Simpsons

Thursday

Prue Leith

My shameful confession: I’m not a good baker

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

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Can London’s favourite restaurateur save Simpson’s?

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

Tuesday

Tom Slater

What’s the problem with Apu?

Remember Apu, the kindly Indian shopkeeper from The Simpsons? Well, in the time since most people have stopped watching that 32-year-old show, past its prime for at least two of its three decades, the world has come around to deciding that he is actually a really racist character, perhaps even a 2D agent of white supremacy. If you’ve missed this particular culture-war controversy, I envy you. It is among the most ridiculous, and protracted, of recent years. It started with The Problem With Apu, a 2017 documentary made by American comedian Hari Kondabolu. Kondabolu is of Indian heritage, and despite liking The Simpsons as a kid, he has come to