There was a piece in The Guardian this weekend that tried to divide cookbooks into two clear categories – ‘lifestyle’ books and ‘instructional’ books. Most of the celeb chef fodder falls clearly into the ‘lifestyle’ category, along with many more serious books, such as Jennifer McLagan’s book about offal. I wrote about that one the other [...]
Hunger makes beans taste like almonds – Italian folk saying It was cold today. That feeling of winter has been creeping in for a few weeks now, the leaves piling up and swirling around the bottom of trees and against walls, things turning brown, dying, hibernating. It felt like winter, and I’ve started to cook [...]
Go into any supermarket, and most butchers, and there’ll be shelves full of neatly butchered meat, prize cuts of rump, sirloin, tenderloin…the premium parts of the animal. What’s missing is the rest of the beast, all the other parts that don’t make up the standardised, easy to handle, easy to cook cuts that people so [...]
Baking is one of the most difficult forms of cookery, at least in my opinion. It’s more a branch of science than a culinary endeavour, one that needs precision and technique, both of which are some way beyond me. I’m also not an habitual eater of dessert. I like the odd cake every now and [...]
For a few years, I looked after an allotment. The ground was full of rocks and half the plot was shaded by a line of enormous trees that plunged the canal into darkness on one side and the bottom half of our plot into a kind of permanent semi-gloom on the other. We did OK [...]