Olivia Potts

Salade Lyonnaise is often translated as ‘bacon and egg salad’ and I can’t stand it. Not because it’s inaccurate – beyond the salad leaves and the dressing, the only other non-negotiable elements of the dish are, indeed, bacon and eggs. But it feels like it misses the point. To the English ear, bacon and egg salad sounds like a lacklustre version of a full English – two items chucked into a bowl of leaves because we’re trying to cut carbs. It also – and I am aware this is just me – makes me picture the egg scrambled, and the thought of scrambled egg in a salad is horrible. ‘Bacon and egg salad’ doesn’t do the elegant, balanced and punchy salade Lyonnaise justice.

Grasshopper pie is an unlikely dish: bright green, mint-flavoured, combined with obscure liqueurs and set with marshmallows, all sitting in an Oreo crust. It feels like the fever dream of a sweet-toothed teenager who’s been let loose on their parents’ drinks cabinet, and will regret it tomorrow. The pie is based on the cocktail of the same name, which combines equal parts crème de menthe, crème de cacao blanc and cream. It’s a heady mix of mint, white chocolate, dairy and alcohol. The cocktail hails from New Orleans and its origin is claimed by Tujague’s in the French Quarter, where it was supposedly invented by the owner, Philip Guchet, in 1918. It tastes exactly as you’d imagine and is, forgive me, far better suited to a pie filling than it is to a drinks party.

Everyone knows the story of the Earl of Sandwich: keen not to interrupt a late night card game at his club, he asked for roast beef to be sliced and put between two slices of bread, to allow him to eat it with his hands without stopping his game. And lo, the sandwich was born. But perhaps less familiar to us is that 140 years later, some 4,500 miles away from the Earl’s cribbage game, another problem was being observed, and was solved in a strikingly similar way. The turn of the 20th century saw an influx of Sicilian immigrants to New Orleans; almost 300,000 arrived in the city between the 1880s and 1920s, setting up shop (literally) in the French Quarter, in an area that became known as Little Palermo.

When it comes to home cooking, we’re obsessed with optimisation. Today this manifests itself in reels on Instagram offering a ‘hack’ to make the time you spend in your kitchen shorter and your dinner to arrive more quickly. Harder, faster, better, stronger. None of this is new: there was a time when every Jamie Oliver cookbook shaved ten minutes of the promised cooking time off the last. Delia Smith’s How to Cheat at Cooking caused a public outcry (can you believe she advocated for frozen mashed potato?). The whole appeal of air fryers is that they’re fast, and while slow cookers don’t exactly get to their destination quickly, they do so with as little intervention as possible from the cook.

Ihad a culinary revelation this week. I like to think I’m an egalitarian when it comes to food – I like beautiful, fancy restaurant stuff and home-cooked one-pot dishes, I like punchy, in-your-face flavour, and subtle, softer flavours. I love trying new-to-me dishes from around the world, and I love the comfort of eating suppers my grandma would make. You can put virtually anything in front of me and I’ll be thrilled. But as I contemplated this week’s recipe subject, I realised that I avoid foods that ooze. Doughnuts splurging out their jam, uncontainable ice-cream sandwiches, croissants or Danish pastries with custards or compotes that blob onto my clothes. Even really juicy stone fruit or a particularly ripe soft cheese makes me nervous.

We all did mad things during the first Covid lockdown. For some it was getting a dog or starting up a microbakery. For me, it was signing up for a NVQ Level 2 in butchery. I’m still not quite sure how it happened, but, once the schools reopened, I spent my Tuesdays in a cold butchery store in east London, socially distanced from my septuagenarian master butchery tutor, who would teach me how to break down whole carcasses, the art of seam butchery and the trick to linking sausages.

‘It’s just a hot dog bun with icing!’ the iced-bun detractors will shriek. I’m a lady with a lot of opinions about fairly esoteric foodstuffs, many of them declamatory, immovable, or strident, but I do not understand taking against the iced bun. I’m not sure what awful bakery-based trauma must have happened to you during childhood to make iced buns the target of your ire, but they are undeserving. For anyone not a self-proclaimed detractor, iced buns (also called Swiss buns or iced fingers) prompt reveries: forgotten childhood memories of plump buns in trollies and sticky fingers holding grown-up hands.

‘Sometimes, in the search for originality, the most obvious dishes are forgotten,’ says Elizabeth David, the doyenne of cookery, in her book French Provincial Cooking. I often think of this phrase when I’m writing about vintage cookery. So much of food (and food writing, and writing, and media, and life) is trend-driven. It’s all about novelty. I look at the handwritten list of my planned vintage recipes – ‘chocolate mousse, custard slice, beef olives???’ – and have to acknowledge that my particular wheelhouse is anything but original. I try, though, to hold David’s words close: those ‘obvious’ dishes are known for a reason. And their familiarity is part of their appeal. David was writing, specifically, about oeuf mayonnaise.

There are few things more delicious than falling down a rabbit hole. No, don’t worry, I’m not serving up a second recipe for rabbit in a row. I mean discovering a recipe or dish which, not only have I not cooked or tried before, but haven’t even heard of. A little while ago, a reader asked me about Hawkshead cake, which Beatrix Potter used to make with her husband at Christmas. Hawkshead is the village Potter grew up in, in the Lake District, and the cake is actually more of a tart, made with puff pastry and filled with currants and syrup. This is where the proverbial rabbit hole came in, because I couldn’t quite stop there.

It is the early hours of the morning and an email drops into my inbox. Lacking any kind of willpower, I open it. Now I’m wide awake. Because this isn’t the usual PR slop that starts my days. It’s a tip-off. A big one. A reader has discovered something about a company and they are urging me – me! – to investigate. Adrenaline surges. This must be what it felt like to be Woodward and Bernstein. Only my informant is pointing me in a slightly different direction. Their intel is on Gentleman’s Relish: the incredibly niche spread is disappearing from our shelves. It has been available in the House of Lords dining rooms but for how much longer? Online supermarkets and delis are showing it as out of stock. What is going on?

Dissonance is necessary around Easter. Fluffy lambs and chicks are everywhere: on cards and decorations, in countless chocolate forms and adorning every Easter-adjacent craft, toy or activity. But, of course, we also traditionally serve roasted lamb or chicken on Easter Sunday. In some part, this is simply seasonality. We associate gambolling lambs and new chicks with spring. But that apparent seasonality is also something of an untruth: lamb, particularly, is not actually in season at Easter. I know, I know, as soon as the days start to brighten, our green and pleasant lands are filled with sentient woolly fluff wobbling about on little legs. But those cartoon-like lambs are far from ready for market.

There’s an inherent pleasure in having something by heart. Poetry at school. Lines in plays. Song lyrics. The things that stick tend to be those that we had by rote when we were young. We get out of the habit, and our gears don’t move as smoothly. When I was at pâtisserie school, we were expected to memorise countless different base recipes – crème pâtissière, brioche, pâte brisée, pâte sablé, pâte sucrée – and our termly theory exams required us to regurgitate these formulae. I spent hours learning the ratios and the quantities, the steps and techniques, convinced I would have them down pat for evermore.