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 5 – No place like home cooking
“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at one’s most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus...
Begin. Part 6 – Wine for all reasons
“Life is too short to drink bad wine”. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe We live in a time where more wine is available to more people than ever before in...
Recipes
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...
Lemon, Cumin and Green Chilli Sea Bass
"O Lord God, when thou givest to thy servants to endevour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same, until it be thoroughly finished, which yieldeth the true glory..."Sir Francis Drake Early home-cooking...
Mini Yorkshire Puddings and Horseradish Sauce
In what seems like a past life, I once laboured under the title of restaurateur. With my business partner Richard, a former TV producer, we drifted into ownership of a pub-come-restaurant in East Anglia. On the day we purchased the building, the irksome truth was that...
Ribollita
“Soup is cuisine’s kindest course”. Virginia Woolf. Unlike Virginia, I have written elsewhere, and far less eloquently, on concerns borne out of an offhand relationship with soup. In a nutshell; I was a latecomer to broth making. An early aversion came in the form of...
Thyme, onion and Gruyère tart
"There is a charm in making a dish, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will survive the competition in the mixture." Annie Besant 1847 -1933 Although Heinz tinned spaghetti...