Olivia Potts

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’, before persuading the hospital staff to put the name ‘Meat’ on his crib (which is real commitment to a joke). I can’t speak for baby Meat Loaf, but when it comes to the dish, the name is at least an extremely accurate description. Meatloaf is made up of ground meat (often beef, sometimes pork, occasionally veal, or a mixture thereof), cut with bread or other carbs, and bound together with egg.

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 entry for bananas shipped from Latin America. Owen Brennan, owner of the eponymous French-Creole restaurant Brennan’s, was no fool: his brother Joe’s produce firm, Brennan’s Processed Potato Company, was running a large surplus of bananas and he wanted to make the most of these readily available fruit. He challenged one of his chefs to come up with a banana dish that could be served at his restaurant.

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 of water to dip my fingers in. My dinner alone must have taken up half the table. From then on, I ordered mussels every time they were on the menu, knowing they would transform me from a gawky 12-year-old girl wearing cargo pants into a veritable sophisticate. But I never once tried moules mouclade. Like Socrates, Casanova and Beyoncé, mouclade is usually known only by its first name, la mouclade – the ‘moules’ implied by the ‘mouclade’.

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 to the crema Catalana you find throughout Spain (known as ‘crema cremada’ in Catalan cuisine), but Catalana is made with milk rather than cream. It means it is lighter, and tends to have a thinner, paler caramel layer. Lemon or orange zest and a cinnamon stick are often used as flavouring for the Spanish pudding, whereas a burnt cream or crème brûlée is traditionally only flavoured with vanilla.

It’s possible that, like me, your first encounter with the Grande Dame of the Austrian pastry world, the apfelstrudel, was not in fact in one of the famed Viennese grand cafés, but rather from the freezer aisle at the supermarket. If it was anything like mine, it was probably a latticed, puffed version; the one I remember from childhood had blackberries mixed into the apple, which peeked through the holes in the pastry. I have no interest in denigrating our Sunday lunch pudding staple. In fact I loved it, served with thick, cold custard, straight from the carton. But it is fair to say that a true apple strudel is a little different. Strudels – meaning a filled, enclosed layered pastry – can be sweet or savoury, but the apple version is by far the most famous.

Butter was not a major part of my childhood. In fact, I don’t remember it ever being in our fridge. My parents were subject to the saturated fat scaremongering of the 1980s, and consequently believed that butter was the enemy. Instead, we had spread: margarine, rebranded as a cholesterol-busting alternative to heart-clogging butter. But spread wasn’t so bad. It lubricated my sandwiches and melted on my toast. Spread was everyday. Butter was for high days and holidays. Otherwise, we were all certain to die young. Butter has always been a bellwether of the British psyche. We want luxury, but only every so often, and only so much – and we don’t want to pay too much for it.

One of the joys of writing about old-fashioned food is coming across dishes that are new to me, and turn out to be such a delight that they gain a recurring role in my cooking. Of course, some I’ve encountered were already among my established regulars – boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin. Others were childhood staples – shepherd’s pie, proper rice pudding. But a few of the dishes I take into my kitchen to work with I’ve never even tried before. The first recipe I wrote for The Spectator was for blancmange. Having grown up during the brief period when milk jelly was fashionable, I’d avoided blancmange like the plague. I was sure it must be rubbery, flavourless and a bit, well, creepy.