Ameer Kotecha

In a recent diary for The Spectator, the editor noted that many of the world’s leading tech companies have names inspired by The Lord of the Rings: Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Mithril; Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. ‘J.R.R. Tolkien has a curious hold on the minds of Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters,’ he wrote. Well, they’re not the only ones. If I had founded a company I probably would have called it Anduril too. While less odd teenagers spent their money on CDs or football boots, I used to have a life-sized replica of the Elvish sword hanging above my bed. I, like the tech bros, was a LOTR obsessive. A super fan. I still am. Tolkien was a genius and I have read his books many times over.

My first memories of limoncello, I expect like most people, are from an Italian holiday, the slender bottles as yellow and radiant as the Amalfi sunshine. And at a local, family-run Italian restaurant, cheerfully slammed down on the table at meal’s end. The lemon liqueur is now having a new lease of life, born again as an aperitif. The limoncello market grew 31 per cent from 2019 to 2023 and it is popping up everywhere from Australia to Germany. Above all this is down to the advent of the ‘limoncello spritz’, which was even added to the menu at J.D. Wetherspoon last year. Having enjoyed two decades as top dog, the Aperol spritz finally has some meaningful competition.

Lindt has opened a ‘first of its kind’ flagship store at Piccadilly Circus. Roger Federer was wheeled out to cut the ribbon. It features the UK’s largest Lindt truffle pick ’n’ mix counter (a snip at £6.50/100g), a ‘barista-style’ hot chocolate bar and an ice cream station. There’s even jars of chocolate spread for those who consider Nutella lowbrow. Lindt’s CEO for UK and Ireland, in that PR corporatese that sounds like guff to everyone except his marketing department, said: ‘With 2025 marking Lindt & Sprungli’s 180th anniversary, what better way to celebrate this journey and enduring passion for captivating chocolate lovers worldwide.’ It’s enough to make me crave Quality Street. It’s fairly obvious what’s inspired them.

At a recent lunch where I was sitting next to A.N. Wilson I couldn’t help but take a good look at his suit. After all, this was the man often described as the original Young Fogey. He was dressed perfectly well in an austere two-piece, though while I (ever the try-hard) was sporting a pocket square, he was without one. On another occasion, chatting to Charles Moore in the colonial surrounds of the Foreign Office’s Durbar Court, the Lord was indistinguishable in dress from the other mandarins and journalistic bigwigs there. In bygone days, a Young Fogey such as he would have donned a seersucker suit and shantung silk tie for the occasion. The Young Fogeys’ flamboyance of dress evident in their heyday is gone.

One can see a city so differently over time. Visiting Oxford recently I noticed fine whisky shops and fashion stores which have always been there but which I barely registered as a student 15 years ago. There are new arrivals: some good, such as the handsome Jericho Cheese Company; others less so, such as the proliferating bubble tea shops catering to the now numerous Chinese, both students and tourists. Covered Market is still there, where we used to indulge at the original Ben’s Cookies. Though I do not remember back then the Thames Valley Police signs now warning of ‘bag dippers’ operating in the area. Oxford is both swisher and scruffier than I remember it. Swish embodied in the new Ivy, in a palatial neo-Gothic pile on the High Street that used to be a NatWest.

In a social media age, certain ingredients – long esteemed by those in the know – suddenly burst on to the scene. One morning we woke up to all the supermarkets stocking Mutti tinned tomatoes. Ortiz sardines and Perello Gordal olives are now in the limelight. I wonder – given the current zeitgeist for all things umami – whether Patum Peperium (Latin: ‘peppered paste’) could be next. Then again, the ‘Gentleman’s Relish’ – an anchovy paste made with butter and spices – isn’t for everyone. Much like Marmite, it has embraced this contentious reputation: ‘Dividing opinions since 1828’ it declares in its branding. After almost 200 years on the scene, it has started popping up in trendy spots, like a debonair rake sauntering into a party fashionably late.

