Recipes from a Wine Merchant’s Kitchen
A tale of 250 of my family’s favourite meals.
I have been cooking for over 40 years, for my wife initially and then, one by one, for my children. It was, and still remains, a pleasure and privilege to feed my family each day. What I have never categorised is the collection of recipes that would serve to illustrate the many thousands of meals I have cooked for them and their friends. Now was the opportunity and imperative to do so.
Recipes
Guanciale & Spaghetti all’ Amatriciana
Amongst the guardians of Semitic languages, pigs get burdened with a bad press. In some faiths, they are regarded as ‘unclean’ animals, mainly because, whilst rummaging in the wild, they will eat virtually anything - carrion, garbage, even animal excrement. Not so...
Pain de Campagne
I have for some time laboured under the twin beliefs that everyone who worked their own kitchen should fashion some home baked bread once in a while and that all shop-bought loaves teetered on the brink of the inedible. Well it turned out that some modification of...
Jerusalem Artichoke Soup
Blackadder: “Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?” Baldrick: “Yes, it's like goldy and bronzy only it's made out of iron”. In my determined quest to reduce our household consumption of meat, treating it as an occasional pleasure rather than a daily expectation, I...
Picallili
A lady friend - refined, middleclass stock, Dubarry wellies in season and a penchant for Mercedes estates - frequently ‘throws’ dinner parties. She never deigns to provide simple suppers. We bump into each other on occasion at a nearby Country Market. Part farmer’s...
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...
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...