The last time I cooked with salt cod was a disaster. In retrospect, the particular piece of fish I bought looked like it had been sat in a dark and dusty corner of a market stall for several years before some poor mug came along to liberate it. That poor mug just happened to be [...]
Salt gets a bad press. I know it’s responsible for the untold misery of heart disease, high blood pressure and a thousand other fairly major medical complaints, but it also has a near mythical ability to preserve food and concentrate flavour, the closest thing to culinary alchemy there is. This duck prosciutto, a ham born [...]
It happens to all courgette growers. Turn your back for a day or so and the small, delicate fruits transform into gigantic marrows. They take over your plot, they take over your fridge. You kid yourself that courgette soup is nice, then you realise it isn’t. You throw them on the compost heap. Happens every [...]
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 [...]
An old method of preserving meat is to cook it slowly in fat, then leave it so that when the fat sets, the meat is entirely encased in it. Any type of meat can be cooked and preserved in this way, but the method is particularly suited to poultry, and especially to duck.To make confit [...]