Olivia Potts is the Guild of Food Writers’ Cookery Writer of the Year 2025. She hosts The Spectator’s Table Talk podcast and writes Spectator Life's The Vintage Chef column
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If you read only the title of Charlie Taverner’s book Street Food you could be forgiven for assuming it was an exploration of the stalls that line the trendier streets of our cities, offering bibimbap and bao, jerk chicken and jian bing. But the author’s focus predates brightly coloured gazebo hoardings and polystyrene packaging and
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Duck à l’orange is so deliciously retro, it’s almost a cliché of kitsch. It seems hard to believe that there was a time when it was genuinely regarded as elegant, or subtle-flavoured, let alone exciting; that it wasn’t always a byword for naff. But as its name suggests, duck à l’orange had chic origins. And
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22 min listen
Amber Guinness is a cook, author, journalist and co-founder of The Arniano Painting School. Her first book, A House Party in Tuscany, is out now. On the podcast she discusses growing up in Tuscany, how to host a successful Tuscan dinner party and the best places to eat in Florence.
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I tend to hunker down on New Year’s Eve, eschewing parties for my own home. Even when I was young, the prospect of sleeping on someone else’s floor or braving the night bus home in the early hours of the morning didn’t really appeal. But sometimes I worry that that can lead to the night
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23 min listen
On this episode, Owen Matthews examines the original sin of Russia’s exiled media (00:44), Christopher Howse says Handel’s Messiah is as much a Christmas tradition as a pantomime (09:08), and Olivia Potts gives her recipe for boiled fruit cake (18:01). Get the full recipe to Olivia’s boiled fruit cake here: https://spectator.com/article/a-last-minute-alternative-to-christmas-cake-boiled-fruit-cake/
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This time last year, I was disgustingly well organised. Awaiting the arrival of my first baby, with a late December due date, I’d ensured everything was squirrelled or squared away. I’d bought all my presents by October, wrapped them by December; I’d made my Christmas cakes and bought my Terry’s Chocolate Orange. For the first
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‘This dish is very you,’ my husband says, as I serve up 650g of melted, boozy cheese to the two of us for a weekday lunch, alongside a teetering pile of bread cubes. He is, I’m afraid, right: it really is my favourite kind of eating. There’s nothing better than a communal pot in the
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25 min listen
John-Paul Flintoff is a journalist, writer and artist who has written a number of books including his most recent, Psalms for the City: Original poetry inspired by the places we call home. On the podcast they discuss John-Paul’s early aversion to peas, memories of his mother’s experimental cooking and how food aided his recovery from
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I am incapable of throwing anything away in the kitchen. In my fridge, there must be at least half a dozen pots of bits and bobs, dishes of leftovers and scraps. In my freezer, a bag of parmesan rinds has filled slowly, each intended to be chucked into a pot of soup or stew to
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22 min listen
Myleene is a singer, presenter and businesswoman, and Jamie is a restauranteur with a number of restaurants to his name. Together they have created the home meal kit My Supper Hero, which aims to provide great food and champion sustainable packaging. On the podcast they talk about their earliest memories of food, the monotony of
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When I was at university, there was a cafe nearby that made the millionaire’s shortbread of dreams: slabs as big as your hand, with soft caramel that only just held its shape, and would yield when bitten into; a thick layer of chocolate, and a base that somehow defied physics by being impossible crumbly and
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Meatloaf has some obstacles to overcome: it has an unprepossessing appearance, and an uninspiring, slightly off-putting name, which it shares with the famous singer. And it wasn’t a compliment when it was given to him: the singer’s father took one look at his newborn son and said he looked like ‘nine pounds of ground chuck’,
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31 min listen
Melissa Thompson is an award-winning food writer and cook who started a supper club, serving Japanese food in her front room in 2014. In September 2022, Melissa released her debut cookbook, Motherland. It explores the evolution of Jamaican food, from the island’s indigenous population to today. On the podcast, she talks to Liv Potts about
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Since 2011, black Africans have been the dominant black group in the UK. Many of them are the descendants of those travellers who came to London in the 1950s from Nigeria, Ghana and Somalia and other African countries, seeking education and prosperity, and found a new home. They now not only hold prominent positions in
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I’m a sucker for a challenge. I absolutely cannot resist a little competition. Throw down a gauntlet, and I am compelled to pick it up. That’s probably one of the reasons that I love bananas Foster so much: it owes its existence to a challenge. In the 1950s, New Orleans was a major port of
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23 min listen
Capri Cafaro was a member of the Ohio Senate for 10 years before becoming a political commentator. She can often be found on American television news channels and also hosts her own food podcast, Eat Your Heartland Out. On the podcast she talks to Lara and Olivia about memories of cooking Italian-American classics with her Grandma,
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‘Come along, kiddie-winkies! Come and get your treacle tart,’ the Child Catcher trills in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, to lure children away. The youngsters are particularly taken with the idea of treacle tart, and it’s not difficult to imagine why: unapologetically sweet and sticky, it’s irresistible to small, greedy hands. It’s easy to dismiss treacle
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Mussels were probably the first thing I ate as a child that I knew at the time was ‘an acquired taste’. They made me feel impossibly grown up, coming with a brigade of bowls, one for the mussels themselves, one for chips, one for bread, one for empty mussel shells, and a little lemon-scented bowl
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21 min listen
Ayesha Hazarika is a journalist, broadcaster, stand-up comic and former advisor to three Labour leaders. On the podcast, she discusses memories of her mother’s chicken curry, navigating bacon sandwich-gate with Ed Miliband and why all cooked orange coloured food is ‘minging’.
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If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, then a Trinity or Cambridge burnt cream must taste as sweet as its French twin, the crème brûlée. The two cooked custard dishes are essentially identical: an egg yolk-rich baked custard served cold and topped with a layer of hard caramel. Both are similar
