Category: Food
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Fancy comfort
It was quiet when we went for lunch at The Peacock in Chelsworth, on a friend’s recommendation. However, I definitely got the impression that even if it had been crowded we would have received the same friendly, attentive and relaxed service. The Peacock is kind of fancy, inasmuch as it…
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For the bakers
I’m fortunate enough to be closely related to someone (my mum) who is something of an authority on the state of scholarship around bread and baking, and she recommended Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery as remaining one of the best secondary sources, more than forty years after its…
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Culturing flavour
The world of ‘elite food’ raises certain questions. It would be easy to write off entirely, from a social justice point of view: good food is domestic food, and everyone should have access to it. Even in a world of perfect economic equality, there would be no way that we…
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Sharing
Rachel Roddy’s second book is full of anecdotes and recollections, little narrative vignettes about her immediate household, the extended Sicilian family she’s married into, her English parents, the people from whom she buys food in Rome and Sicily, people she cooks with, and so on. I don’t go a bundle…
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A kitchen quadrivium
This book made a big noise on release, and Spouse bought me a copy for Christmas shortly thereafter, which I promptly forgot about. Last year I made a decision to start working my way through all the unread food books I’d been receiving for Christmas and birthday gifts, and since…
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Eyes the same size as her stomach
Luchie (as illustrator and cartoonist Lucie Bryon likes to call herself) was apparently blessed with extremely large eyes as a child. In pictures of herself as an adult, she has extremely large glasses. Although she writes in convincing idiomatic English, she is a Francophone, and this may be why the…
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Food as illustration
In Western Europe we take holidays on the Mediterranean, we hear about migrants attempting to cross it, we imagine our histories as entwined with it—the cradle of a Roman Empire that impinged on the continent’s most distant fringes, bringing olives, wine, and dozens of other markers of its cultures and…
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Enough of a twist
High Georgian ceilings, above vast, perfectly proportioned sash windows, speak to me of cosy home comfort. Wherever I am, if I can look up and past my surroundings to that kind of a backdrop, I’m back in toddler-hood, lazing in that delicious torpor of the up-too-late surrounded by noisy, kindly,…
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Congenial hubris
Spouse and I first visited The Sheep Heid Inn at the end of a long walk with Spawn, through Holyrood Park in near total darkness. It was the Saturday before November 5, and we’d been planning to climb Arthur’s Seat for a view of any fireworks that might be going…
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A ritual of sipping and nibbling
I am wearing my new coat. It is a rather jaunty, fashionable coat, but it is also very smart, so I feel quite in command of the situation as we enter the Signet Library in Edinburgh. I have elected to go scruffy for this visit to the city, rather than…
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The start of a new history?
Roughly as long as my life has had something resembling its present form, I’ve been going to the Angel in Stoke-by-Nayland. Initially it was an outlier, as the Black Horse was a fairly standard pub (which nobody I knew went to, owing to the pathological unfriendliness of the owners), and…
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A hangover cure in the form of a building
Comfort comes in nostalgia-sized portions, and for the eponymous ‘Mum’ that nostalgia is focussed on the 1970s. This is evident in the decor at Mum’s Great Comfort Food in Edinburgh, in the period TV quotes on the menus, rendered in appropriate typefaces, and to some extent in the menu, although…
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A life lived in the kitchen
I don’t come from anywhere in particular. I’m a Turkish jew with an Italian name on my father’s side, and I’m a characteristically rootless kind of middle-class English on my mother’s, with bits of Norfolk, West-Country, Kent, Wales and whatever-else in the family histories that precede my arrival in a…
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Slightly scuffed culinary theatre
I know about as much about Japanese food as you can find out about Italian food by eating in Pizza Hut. I have eaten sushi, sometimes ostentatiously Japanese in its immediate preparation, but consistently of a character that will be familiar to British consumers. I have eaten noodle soups described…
Oliver Arditi 