Jane Stannus

This doesn’t feel right. I am wrapping plastic around a freshly baked cake, preparatory to putting it in the freezer for thirty minutes. Then, I’m supposed to take it out and gingerly unmold a bowl of ice cream on top of it. Back into the freezer after that for another hour or so. The bowl of ice cream is lined with plastic wrap and filled with layers of raspberry sorbet, mango sorbet and chocolate ice cream. The ice cream was pressed flat to fill up all the gaps, and it went into the deep freeze two hours ago. Will it be firm enough to hold a beautiful dome shape as it unmolds onto the cake? Or will it slither and slide everywhere? I’m making Baked Alaska — or what seems to be a modern twist on it.

Pastry chef Alistair Wise says never to make pavlova on a rainy day. “Just forget about it,” he advises. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to perfect-pavlova advice. Run a cut lemon around the inside of your bowl before whipping the egg whites. Don’t use fresh egg whites, but also don’t use cold egg whites. Don’t use a plastic bowl, as it may harbor grease. The bowl you do use must be scrupulously cleaned and dried... Don’t whip the whites on a “high” setting, but whatever you do, definitely don’t whip them on low. Use clean sugar — cue the desperate self-analysis of one who has never second-guessed the cleanliness of bagged sugar! Use superfine sugar, or all will be a disaster.

Does anything say “June” quite like strawberries and cream? The sweetness of sun-ripened strawberries allowed to remain on the plant until peak maturity, pairs exquisitely with the velvety, ever-so-slightly tart, richness of cream. Taste-wise, it’s a perfect match — and looks-wise, strawberries and cream are one of the prettiest dishes of summer. Some things are just meant to be. But life isn’t all strawberries and cream. Sometimes you have to shake things up with a lively new take: Gorgonzola and white chocolate cheesecake, for instance, or lamb with anchovy, garlic and rosemary. Love it or hate it, at least you’ll have your diners sitting up and paying attention. And sometimes a bit of experimentation can lead to a new favorite. That’s the story behind salt and caramel.

Russell Brand was baptised on Sunday, he says – in the River Thames, despite his tongue-in-cheek fear of catching a virus – and he’s thrilled about it. He thanked those who embraced his decision, while expressing understanding of those who are cynical. He’s not perfect, he explains; he knows he’s going to make mistakes, but ‘this is my path now,’ he says. ‘I’m so grateful to be surrendered in Christ.’ Speaking as a Catholic, this writer can’t but consider the advantages of baptism in church: waters freed from viruses and demons through exorcism, holy oils, and proper storage, might have been preferable.

They’re everywhere, it seems: in the oceans, the fish, the soil, our drinking water, our vegetables, our grains and cereals, our meat – even in us. Microplastics and smaller nanoplastics are tiny particles of plastic flubbage measuring half a centimetre or less that result from the degradation of plastic refuse, and according to recent news coverage the world is simply crawling with the stuff. Anxiety might turn out to be the biggest health problem caused by microplastics It’s getting everyone in a tizzy. On the one hand you can’t possibly avoid it, since it’s already more or less everywhere. But you must do something, the reports insist, or risk a plethora of terrifying health consequences: cancer, hormonal imbalance, diabetes, reproductive problems, and more.

Thirty feet in the air off a northern Canadian highway stands the giant Vegreville Easter egg, rotating gently in the wind. The egg is eighteen feet wide, nearly twenty-five long and designed to turn with the breeze like a weathervane. It is decorated in a traditional Ukrainian pysanka pattern with thousands of gold, black and white aluminum triangles, for the egg is an homage to the Ukrainian immigrants who settled the area long ago. It is a technical feat: the tile- cutting technology developed to produce the mosaic on the egg’s curved surface was later used to tile the exterior of the Space Shuttle. Whatever day of the year you may spy it, it is undeniably an Easter egg.

In a world full of muffins, they say, be a cupcake. As an inspirational saying, it’s a good effort. But handsome is as handsome does: for solid worth, texture and deliciousness, give me the muffin every time. I remain open-minded and willing to be proven wrong, but it seems to me that however gloriously frosted, sprinkled, beflowered or bedazzled the exterior of a cupcake may be, its interior texture is always trying, in a socially anxious sort of way, to be cake. All the icing in the world can’t hide the strain. Allow me to suggest an alternative: in a world of Christmas cookies, be homemade shortbread. The last word in simplicity, shortbread is the Hermès scarf of the cookie world. It has confidence, identity, classical elegance.

If I’d known what a whole monkfish looks like, I would never have ordered it. It was only weeks later that I saw a picture of the horrid creature: small, wicked eyes, prehistoric head, skin like rusty medieval armor and a gaping mouth overflowing with jagged teeth. Truly the stuff of nightmares. We’d popped over the border from France into San Sebastián, Spain, for a bite of dinner, selecting a spot a stone’s throw from the Baroque exuberance of Santa Maria del Coro. The daily special was monkfish, and for some reason — perhaps an excess of sun that day — the image that came to mind was, inaccurately, that of the innocent red mullet. The daily special in a fishing town is bound to be fresh, so it seemed fair to give it a try.

If called upon to declare the seven greatest cocktails of all time – a Magnificent Seven, as it were – what would be your line-up? The struggle is less in naming seven than in sticking to so few. The ubiquitous gin and tonic must be on the list, of course, along with the Old Fashioned. And surely the Bloody Mary deserves a place… but can the Bellini be left out? And is it legitimate to include not one but two brunch cocktails, when we haven’t even mentioned the mighty Ms – martinis, mojitos, margaritas and Manhattans? We’re already past seven, and what about the whisky sour, the Negroni and the Long Island iced tea?

Spring, as Chaucer pointed out, occasionally has the curious effect of making people “long on pilgrimage to go / And palmers to be seeking foreign strands / To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.” The May morning may come when you find it in your heart to pick up the pilgrim’s staff and wend your way along the paths of olden Spain to Santiago de Compostela. There are several ancient ways to reach the distant shrine of St. James, and if you are a lover of the road less traveled, you may find yourself drawn to the Camino del Norte, which begins in the western Pyrenees of the Basque country, then hugs the long beaches and jagged cliffs of the Atlantic shoreline through Cantabria and Asturias before curving inland through Galicia to the Apostle’s tomb.

Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts, or so said Charles Lamb in an essay about grace before meals. Other vegetables had come to pall on him, but a noble affection for asparagus still lingered in his heart, a reminder of simpler and more innocent times. One can only surmise that he didn’t much care for the vegetable. Who feels melancholically virtuous when eating greens? People who don’t really like them, that’s who.

It takes four people, according to the French, to get a salad dressing right: a spendthrift for the oil, a miser for the vinegar, a wise man for the salt and a lunatic for the pepper. A tough cast to assemble, you might think, but the freehanded, the tightfisted and the insane aren’t such rare birds. The true needle in the haystack is the wise man who would have anything to do with a recipe involving four chefs. Cooks, broth, too many — enough said. Most wise men would be out of town before you could say “smoked oak salt flakes” ten times fast. But the point stands: getting the salt right isn’t a walkover. The rookie has to steer a tight course between undersalted Scylla and oversalted Charybdis.