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
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...
Jansson’s Temptation
When Douglas Adams first introduced us to the world of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and Marvin the Paranoid Android, courtesy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a comedy science-fiction franchise was born. That was in 1979. Nearly a decade later, in 1987, a more...
Coq au Riesling
Coq au Vin is the quintessential bistro dish that remains a sublime French country classic and an essential part of what was once known as cuisine paysanne, a style of cuisine with which we may all have to become better acquainted given the predicted trajectory of...
Breakfast Baps
“A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde Whilst revisiting a charming recipe with which to provide my daily bread (Breakfast Baps - Elizabeth David’s oft overlooked gem in her publication English Bread and Yeast Cookery of 1977), a...