It’s somewhat risky to make the case for lard for a publication whose cookery columnist is the author of a book on butter. But so be it. Because lard has generally been at best overlooked and at worst openly maligned, and that is madness. The cost of cooking oils has rocketed in the past couple of years – sunflower oil has trebled in price, olive oil doubled. Butter is much dearer too. Yet inexplicably no one has suggested lard might step in to save the day. The cheapest pack of butter at Tesco will currently cost you £1.99. A block of lard is 50p. It has long been a slight object of ridicule. A ‘tub of lard’ is somehow crueller an insult than the Shakespearean ‘fat as butter’.

Recently in Spectator Life Rob Crossan laid bare ‘the unpalatable truth about British food’ – namely that it is, er, in some establishments he’s been to, done badly. Leaving aside the fact he’s looking for his fish and chips in the wrong place (outside the M25 it wouldn’t be such a struggle), encountering a few dodgy versions of British fare is not a good reason to sit idly by and allow our culinary heritage to disappear. British food can compete with the world's best – if we allow it to. In many ways we have had to develop a thick skin when it comes to the loss of treasured bastions of food and drink.

The jigsaw is having a moment. Ditto other puzzles, games and brain teasers. Couples engage in post-coital sudoku (apparently). Wordle was played 4.8 billion times in 2023 (the lockdown invention of a young Welsh lad, Josh Wardle). Board game cafes have sprung up in cities. This recent resurgence in the popularity of puzzles is partly a hangover from the Covid pandemic. Sales of jigsaws and board games soared 240 per cent during the first week of lockdown, with more puzzles being bought for adults than children. There are also wider reasons: the so-called ‘homebody economy’ and Scandi-inspired hygge lifestyle craze (think being wrapped up in blankets with a log-burning stove while your mates are on a night out).

Whether we’ve got Mad Men or lockdown-inspired home boozing to thank, one thing is clear: the drinks trolley, or bar cart, is back. Interior design websites and social media are awash with them. And that means suddenly the bottle is becoming as important as the drink. Design agency Stranger and Stranger (motto: ‘Don’t fit in. Stand out’) has legions of clients, celebrities first in line, all vying to make their bottle the most beautiful. Brad Pitt (‘A dreamer, a visionary’, according to his drink’s packaging) had them encase his Gardener gin in pastel hues evocative of the French Riviera. (Not to be outdone, Brooklyn Beckham came knocking, deciding he needed a fitting phial for his elixir. Only his creation wasn’t booze but hot sauce.

On 2 October 1814, a grand feast was held at the Hofburg imperial palace during the Congress of Vienna. Famed French chef Marie-Antoine Carême was charged with cooking and didn’t disappoint. But when it came to the cheese course, a lively argument broke out among the assembled statesmen, each advocating for the superiority of their national cheese: the Italian for Stracchino, the Swiss for Gruyère, the Dutchman for Limburger, and so on and so forth. The UK foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, championed Stilton. French foreign minister Talleyrand snapped an order (‘Send the despatches to the chancellerie’) and a large piece of Brie de Meaux was duly brought out: ‘The Brie rendered its cream to the knife. It was a feast and no one further argued the point.

Those who still make a habit of the Sunday roast are faced with a challenge come Christmas: how to make sure the big meal doesn’t disappoint. What if the turkey is a let-down given everyone so loves the topside of beef? It would take a real Grinch to sniff at the festive spread – we serve it not because turkey would be anyone’s death row meal but because, as I have written before, there is virtue in tradition for its own sake. And truth be told, there is little reason to fear disappointment when pigs in blankets are close at hand. But there is one other trick up the Christmas dinner host’s sleeve – something that if served at any other occasion of the year would prompt raised eyebrows and being led away gently on suspicion of imbibing too much red wine.

It is now not unusual to find ‘bone broth’ in the refrigerated sections of supermarkets or delis, on sale for more than £7. Who can afford this stuff? If you have the time to make your own stock then all credit to you. But if not, the concentrated stock in little cubes or tubs is perfectly acceptable. Knorr and fancy upstarts such as Kallo pose as the superior products. But Oxo has stood the test of time. In a flooded stock market, their cubes remain my choice. Beef is the classic (the name ‘Oxo’ is thought to come from the word ‘ox’). Retailers seem to have taken the lamb version off the shelves, though the brand says they’re working on getting it back. The company has moved with the times, a few years ago launching the first vegan cube.

