There are dozens of Italian cookbooks on my shelves. It’s a cuisine I return to time and time again, because it’s accessible, exciting and packed with flavour. Its reliance on good ingredients, cooked simply, cooked well suits my own approach to food. Most of all, the food of Italy never stops surprising me – the [...]
The past few years have seen an explosion in craft brewing in Yorkshire, with small breweries popping up everywhere, producing a wide range of styles of beer, beer of real character and quality. This revolution in brewing has left Yorkshire with 123 breweries, but without its biggest, most iconic brewery, after Carlsberg pulled the plug [...]
Hmm. Hard to know what to think of this … Manly Food is a cookbook dedicated to food with a distinctly masculine edge. I had to stop and think about that for a while. What does it actually mean? What is ‘masculine’ food, and what makes it so? There are hints, of course, nudges in [...]
Sicily is one of the most interesting parts of Italy, not least from a culinary position. The island’s position as the biggest in the Mediterranean, the ball to Italy’s boot, means that it’s endured attack and invasion from all sides, each successive wave of occupation leaving another layer on the island’s cuisine. The effect has [...]
The last book I read by Jennifer McLagan was about offal and other often overlooked cuts of meat. This book, Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient with Recipes,an earlier volume, is about little more than fat, the stuff that we’re not really supposed to eat too much of, but which plays a huge part [...]