People have dried meat to preserve it for thousands of years. The practice seems to have arisen independently in both South America and Africa, with the two traditions cross-pollinating with the Spanish conquests of the Americas. The Native Americans eventually adopted the Spanish word for their dried meat, ‘charque‘, changed the inflection and morphed it [...]
Sometimes, I like simple. Those meals that are just thrown together with little effort and less thought, the ones that somehow transcend their parts and become something quite wonderful because of either the sheer quality of their ingredients or the application of a transformative cooking process. This is one such dish – a deep, rich [...]
I made this pie yesterday. It was a simple, lazy Saturday afternoon, and we had some friends round who we see far too little of. Everybody drank coffee and talked and sat in the sun, and the kids played, and I holed up in the kitchen, listened to John Coltrane and made a pie. And [...]
A few years’ ago, I did a one-day crash course in baking all things French and croissant related at the wonderful Handmade Bakery in Slaithwaite. It was a lot of fun, and the batch of croissants I came away with were the best I’ve ever managed, mainly because of the expert guidance on hand to [...]
So, it’s January, and it’s very, very cold at the moment. That means that now is the perfect time to cure some meat and hang it out to dry in a shed, outside of a refrigerator, without too much fear of death from botulism. I exaggerate slightly – botulism is very rare, and basic hygiene [...]