Recipes

Choux pastry can inspire fear in even the most confident of cooks. There's a good reason for it: it’s difficult to give a very precise recipe for choux pastry, as the amount of egg needed to create the correct texture depends on the flour you’ve used, how long the choux has rested, and how fast and how thoroughly you have cooked the choux mixture out. It’s the water content in the egg that primarily causes the choux to rise and puff in the oven into those distinctive domes or elegant eclairs: not enough and they will fall flat, but too much and the pastry will be too sloppy to pipe properly. It’s the Goldilocks of pastry recipes. I am not unfamiliar with choux-dread.

Do you ever find yourself holding forth on a topic you hadn’t realised you cared about? You know, someone asks you an innocuous question in passing about the merits of slow cookers, or the best way to grow cabbages, and before you know it, 20 minutes has passed and you're still grandstanding. There are a few topics that have crept up on me like this during my life: I have found out that I feel extremely strongly about pyjamas (pro), low-calorie cooking spray (anti) and the TV show Stars in their Eyes. And, it turns out, burger buns. I truly didn’t believe I had anything approaching an opinion on burger buns. But the moment I turned my mind to it, I realised that, to the contrary, I had very strong opinions on this apparently benign subject. So what is required of a burger bun?

Imagine a summer morning in Southern California. You rise with the sun in a palm-shaded bungalow and stroll to a nearby farmers market, where the tables spill over with heirloom tomatoes, sweet corn and cartons of juicy strawberries. Your canvas tote filled with the season’s bounty, you return to your sun-dappled kitchen to prepare a farm-to-table feast for all your friends while listening to your favorite vintage records. Sigh. This is the dreamy lifestyle purveyed by Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession by Jess Damuck (Abrams, 2022). I’ve always aspired to be the kind of woman who can “just toss something together,” making a light, fresh, delicious dish with ease, rather than worrying that something will catch fire if I leave my post by the stove.

In a world of ultra-convenience, I think making the argument for home cooking is important. Because a lifestyle of takeaway delivery apps, ready meals or eating out every day is not a recipe for health and happiness, no matter how easy the modern world makes it.   One of the downsides of the cult of the ‘foodie’ is that it can make food and cooking more intimidating than they need to be. If you’re a Londoner, invite friends over for a dinner of lasagne and garlic bread and you’ll have one guest asking if the pasta is fresh or dried and the other telling you to try roasting the garlic for 24 hours in a low oven next time to unleash its inner umami. It’s enough to put anyone off.

I am pretty capricious when it comes to puddings. I'm always ready to declare my most recent success the king of all desserts, swearing blind I will never make anything else, and just falling short of sending a newsletter to my entire address book informing them of the new love of my life – only for a new pretender to take its place a week a later. So you would be forgiven for feeling a little dismissive when I crow about my new favourite pudding. But listen, this really is my new favourite pudding. Maybe I will never make anything else again. Baked custard pots: richer than a crème caramel, but without the distinctive brittle ceiling of the crème brûlée, these are a make-ahead wonder, fantastically impressive, and really, completely delicious.

I love St David’s Day. While it may not get as much attention as St Patrick’s, which seems to dominate the rest of March, it’s a great reminder that spring is on its way and an even better excuse to celebrate all things Welsh. When you think of Wales, you may think of our stunning scenery, rolling hills, choirs, rugby (although, if you are Welsh, probably best not to dwell on that one at the moment), breathtaking coastline, and of course Tom Jones. But we also have some pretty good cuisine – and I’m not talking about cheesy chips and gravy. Cawl, Welsh cakes, bara brith, leeks, laverbread and cockles are all famous Welsh foods – but perhaps the best known of all is Welsh rarebit. It’s the perfect dish to salute the onset of spring.

Does it seem these days that everyone you know suffers from a food allergy, sensitivity or intolerance (don’t ask me to explain the difference)? It seems inevitable that eating out in a group entails someone in the party requesting a menu item be made vegan, keto, gluten-free, dairy-free, tree nut-free, sulfite-free, etc. (I usually just hope the meal itself is free). Blame it on seed oils, soil depletion, genius marketing, the Liver King — whatever. The fact is that our toxic world makes party-planning a royal pain. How do you accommodate a bunch of people whose dietary restrictions turn menu-making into a culinary Sudoku puzzle? Fortunately for you, The Spectator associates with a lot of cool, accomplished, clever people — one of whom is Chef Andrew Gruel.

Apple pies are synonymous with domesticity: both here and across the pond, the image of an apple pie, fresh from the oven, possibly cooling on a windowsill, speaks of family, and of homeliness. While they’re not difficult to make, they take time and care, and the making of one is an act of love. Perhaps that’s why they are such a simple and clear shorthand for comfort.

Who is Ali Slagle? A fan of New York Times Cooking might recognize the name: nine of their fifty most popular recipes of 2022 are credited to her, the most of any of their contributors, including household names like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Melissa Clark. But despite the tremendous popularity of her recipes, Slagle herself is a bit mysterious. She crops up, cheerfully and occasionally, on NYT Cooking channels. Her 142,000 Instagram followers are a mere fraction of the followings of her food-celebrity contemporaries, like Molly Baz, Alison Roman, or Claire Saffitz. She doesn’t appear to be developing a platform; she has no Twitter, no Substack, no YouTube channel. She appears to live in a camper van.

