joint. When the time comes, I hope the drones know. Ignore the lie that gold restaurants serve tiny portions for tiny people. These are vast Mezzogiorno is by the gifted Francesco Mazzei, previously of Sartoria in Savile Row. Here, because this is an age in denial about hierarchy– ha!

Thursday

Jane Stannus

The glorious versatility of Dijon mustard

Not just salami, air conditioning and dental fillings: among their many contributions to civilization, the Romans also gave us Dijon mustard. Somewhere about the 4th century, it seems, the vinegar makers of Dijon were granted the right to use the exclusive mustard recipe composed by Palladius, son of Exuperantius, Prefect of the Gauls (or so Samuel Chamberlain informs us in his Bouquet de France of 1952). Palladius was one of those fascinating Roman gentleman-farmers who are also poets and scientists. He owned farms in Italy and Sardinia and had a particular interest in fruit trees. He penned a popular treatise on agriculture that stayed on the best-seller (or at least most-read) list until well into the Middle Ages.

Olivia Potts

My take on marry me chicken

I am not in the habit of bringing viral TikTok recipes here. It is a safe space, away from digestive biscuits submerged in yoghurt masquerading as cheesecake, baked oats, or sugary instant coffee whipped up like foam (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, ignorance is bliss). No, here we are in the realm of tried-and-tested vintage recipes. So why am I letting marry me chicken into this sacred place? For the uninitiated, it first popped up a decade ago on an American food website called Delish, but it became the most-searched recipe on the New York Times in 2023. It’s a simple concept: chicken cooked in a creamy, tomatoey sauce that is so delicious that the person to whom you serve it will get down on one knee.

Wednesday

Tanya Gold

Food for adults remembering childhood: Dover Street Counter reviewed

From our UK edition

Dover Street Counter is the tiny sister of The Dover, a very good restaurant on – who knew? – Dover Street, Mayfair. This is the site of P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional Drones Club, if following Wodehouse’s paths is your way of coping, and there is nothing wrong with that. There are some bad restaurants in Mayfair now, with slutty Roman gods and monumental Caesar salads; passive-aggressive tributes to Elizabeth II in bad cake, and enslaved fish staring at sex workers with the mute anguish of recognition. This is better. Good restaurants have the gift of suppressing fear, and this is one such The Dover is delivered by professionals for adults – that is, people who do not put intimacy on expenses, and who can recognise neo-Stalinist soft furnishings when they see them.

Saturday

Josh Barrie

Food influencers aren’t going anywhere

From our UK edition

At Gordon Ramsay’s launch party for his new Netflix show, Being Gordon Ramsay, influencers could be found in every corner of the room. Soon after getting another ‘lemongrass cha’ and walking past Victoria Beckham, I came face-to-face with Eating With Tod, a man whose wide-eyed hand rubbing and hyperbolic cries for enormous dinners has earned him 2.3 million followers and counting – impressive however you bill it.   Next to Ramsay, near the pulled pork bao station, was Jesse Burgess, one half of Topjaw and the presenter on another one of the chef’s food programmes Knife Edge on Apple TV.

Monday

Robert F. Moss

The growing appetite for brisket

When I first became enamored with barbecue in the 1990s, I ate a lot of chopped pork at Carolina barbecue joints, and sometimes chicken and ribs. One thing I almost never encountered was beef, especially slow-smoked brisket. That barbecue cut remained mostly a Texas thing until well into the 21st century. A few pioneers did try to introduce it to the Carolinas over the years, with limited success. Tommy Brightwell, for instance, put brisket on the menu when he opened Pappy’s BBQ in Madison, North Carolina, in 2004. A review in the Greensboro News & Record began, “So, you think barbecue has to come in pork form only?

brisket
Rob Crossan

I have a bad case of northern homesickness

From our UK edition

I’ve long held firm to the adage that you can’t truly call yourself a local in the town, city or village you reside in until you’ve spent over half your life there.  By my own calculation, I’ve just tipped over into becoming a Londoner: as of this year, I have spent 24 of my 47 years in the capital.   Not only that, but I’m marrying into the clan too. My fiancée – whom I’ll be tying the knot with in the spring – is a born-and-bred Chelsea girl whose proximity to the sound of Bow Bells has never strayed further than Crystal Palace.

Thursday

Sean Thomas

Americans have perfected the art of countertop cuisine

There are many reasons to admire America, and also a few reasons to disapprove. On the plus side there is free speech, the right to protect oneself, a relatively dynamic economy and 198 versions of beef jerky. On the downside, an inconsistent attitude to turning right at lights, too much fructose and the possibility of a civil war on the way. However, on a recent long trip up the American West Coast, from palm to pine, I came away realizing that America has one great advantage over Europeans: a serious understanding of the concept of eating at bars in restaurants. By which I don’t mean nibbling nuts and necking a cocktail while waiting for a table. I mean actual eating, of a proper meal, while seated on a barstool.

Olivia Potts

There’s no beating the comfort of cabinet pudding

From our UK edition

The British hold a steamed pudding close to their hearts. Like a culinary hot-water bottle, it may not be terribly elegant but it’s hard not to feel comforted and delighted by its presence. Most, however, follow a similar formula: a sponge cake mixture that is steamed into ethereal lightness and topped with a gooey, drippy sauce. This isn’t to decry them: I could never be fatigued by the spongy similarity of a golden syrup pudding and a bronzely glistening ginger one but they all come from the same sponge playbook, so I was intrigued to find one that doesn’t fit the mould.