Notes and recipes from a Wine Merchant’s Kitchen
A tale of 250 of my family’s favourite meals.
Falling in love with exciting food and wine is a swift and easy process, providing it daily, at home for my family, is a lot more demanding. Notes and recipes from a Wine Merchant’s Kitchen looks back on the successes and mishaps of a life spent casting around for culinary discoveries.
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Notes
Begin. Part 2 -Facing the oven
“Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us, the place...
Begin. Part 3 – A Change of Mind
"Give me a doctor partridge-plump, Short in the leg and broad in the rump, An endomorph with gentle hands Who'll never make absurd demands...
Begin. Part 4 – Growing our food
"Anyone who has been fortunate enough to eat fresh, home-cooked vegetables in France remembers them with pleasure. The French are interested in...
Recipes
A Norfolk cottage pie
Stendhal (19th century French writer and diarist) “The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same”. On the subject of recipes - words matter. They serve to define expectation. Shepherd's pie or Cottage pie, is there a...
Rich Pigeon Pâté
Genesis 1:26. Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” Not wishing...
Tinned sardines and Pasta con le Sarde
🎵Oh for the life of a sardine That is the life for me Cavorting and spawning every morning Under the deep blue sea. To have no fear for storm or gale Oh to chase the tail of a whale Oh for the life of a sardine, That is the life for me. 🎵 From the song...
Sorrel soup
The leaves ‘sharpened the appetite, strengthened the heart, and gave so great a sharpness to a salad…that it should never be omitted” John Evelyn 1620 – 1706 That the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence is a prosaic reduction of Ovid’s earlier, more...
Nut Roast
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little”. Edmund Burke. 1729-97 When a sanguine publisher suggested I write a fashionably contextualised book based on East Anglian cuisine with the focus on ingredients, terroir and...
Fave e pecorino
“Simple food does not necessarily mean quick food or even easy food, though it can be both. Keeping it simple means being pure in effect - finding natural rhythms and balances allowing food to taste of itself. Simple food does not hide behind a sauce of concealment,...
Duck Confit & Fleur de Sel
A while ago, I embarked upon a contemporary magazine project focusing on food and wine. Armed with my new title of Editor-in-Chief - and pausing only briefly to lower the bar within the elevated world of publishing - spontaneous plans were drawn up to undertake a...