Of all the myriad ways of preserving, confit always strikes me as wonderfully improbable. The ability to preserve meat just through cooking it slowly in its own fat feels particularly wild. And the fact that this simple, unlikely process makes the meat more tender, more flavoursome than any other way of handling it only adds
My mother, a Yorkshire woman, would occasionally take shortcuts in the kitchen, but not when it came to a roast, and certainly not when it concerned a Yorkshire pudding. She even owned a specific Tupperware shaker for the job: like a plastic cocktail shaker, in 1970s orange colour, with a propellor insert, and a lidded
Chess pie was, in one sense, new to me when I started learning about it a few months ago. I’d never heard of this favourite of the American South until I came across it in a pie-centric cookery book. But in another sense, it’s extremely familiar – both to me and to anyone who’s ever
For a while now, we’ve been living through a renaissance of classical British cooking: a whole host of restaurants have been embracing the joy of the old school, the pies and puddings, the traditional and the retro. But there’s something missing. Bring back the savoury! An Edwardian favourite, a ‘savoury’ was an extra course that
Yeast scares even some of the most proficient cooks. I know home cooks and professionals alike, food writers and fanatics, who wouldn’t think twice about deboning a duck or rustling up a feast for 14, who quail the moment they hear the word ‘yeast’. I understand the trepidation: yeast is a living thing and, as
Chicken tikka masala has become something of a joke. When, in the late 2000s, it was topping lists of the nation’s favourite dishes, its popularity was seen as an indictment of British cuisine: we nick stuff from other cultures, strip out its character and call it our own. This is all deeply unfair: chicken tikka
A confession: I don’t like being messy. I think this is something of a failing in a home baker, but I can’t deny it. I can’t stand dough on my hands. I don’t like getting buttercream on myself when I ice a cake. I love arancini, but my God, the mess! I might as well
When we were little we used to go on holiday to the same place in Brittany, a picturesque, quiet coastal town. There wasn’t a lot to do there for children, but I always looked forward to the holidays because of the food. It was the first time I was exposed to French food, and it
I always feel pulled toward citrus at the start of the year. Initially it was subconscious: I’d just find myself in the kitchen making a lemon drizzle cake. But now I actively plan my citrusy January. As Christmas recedes, I make notes of recipes that I’m craving, and almost all of them call for a
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
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
‘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
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
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’,
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
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
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
Laurie Colwin wrote: ‘No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.’ It is one of my favourite quotes about cooking, mainly because it feels true: everything you cook
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
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
