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
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...
![Moussaka [Μουσακάς]](http://keithreeves.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/41CFBCB6-4E88-4AF0-A2CD-6C696044E06E_1_105_c-400x250.jpeg)
Moussaka [Μουσακάς]
“We do not sit at the table to eat… but to eat together” Plutarch, Greek philosopher. (46 AD - 119 AD) As we are living through an era plagued by travel uncertainty, with the welcome whiff of sea salt, scorching sand beneath the feet, scrubbed white dwellings...
![Borshch [борщ]](http://keithreeves.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/711B21A3-D51C-4389-B3F9-603B7701EDE2_1_105_c-400x250.jpeg)
Borshch [борщ]
I have a few colleagues who when pressed to provide a short list of culinary dislikes, blandly cite beetroot as one of their vegetable aversions (located somewhere between broad beans and parsnips on the unrefined straw polls I occasionally undertake down the pub)....
Fresh Apricot Preserve
“At its best the Apricot has a certain Eastern lusciousness, a touch of the exotic which comes strangely into our homely country. In some Persian palace whose quiet garden hears only the tinkle of a fountain it would seem to find its right setting, fitly waiting on a...
Celeriac Rémoulade
"A good supper is a rare thing today. Gastronomy is like poetry: it has fallen into a complete decadence... The causes of this decadence are well known: thoughtlessness, fatuity, overweening ambition are only small and ordinary sins; the most complete...
Devonshire Honey Cake
“I did it without reading the script, because I said, ‘Who’s in it?’ and they gave me this great big star list: Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland, Richard Widmark, Jose Ferrer,” Caine said. “I told them ‘I’ll do it.’ One day we were all having a conversation with live...
Greens with Pork Belly
Have you ever stood in your butchers shop or alternatively the butcher's counter at your local supermarket (where staff don straw boaters and striped aprons in order to convince you that they, and they alone, really did make the sausages that morning), and been...
Simple Bread Rolls
Some unusual things turn up when you’re looking for something elsewhere. Advancing shades of Don Quixote I fear. I was searching amongst the horizontal metres of cookbooks - a quantity of invaluable publications that my family frequently find time to pillory - in a...
Dolmades and Spanakopita
Back in the ‘70’s, as an impecunious art student, a first date found us watching The Blue Max at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square. Apart from the romantic delight sparked by my potential new partner, I have no idea as to why I picked that particular film. I had no...
Mashed Potato
“What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.” A. A. Milne The Spanish tag surrounding the Conquistadores and their early colonising shenanigans still retains a hint of missionary altruism coupled with shades of...
Pastéis de Nata. Portugese egg tarts.
"No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be a falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilising...
![Chicken soup with egg-lemon sauce [Avgolemono]](http://keithreeves.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_8988-400x250.jpg)
Chicken soup with egg-lemon sauce [Avgolemono]
Back in the seventies, whilst transitioning between impecunious art student and manqué sculptor, I was pleased to accept any and all invitations to attend select private views that generally preceded most art exhibitions. Be it in a national museum, ad hoc pop-up in a...
Lemon Pavlova
As a former wine merchant, often as a guest on lengthy wine tours skipping from one European winery to another via sauna-hot coaches filled with assorted media personal, a morbidly topical alternative to I-Spy became a frequent distraction amongst wine writers. It...
![Potato Straw Cake [Pommes Paillasson]](http://keithreeves.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_8895-400x250.jpg)
Potato Straw Cake [Pommes Paillasson]
Humour me if you will, and see if you can come up with the author: “…a sort of convergence of all the senses - the awareness through touching, and also through smelling, hearing, seeing and tasting that something is ‘just right’…to know by pinching and judging the...
Spaghetti with Clams
“I’ve been picking it up and putting it down for weeks now. I can’t say I’ve actually cooked anything from it. More, what I’m doing is deciding whether I can live up to its exacting standards” So wrote poet and journalist James Fenton in the Independent newspaper...
Salmon en Croute with currants and ginger
Some years ago our son announced that he would, in line with previous years, be joining us in Norfolk for the Christmas period. On this particular occasion he would be bringing his delightful new partner - disconcertingly called Charlotte. I say disconcertingly,...