Olivia Potts

I hereby officially declare autumn open! I am picturing myself bedecked with a wreath of perfect autumn leaves. The bright October sun beams down, warming the cool, crisp air. I am dressed in jewel tones – possibly a cloak – and I’m cradling a pumpkin in one arm and holding a leek in the other, my own autumnal orb and sceptre. There are conkers all around. The reality of autumn is probably more prosaic: an oversized sweatshirt, some gravy smeared up my forearm, and a grimly determined look as I gaze on the pumpkin and leek lying on my chopping board. It’s probably raining. But I am certainly surrounded by conkers, thanks to my small kids. Still, the feeling is the same: it’s exciting when it’s time to begin cold-weather cooking.

A criticism often levelled at cookery writers is: ‘I could just buy that at the supermarket’, which is an apparent slam-dunk counter to the time and effort needed to make the thing yourself, i.e. why would you bother? With such people, I find myself stutteringly defending cookbooks, recipes and the practice of cooking as a whole. My defence is both obvious and compelling: I can make it better, I can make it cheaper, I know exactly what’s going into it if I’ve made it and, crucially, cooking is one of life’s pleasures. I actively enjoy kneading and proving and waiting and peeking in the oven and stirring and whisking and slicing. Making the thing is often the whole point – the end result a delightful by-product.

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.