Food

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 the fringes of Covent Garden will have you drooling before you've even sat down.

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 right. ‘Take the frozen pea.

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, plus more than one wedding.

Marmite is one of very few manufactured foods to have become an idiom. British people think of the black stuff as a national idiosyncrasy, entirely unknown to horrified foreigners: there are many videos on YouTube in which outsiders have Marmite inflicted on them for the first time. In fact, there are a large number of pastes based on yeast extract in different countries, each with its passionate devotees. British Marmite may have been the first to go into production, but it did not stay unique for long. A German chemist, Justus von Liebig, influential in the propagation of meat essences, discovered that yeast could be concentrated.

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 damper but nuttier cookie (a delightful variation, in my books).

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 ‘of the forest’ and is really a reference to the mushrooms in the sauce.

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 and even chimney sweepings to increase their takings.

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 day that the magi were supposed to have visited Jesus in his stable.

Living in Crouch End, a part of North London without a tube line and a distinctly villagy feel, you might imagine I would be spoilt for choice with excellent local restaurants. But Crouch End, like it’s posh neighbour Hampstead, has a bad reputation in that field. Too many coffee shops, the odd chain, and one or two overpriced gaffs that remind me of the phrase ‘All fur coat and no knickers’. I occasionally Google ‘Best restaurants near me‘ in case I’ve missed something, and one day, Table Du Marché popped up – a restaurant I had never heard of, despite it being just up the road in East Finchley.

Tennis — as the New England poet Robert Frost remarked in defense of formal verse — is more fun with a net. Creativity does indeed flourish within constraints. Soviet censorship brought about samizdat. Prohibition brought about bathtub gin and any number of fabulous cocktails designed to mask its unsubtle notes of paint thinner. The greatest human spirits would view the new era of show-your-papers dining not as a hardship, but as an opportunity. In our brave new world, some don’t mind handing over papers in exchange for a mess of restaurant-prepped pottage. And yet there are ancien régime sticklers for propriety who think that the use of QR codes to gain access to food indoors is not quite comme il faut (if you’ll pardon their French).

Cheese, potatoes, sausage and bacon for dinner? Let’s just throw in bread and heavy cream for the sake of it. Sounds like a recipe for a heart attack or stroke? Why do the Swiss and French then double up — or even triple up — on these carbs and calories when cold weather comes? The answer is easy and old; the combos are delicious, divine and de rigueur, filling the body’s need for cozy food and energy to shovel snow and ski. The French and Swiss still argue about which country invented raclette.

Well, Christmas may be complete, but the festivities are far from over: the new year is just around the corner. As we stare down the barrel of the end of the decade, we’re not quite ready to give up the cheese board, the doorstep-sized leftover sandwiches, or remove our hand from the Quality Street box. But although the food might be the same post-Christmas, the tone of our eating has changed slightly. Christmas cooking (and eating!) can turn into a logistical marathon: juggling pans and hob space, reconciling wildly different cooking temperatures for items that need to be in the oven at the same time, catering to a raft of traditions and preferences, all of which need to be satisfied in this single, momentous meal. Preparing Christmas lunch can feel like a maths GCSE problem.

I’d always assumed that the hummingbird’s cake derived its name from its unapologetic sweetness: a cake so singing with fruit juice and soft caramelly sugar that it charms the (humming)birds from the trees. The origins may in fact be more prosaic: originally called the Doctor Bird cake, it was named after the national symbol of Jamaica, a type of hummingbird, only found on the island, and it first came to fame outside of Jamaica thanks to a bit of a PR stunt. It was a marketing tool, really: one of a number of recipes exported by the Jamaican Tourist Board in 1968 in little press packs sent to the USA.

Turkey curry, as a means of using up festive leftovers has become something of a joke: the turkey curry buffet in Bridget Jones is the true low point of Bridge’s festive calendar. The prospect can strike fear into the most Christmas-spirited of souls. But actually, on boxing day, or the day after, the last thing you really want is the same meal you’ve been eating for the past two days, looking a little tired and fridge-worn, all the best bits gone. Don’t get me wrong: I’ll be first to the table for cold roast meats and my fifth serving of stilton in 48 hours, and if you hesitate for a moment, you won’t see that final portion of trifle for dust.