It’s easy to forget just how influential French cooking is, how it’s still widely regarded as the ‘mothership’ of cuisines, the place where all the best techniques, the best ideas, the best recipes come from. If I had to choose just one cuisine and eat it for evermore, it’d be French. That might sound treacherous [...]
Good meat is important. If you’re going to eat an animal, the least you can do is to make sure that it was treated well when it was alive, and that you use its meat with care and respect. Can you always do this, though? Do you get a clear picture of where your meat [...]
I’ve been lucky enough to chance across a series of excellent cookbooks lately, all of which share a similar quality. They’re not just about food. Food might be their reason for existing, but this clutch of books have more, they have a feeling about them, a feeling that the author has got under the skin [...]
There’s a rather apologetic introduction to Ross Dobson’s book, Grillhouse, where the author dances around the fact that much of what’s to come feels a little retro and old-fashioned. Dobson argues that “we’ve never stopped enjoying classic, simple, hearty food. It may have been a while since it graced the covers of the foodie magazines [...]
“The truly delicious things are not always those that cost a fortune, but those that have been passed from generation to generation; you can taste their integrity.” Stevie Parle’s book My Kitchen: Real Food from Near and Far isn’t constrained by geography. This isn’t a collection of recipes with a defined focus on a particular [...]