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
Beef Tagine with Prunes
Tagine - ‘meaning stew, is a category of dish fundamental to cookery in Morocco. The same word appears in the name of the special earthenware cooking recipient - Tagine Slaoui - with a distinctive pointed cover in which it is cooked’. The Oxford Companion to Food....
Pierogi
Frank Muir was a raconteur, comedy writer and former Head of Comedy at the BBC. In a TV interview, when asked as to his faith he replied “I’m a lapsed agnostic”. His tongue-in-cheek proclamations always managed to leave the synopsis hanging... Mr Muir’s dilemma...
Prawns with brown bread and butter
During the Second World War my father joined the AFS (Auxiliary Fire Service). Slow to engage and derided by some neighbours for not leaving for the ‘front’, his role as a domestic fireman had yet to be tested. The Blitz, which was soon to kill so many of his comrades...
Flatbread. Coca De Azúcar con Piñones y Anís
If Britain was regarded as the grain sack of the Roman Empire, then Spain was its bakery. Of all the early provinces of Rome, the bakers of Spain and Portugal (Iberia in Roman days) were regarded as the most accomplished in Europe. As with the dining tables of modern...
Salmon Fish Cakes with Lemon Sauce
At a time in the late ‘70’s when many chefs were still making their names following the parables espoused by Elizabeth David and her love affair of all things French, and home-cooking was seen as decidedly lacklustre, a young Gary Rhodes set his focus on overlooked...
Focaccia
“Visitors to Liguria may perhaps be classified into six main groups; the fashionable, the ultra-fashionable, and the would-be fashionable: the once fashionable, the unfashionable and the anti-fashionable” Jasper Moore. The Land of Italy (1949) It was some time ago...
![Cheese Puffs [Aigrettes au Fromage]](http://keithreeves.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_1383-400x250.jpg)
Cheese Puffs [Aigrettes au Fromage]
When spare time and inclination are unforthcoming, yet you still feel the need for a fresh, exciting supper, try this cheeky little stand-in for le fast-food. I have written elsewhere of how delicious, and simple, Burgundian Gougères can be, but these little golden...
Salade Niçoise
Some time ago, as an impecunious art student studying sculpture at Goldsmiths College, I paid the rent on a one-roomed flat in Ladbroke Grove building sets and props for theatre and television. I liked to think of these times as heralding my more practical years...
Porchetta
"If I had to narrow my choice of meat down to one for the rest of my life, I am quite certain that meat would be pork." James Beard Within a short radius of our village, we have a surfeit of that endangered species – the traditional butcher. At the risk of sounding...
Membrillo
A nearby farmer, whose commercial preoccupation is to encourage many thousands of unhappy hens to provide the nation’s supermarkets with inexpensive eggs, has at least one redeeming feature; he has a quince tree on his farm and he has no idea what to do with it. The...
Omelette
In her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1963), Julia Child offers a sensual introduction to her chapter on the omelette, “A good French omelette is a smooth, gently swelling, golden oval that is tender and creamy inside.” followed by her more familiar,...
Cauliflower Cheese
“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” Mark Twain, from Pudd’head Wilson Elsewhere on this site I have discussed the flagrant abuse suffered by our compact and creamy white cauliflower...
![Onion Soup [Soupe à l’oignon]](http://keithreeves.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_4061-400x250.jpg)
Onion Soup [Soupe à l’oignon]
"The classic soup à l'onion is truly a formidable beast - and you can pronounce that 'formidable' in either French or English with equal precision." Richard Ehrlich The Centre Pompidou in Paris is described by its architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, as “an...
Union Square Cafe’s Bar Nuts
"I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks" Paul Rudnick I first visited the Union Square Café in the early eighties at its original venue on E 16th Street, way before it relocated to the...
Meat and Potato Pie
“The pie-cook and the pie-consumer are both lucky if the smell of the pie 'sells' not only its desirability as biological fuel but also remembrance of pies past.” “It could be argued that there is an element of entertainment in every pie, as every pie is inherently a...
![Garlic Chicken [Poulet à l’àil]](http://keithreeves.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IMG_0282-400x250.jpg)
Garlic Chicken [Poulet à l’àil]
Elisabeth Luard, in her absorbing book European Peasant Cookery, introduces one of my most treasured poultry dishes from France with the following note from one of her close relatives whom she describes as a ‘gentleman-of-letters’: “Garlic eaters, assuredly wiser than...
![Galician Almond Tart [Tarte de Santiago]](http://keithreeves.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_3799-400x250.jpg)
Galician Almond Tart [Tarte de Santiago]
Some time ago I joined a trade delegation hosted by the commercial arm of the Spanish Embassy on a visit to Galicia, a region in the north western corner of Spain. Effectively a European jolly with as many wine samples as you could shake a corkscrew at. Flanked along...
Asparagus Tartlets
In The Go-Between, L. P. Hartley described the past as a foreign country, where they do things differently. I have a feeling author Laura Mason might not find the concept so convincing. In her lengthy introduction to The National Trust Farmhouse Cookbook, published in...