I tend to hunker down on New Year’s Eve, eschewing parties for my own home. Even when I was young, the prospect of sleeping on someone else’s floor or braving the night bus home in the early hours of the morning didn’t really appeal. But sometimes I worry that that can lead to the night being a damp squib. The way to fix this is a little bit of luxury. Perfect bitesize tastes of luxury. And for me, that means blinis topped with the fanciest, most delicious morsels I can lay my hands on. Drink them with something cold and sparkly, and you won’t regret staying in for one moment. If you are more sociable than I am, these also make the most impressive party snacks – and ones that suggest far more preparation and skill than they actually require.

Let Bing sing about a white Christmas, if he insists. My kind of Christmas is more eggnog-toned: yellowy, like old-fashioned incandescent string lights; rich, like real velvet ribbon on presents; topped with pale froth of the most non-utilitarian and fluffy kind; sweet, with a kick of rum or bourbon to redeem it from sentimentality; stippled with a dark sprinkling of freshly grated nutmeg on top to ginger up the olfactory receptors. Uncanonical as it may be to view this time of year through an eggnog-tinted lens, it seems to me that food and wassail are more essential to Christmas than snow. What is the celebration without culinary traditions, even though one man’s festive favourite may be another’s pet peeve?

I love a good cookbook. In an age where endless variations on any recipe are no more than a few clicks away on the internet, there is still a certain magic to buying, or receiving, a physical, curated collection.  Cookbooks can teach you something in a way that individual online recipes can’t. Whether exploring a new cuisine or trying a new technique, cooking from a cookbook means you can build up a whole repertoire of dishes and hone new skills. I love that you can annotate the pages, and it doesn’t matter if they get mucky (I find you can always tell the best recipes in a book by how dog-eared and food-splattered the pages are).

Like many American families with multicultural members, my own family incorporates traditions to reflect different ways to celebrate Christmas. I count seven besides American: Swedish, English, Scottish, German, French, Swiss, Belgian. The first five are in the family DNA. The remaining two reflect countries where we have lived and raised our children. Growing up with Swedish immigrant grandparents under the same roof, my Christmas took on many Swedish customs, starting on December 13 with the celebration of Santa Lucia. Legend has it that the fourth-century saint was a child-martyr who brought food and aid to Christians hiding in the Roman catacombs. A young girl is dressed as the saint, in virginal white, sashed in red, representing a baptismal robe and the blood of martyrdom.

It seems our course is set. Food prices are rising at the fastest rate in more than 40 years, taking the average family’s yearly grocery bill over £5,200 – and there’s no relief in sight. Lord Woolton would be rubbing his hands at a situation so ripe for his ingenuity and optimism – and perhaps his namesake pie and the national loaf might find themselves resuscitated before long. But his 1945 call for ‘a simpler diet’ of bread, potatoes and vegetable oils won’t help much in 2022. According to the Office for National Statistics, ‘low-cost’ everyday staples are seeing the greatest price rises of all, with the average cost increasing by 17 per cent in the past 12 months.

‘Come along, kiddie-winkies! Come and get your treacle tart,’ the Child Catcher trills in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, to lure children away. The youngsters are particularly taken with the idea of treacle tart, and it’s not difficult to imagine why: unapologetically sweet and sticky, it’s irresistible to small, greedy hands. It’s easy to dismiss treacle tart as a nursery food. But that, of course, is part of its charm. It’s the Platonic ideal of a childhood treat, and a byword for comfort. In Harry Potter, the love potion Amortentia smells of whatever someone loves most in the world; to Harry, it smells of broomsticks, Ginny Weasley’s hair and treacle tart, the first dessert he ever ate at Hogwarts.

Food waste is suddenly the subject on everyone’s lips. A combination of environmental concern and biting inflation has propelled an issue that was already rising up the public consciousness on to centre stage. Some supermarkets are dropping ‘best before’ labels on fresh produce, and this month the British Frozen Food Federation launched a campaign to highlight the virtues of freezing to save money. The issue even gained a mention in the first televised debate of the Tory leadership contest at the end of July, when Liz Truss stated: ‘I am naturally a thrifty person. I like saving money and it also helps the environment. It’s about using less, wasting less, particularly food waste which I think is a massive problem in this country.

How does the saying go? ‘Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.’ Well, if you’re looking for the highest possible status of breakfast, then kedgeree is the dish for you. Bran flakes just don’t quite scratch the same itch. Kedgeree cannot be casual; it requires time, both for preparation and enjoying, and it makes breakfast an occasion. It came to our breakfast tables (or mahogany sideboards) in Victorian times, brought back to Britain by returning colonial officers. It was served in silver chafing dishes, set alongside steaming urns of porridge. Kedgeree is a rice-based dish, flavoured with curried spices and cooked with smoked haddock, onions and boiled eggs.

I used to be a baked cheesecake sceptic: I didn’t feel they were worth the effort when other cheesecakes required you simply to stir together some ingredients and bung them in the fridge. My thinking was: why waste your time? Was the result really worth the extra effort? In turns out that yes, it was. It is. I just hadn’t ever eaten a really good cheesecake. That changed on a visit to San Sebastián. La Viña is a small bar and restaurant serving pintxos (the Basque version of tapas), but it is best known for its ‘burnt’ baked cheesecake. Inside, you feel as though you’re in a cheese shop that has recently suffered a fire: the walls are lined with shelves on which sit rows of cheesecakes, slowly cooling in their charred baking-parchment wrappers.