Ikea has opened its first high-street restaurant in the UK. There's not a flat-pack in sight – but a hotdog is 85p and a children’s pasta dish with tomato sauce (plus soft drink and piece of fruit) is 95p. A nine-piece full English will set you back £3.75, while a serving of their famous meatballs (with mash, peas, cream sauce and lingonberry jam) is £5.50. Vegetarians are amply catered for. It’s open 12 hours a day (and that may be extended further to enable dinner). There’s free wifi and somewhere to charge your phone. Even better, there is no music. It’s not pretending to be anything it isn’t.

Marco Pierre White may have earned a reputation as the tousle-haired kitchen bad boy who once made Gordon Ramsay cry, but these days he spends his mornings rather more quietly, enjoying his kippers. Yet in his retirement, he can still cause controversy. He recently told a podcast how he cooks his kippers. ‘On a plate, paint it with butter, wrap in cling film, in the microwave, two to two and a half minutes.’ A microwave? Really, Marco?! Yes. As far as kippers go, his reasoning is spot on. ‘Most people put them under the grill, which intensifies the salt’. Meanwhile, boiling them – jugged kippers – washes away the flavour. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with a microwave. As Marco put it, the haters need to ‘take off the blinkers’.

I remember, vividly, when working at Raymond Blanc’s Michelin-starred Le Manoir, the moment the truffles were delivered. A frisson went round the kitchen staff as the napkin covering the precious morsels was dramatically whipped off. Physically inspecting the gnarled, knobbly nuggets was a right reserved for head chef alone. As a lowly pot-washer, I was confined to the back, neck craned for a glimpse. So I am not blind to the excitement and sheer theatre of the treasured truffle. I even like them. But why on earth have they taken over every restaurant menu, as plentiful as lashings of ‘EV’ olive oil and flaky sea salt? 2018-19 was when the truffle takeover first got going on the London restaurant scene. Then the rot quickly set in.

They were loud, vivacious and gloriously un-PC.  Sometimes they seemed to be learning how to cook as they went, barely one step ahead of the viewer. It didn’t matter. If anything, it only made the BBC's Two Fat Ladies more watchable. And 25 years on – the last of the two dozen episodes pairing Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright aired on 28 September 1999 – I miss terribly their jaunty style of cooking, glass in hand. I don’t think I’m alone. Spectacularly and unexpectedly successful in their lifetimes – 70 million worldwide watched their programme over its four-year run, including many in the US – the internet has allowed them to find fresh admirers since their death.

I have been reading Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature which came out in October, just a few months before the great man’s death aged 100. And so a weekend holiday in Suffolk was calling to me. I went to Aldeburgh, on the coast, north of the river Alde. The town appears to be thriving – full of bustling cafés and London money. It is fashionable and chic. In many respects it is a world away from Blythe’s Akenfield. But there is much here to charm you. I lingered by a wonderful second-hand bookshop, Reed Books 4, its window display with Peter Kent’s Fortifications of East Anglia, George Ewart Evans’s The Farm and Village and Hugh Barrett’s recounting of a rural Suffolk morning in Early to Rise. Is this what Scruton meant by oikophilia? Here was heart-warming local pride.

When imagining a monarch’s wardrobe, what comes to mind? With the late Queen, it was bold-coloured dresses (as she famously said, ‘I have to be seen to be believed’), elaborate hats, silk headscarves and those black Launer handbags. Our new King is no less a style icon. For him it’s well-tailored double-breasted suits from Anderson & Sheppard (probably well-worn, for His Majesty is a great advocate of make do and mend – the suit he wore to Harry and Meghan’s wedding was 34 years old), Turnbull & Asser shirts, hats from Lock & Co. and probably the odd tartan kilt. But it is his collection of pocket squares that I would be most interested to see if ever allowed a peek into the King’s cupboard.