Dhruv Baker won Masterchef a few years ago. Now, normally at this point, I’d start reeling off a whole series of snide, unhelpful and generally smart arse comments about TV chefs, etc, etc, but I remember Baker coming across as a nice chap, and his food was astonishingly good, so much so that the relish [...]
There are a lot of cookbooks emerging at the moment that concentrate on Eastern Mediterranean food. It’s a broad and interesting cuisine, shaped in large part by geography and the region’s position as the buffer between East and West. Nowhere is this more acute than in Turkey, whose largest city straddles continents, a foot in the east, [...]
Japanese food has a reputation for being different and difficult, mainly because that very difference helps to create an illusion of difficulty … it’s a kind of self-perpetuating myth. Japanese cuisine is in many ways so radically different to Western food, and its strangeness is off-putting to some people … after all, this is a food culture [...]
Many cookbooks come from a family’s kitchen, a reflection of the food they cook and eat together. This is good. It shows that food is more than just fuel, that it’s a means of drawing people together, something that knits through the fabric of daily life. Sharon Salloum’s book of Syrian food, Almond Bar, has [...]
Before I begin, some confessions: I sometimes have soup from a can for lunch I don’t often make a soup from scratch at home When I do, I sometimes freeze whatever’s left, never label it, and end up chucking unidentifiable blocks of frozen matter away countless months later This is a very poor state of [...]