Olivia Potts

I am evangelical about scones as a gateway bake – they are the perfect entry point for the nervous baker. They don’t require any nonsense. Rubbing the butter and flour together by hand and stamping the dough out is straightforward; and as long as a scone is risen and golden-topped after baking, then you’re fine. But more than that, if you can bring a scone dough together – and you can, I promise – then you can bring any pastry dough together. I’m not suggesting you open a pâtisserie while your first batch is still in the oven, but rather that scones can be a confidence-builder for the novice baker, in a way that biscuits, cakes and brownies can be quite the opposite.

Whenever I think of steak tartare, I can’t help but remember a heartbreaking passage in Nigel Slater’s memoir Toast. Slater, working at a French restaurant in a Midlands hotel as a young man, is desperate to try the steak Diane. He books a table there for himself and a date. In a moment of madness, he accidentally orders the steak tartare instead. Expecting a rich, cream-spiked, butter-fried, brandy-flambéed steak, he is first surprised, and then horrified when a waiter begins chopping up raw meat alongside him. ‘I felt cold, then hot, then cold again. The little egg yolks seemed to be looking up at me, laughing. Then everyone was laughing.’ He goes outside and faints.

I have a complicated relationship with elderflower cordial. I love taking ingredients that have short seasons, preserving and squirrelling them away for future enjoyment. And I’m cheap, so the fact that the main component comes from the hedgerow is appealing. And it’s fun! It is a little like making a potion, dunking whole heads of flowers into an enormous pan and then leaving it to steep for days, before bottling it. Magical. But the truth is, I really don’t like drinking the cordial. It is too floral, too perfumed, too green. It’s just not for me.

We all have our quirks when it comes to cooking. I have clear mental blocks over what is and is not a complicated supper, many of which do not follow any kind of logic. I wouldn’t think twice about setting a sauce or ragu going early in the day, blipping gently, returning to it every so often for a stir and a taste, knowing that it will take hours and not inconsiderable attention before it is ready. I don’t mind at all making dough which will need proving and shaping as the afternoon wanes. I even find the act of slicing or chopping various different components meditative. The result is neat little parcels of golden-brown crunchy breadcrumbs encasing chicken, cheese and ham But there are processes that set off klaxons in my head: warning, warning, avoid.

I have become obsessed with the French idea of goûter, the time in the afternoon when French schoolchildren have a sweet treat to tide them over from the end of the school day until dinner. It’s just teatime, really, a pause for an afternoon snack – my kid has the same, but we don’t have such an elegant word for it (and his tends to be a gobbled Babybel, and rejected cucumber sticks, which is far less fun) – but giving it its own distinct name and place in the day is charming.

Poor old parsley sauce. As someone who writes regularly about old-fashioned food, it often feels that we are living through a golden revival of vintage dishes. You can’t move for cookbook concepts pinned on comfort and nostalgia, or restaurants attempting to take the diner on some kind of Proustian journey. Whether it’s nursery food, school dinners, classical bistro French cooking, hyper-regional food, or the polarising ‘reinvention’ of any of the above, old-fashioned ingredients are in vogue again. In trendy restaurants menus are littered with rabbit, offal, marmalade, boozy prunes; with steamed suet puddings (sweet and savoury), duck à l’orange, prawn cocktails, rice pudding, hand-raised pies… Ten years ago, devilled eggs were naff. Not now.

Linzer torte has quite the claim to fame: some assert that it’s the oldest cake in the world; others that it’s the oldest to be named after a place. It feels churlish to split hairs, but those two assertions are quite different, aren’t they? In any event, it’s certainly very old. For a long time it was thought it dated back to 1696, when it was mentioned in a recipe held in the Vienna City Library. But 20 years ago, an earlier reference was found by Waltraud Faißner, a Linzer torte historian, dating it to 1653 in the snappily titled Book of All Kinds of Home-Made Things, Such as Sweet Dishes, Spices, Cakes and also Every Kind of Fruit and Other Good and Useful Things etc.

My husband is obsessed with pretzels. The joy that a slightly warm, soft baked pretzel brings him is disproportionate. And, unlike in Germany and the States, where soft pretzels are ubiquitous, they are hard to come by here. So, for a while I have been trying to perfect the pretzel. It has not been smooth sailing. Throwing your pretzels into a cauldron of water feels somewhere between heresy and madness Pretzels are tricky: as well as being made from bread dough, and therefore yeasted, they are boiled before baking, have a very distinctive flavour, and their shaping requires a certain knack. Getting them right was a labour of love. But now I’ve cracked it, which means you should be able to avoid my pitfalls.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but perhaps you can teach it old tricks. When I embarked on making a Boston cream pie, I thought I knew it all when it came to sponge cakes. I’d creamed butter and sugar, using elbow grease and a wooden spoon or employing the horsepower of a stand mixer’s whisk attachment. I’ve used the all-in-one-method; I’ve melted butter and folded it into cake batters in the pursuit of sticky denseness. And I’ve folded in egg whites, holding my breath in an attempt not to knock any air out of the mix. But I had never made a Boston cream pie, and so I had never made a hot milk sponge. Could this old dog learn something new?

A pot roast is probably the antithesis of glamorous cooking. But that’s also sort of the point. For as long as we’ve been cooking meat, we’ve looked for ways to make the tougher cuts more tender and succulent. It’s the kind of cooking that every culture around the world has developed individually, a way of transforming the cheap and possibly unappetising into something delicious. The answer is simple, and relies on three elements: low heat, moisture and a lidded cooking vessel. A homely and economical way of bringing the best out of an unprepossessing joint Pot roast is the American way of slow-cooking whole joints of unforgiving meat, usually a piece of beef (although similar principles apply to pork and lamb).

The Chelsea bun was first baked in the Bun House in Chelsea in the 18th century. It was a bakery which found particular favour with the Hanoverian royal family, as its pastries were reminiscent of those from whence they came. But these buns were for everyman: they were customarily bought by the poor on Good Friday along with hot cross buns. On these days, the demand was such that the buns were sold through an opening in the shutters, and a police presence was needed. The Bun House was headed up by Richard Hand who was known as ‘Captain Bun’; after his death, the shop passed on to one of his sons and then another. In 1839 there was no one left to take it on, and the shop closed.