I’ve never really liked ‘performance’ cookery. Most of the cooking I do is on the hoof, unplanned, un-shopped-for and generally last minute and chaotic. Quite often, it’s done without really enough time. It’s in this type of cooking that the real skill lies. What marks out a great cook is not the ability to produce [...]
Around this time of year, rhubarb tends to get tired and worn out. The stalks, those that haven’t been plundered already, are green and thick, with big umbrella-like leaves. Everything starts to look a bit Jurassic, overgrown and gnarled. The slender pink and red elegance of the early stalks has long faded, and the taste [...]
‘Bhuna‘ is a particular Asian cooking style where a sauce is reduced and reduced until it is so thick that it just clings to the meat, making the meat appear ‘browned’. Dishes cooked in the bhuna style are rich and pungent, the flavour of the spice mix concentrated down by the fierce reduction of the [...]
I feel like I’ve mastered a mysterious, secret art. I made a pork pie, and it was easy. More than that, it tasted astounding. Here’s how. Start with the pastry. The pastry is unusual as it’s made with hot water. It seems to go against everything you know about making pastry, but it does work. [...]
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution gave birth to Blake’s “dark, Satanic mills”, huge cathedrals of commerce producing cotton, wool, alpaca. Conditions in the mills were harsh – the workers started young and the hours were long, the work dangerous. The mills of the North were places to be feared, [...]