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Peppermint ice cream with chocolate chips
The best ice cream is vanilla bean ice cream, the best dessert is vanilla ice cream with just-warmed-through raspberries, but …
… you have to vary the routine occasionally, or else you’ll be sick of it before you know it. I made my way down this course when the peppermint bush started to grow and grow [...]
Peach Melba the way it used to be, should be
Sometimes we forget the most simple things. Which is why there has been such a trend in smart restaurants to serve up the old dishes that have been forgotten or so mistreated by years of sloppy cooking that they have been discredited. Thus lamb shanks, fish & chips, pesto, bread and butter pudding, a dozen [...]
Childhood memories: a Kreem-b-tween
The concept of the Kreem-b-tween was a triumph for Peters Ice Cream. You know the company — it went by the swinging slogan ‘The Health Food of a Nation’. The health freaks of the nineties might dispute that ice cream is a health food, stuffed, as it should be, with eggs, sugar, milk and cream! [...]
Creme brulee from New York’s Le Cirque
Crème brûlée is one of the simplest of desserts, and a triumph to serve — if you have the equipment to do the job. I fiddled and failed several times with this dessert all over the place — at home, in the restaurant, all ways — but couldn’t get that glassy caramel on top of [...]
Custard, the key to the door; to ice cream and more
Custard is one of those things we should mark down as an early and vital lesson in learning to cook, leading as it does to so many wonders at the end of the meal. What would a Christmas pudding be without a custard sauce? How would you sink into profiteroles without pastry cream? And ice [...]
Sweets: from breakfast to supper
The best dessert ever made starts with a punnet of perfectly ripe raspberries, fresh from the vine, picked at summer’s dusk; warmed through until the berries give just a little of their juice. The lot is then poured over vanilla bean ice cream, fresh from the churn.
But if you stop there, you stopped watching cricket [...]
A rose by any other name
I always believed ’sweetbreads’ was a modern moniker, a name doubtlessly dubbed by a smart butcher who couldn’t get rid of the not-so-little bloody blobs known more correctly as the thymus glands of vealers and lambs. Sex on the cover of a novel is said to guarantee sales, so sexy names to move non- sellers. [...]
Brains, for those who need them, love them
Brains used to be the real food of the masses; or more exactly, lambs’ brains and bacon served with a beer at the counter of your local pub. Not these days: all these old-fashioned cuts have become very old-fashioned. The new man, the new woman, have no place in their lives for brains and livers [...]
Duck livers with a crispy skin
The French, you will know well, rave about the livers of birds, notably that of the goose, but also that of the duck. Duck livers, too, are really the sort of food which you really have to love to like. There is no middle ground. But to eat them rare is not so much a [...]
Hare, slow-cooked
1 hare, jointed, fillets removed and kept separate
Trim the fillets as described in the previous recipe.
2 cups red wine
4 waxy potatoes, sliced into quarters
3 carrots, sliced roughly
1 celery stick, sliced roughly
1 clove garlic, sliced finely
1 hot chilli, sliced roughly
1 walnut-sized piece of ginger, sliced finely
water to cover
250g tin of tomatoes
3 teaspoons salt pasta shapes
bunch of [...]