I write about food. And other things. Books inc Consider the Fork, First Bite. Founder of @TastEdFeed: taste education. Next: a cookbook. THE SECRET OF COOKING
Based in United Kingdom
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This is just to say thank you again to everyone who has cooked from THE SECRET OF COOKING. It’s a third off at Amazon U.K. until dec 1st. But know I would be every bit as delighted if you got it from one of the great independent booksellers who have supported it. Or a library.
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Do you remember your very first taste of plum? Headteacher @jasorourke of @washingborough recorded this three year-old trying her first plum as part of @tastedfeed. She goes from fear to curiosity to joy. As discussed on the @nytopinion podcast.
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Butter-poached carrots from The Secret of Cooking was recipe of the day on @nytcooking! Thank you so much to @ericjoonho for the beautiful write-up (and prodigious recipe testing) which made me see the simplicity of the recipe in a whole new light. 🙏🧡
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On these cold days, I can’t say how much comfort I am getting from this book of NEW SCOTTISH BAKING from @SueHLawrence. Cheese scones, flapjacks, oatcakes, bannocks, shortbread and so much more. It would make a lovely present.
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P.S. with thanks to @Booksforcooks for this lovely window display. The title recipe is Sylvia Plath's favourite cake recipe which she adopted from her mother. As the title suggests, it's flavoured with canned tomato soup as well as cinnamon, cloves, allspice and nutmeg.
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On top of all his other writing achievements, Vladimir Nabokov wrote the greatest ever recipe for a soft-boiled egg. It's one of the recipes by famous writers in this little volume which I wrote the foreword to. I'll be on @BBCFrontRow tonight talking about it w/ @JLQuoVadis
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Things that make me happy in the kitchen. The way a pestle sometimes rolls by itself when you put it down. As if it’s alive.
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My happiest reading has all been thanks to libraries and physical bookshops. So I’m not suggesting anyone should go to Amazon in preference to those. But in case it’s of interest,THE SECRET OF COOKING is 40% off for just 2 days (8th and 9th) October.
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You can toast pine nuts in the microwave! 2 mins on a plate followed by thirty second intervals until done. Also you can make these ‘semi-confit’ tomatoes with a little oil and garlic. Among many things I’ve learned from MICROWAVE MEALS by Tim Anderson.
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What a joy to celebrate five years of @tastedfeed at Honey and Smoke @Honeyandco with TastEd patron @we_are_food last night. So many thanks to everyone who made it happen, especially @FranABox and to the people who came along, including teachers who are doing TastEd every week.
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Taste may be identity but it isn't destiny. I so much enjoyed talking to @LoriLizarraga for @NPRCodeSwitch about food preferences, FIRST BITE (@BasicBooks) and how we can change the foods we love at any age (in answer to a question from a listener, Anton, about picky eating).
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It’s a year since THE SECRET OF COOKING was published. Thank you so much to anyone who’s cooked from it so far (and all the people who have told me they are using their spider and box grater more). 💙
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'We see droughts in soy-growing regions in Brazil'. @DoctorChrisVT talking about how while the modern food system has been sold to us as good for food security, it is actually endangering food security and the environment as well as human health. #GoodwoodHealthsummit
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'The accounts that leap on you in the most aggressive way are industry funded'. @DoctorChrisVT on how so many of the messages on nutrition online are influenced (and funded) by the ultra-processed food industry. #GWhealthsummit
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'We talk about healthy choices but a lot of the women we serve don't have a choice'. A brilliant and important conversation this morning between @louiseckenny and @DoctorChrisVT about how the British food system does harm both to children and their mothers. #Goodwoodhealthsummit
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Some of the best-ever book launch food at the party tonight for @romygill’s Romy Gill’s India @HardieGrantUK at Carousel. Every conversation I had was about how hungry it was making us. And then just ‘mmm’. Dal makhani, butter chicken, samosa chaat. Here’s Romy with @ajesh34
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Thank you, @meerasodha, for making me see that I needed a julienne peeler. To make the Thai tomato and courgette salad in her excellent new book DINNER
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Should soup come at the start of the meal or the end? At Pontocho Sushi Ishiya in Kyoto, during a sublime dinner, it came twice: this delicate broth at the start and miso soup at the end. This was what inspired me to write about the grammar of food for @WSJ
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'My school is in a sea of corn'. This was my all-time favourite letter I got from a reader during my time writing the Table Talk column for @WSJ. From a fifth-grade high school teacher called Brian Hayes who said he was going to use my column on CORN for teaching 120 students.
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Also on the subject of chickpeas, terrible photo but this might be the most delicious chickpea thing I've eaten. Cooked by Syrian chef Faraj Alnasser. It was so deep in flavour just from chickpeas and their broth cooked with olive oil plus more crispy chickpeas on top.
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‘Take a pound of rocks and turn them into something creamy and delicious’ is how Steve Sando of @RanchoGordo describes cooking beans. I write about BEANS and how to cultivate a taste for them at any age (as one way to eat more sustainably) in today’s @nytimes.
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Also this! Cold soba noodles with Sudachi (a lime-like citrus fruit) on top. Made me think of the great cooking potential of cold noodle dishes in the summer such as @ericjoonho Cold Noodles with Zucchini.
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A teapot of soba noodle cooking water (sobaya). Of all the things I loved about the soba noodles at @osobanokouga in Tokyo, my favourite was drinking the soba cooking water at the end. The idea is to get back the nutrients lost to the water. It also tastes deeply umami.
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Other highlights of the @GuildFoodWriter awards included @PrueLeith winning the Lifetime Achievemnet award, watched by the great @ChefKenHom, last year's winner. Also @demarionunn for restaurant reviewing, @timhayward for food writing, Alex Jackson for International Cookbook
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I've wanted to write a cookbook ever since I was 8, sitting at the kitchen table. So it's hard to express what this means. THE SECRET OF COOKING won the General Cookbok award at @GuildFoodWriter awards last night. Thank you so much to the judges & to all of you who have read it x
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‘It made me see new places with a little sniff’ wrote a year 4 child in a @tastedfeed lesson after smelling mint, one of my all-time favourite responses in a TastEd lesson. I’m so proud and happy that TastEd celebrates 5 years of being a charity today!
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‘To some people, jerk …may be mere recipes, but to me [it is an] expression of resourcefulness and resilience’. I can’t wait to start cooking from KIN by Marie Mitchell @ParticularBooks having heard her talk about it so powerfully just now @britishlibrary #FoodSeason
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What a lovely audience at @CharlestonTrust #CharlestonFestival earlier for a FOOD WISDOM talk with me @leylakazim & @HughFW. Things discussed included the joy of beans, cooking alone, @tastedfeed (& food education in general) & how complicated food choices can seem.
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Happy publication to @edentravels for COLD KITCHEN, wh I was lucky to read in proof form & wh I spotted in Topping’s St Andrew’s. Like all of Caroline’s books, this draws on her travels but is set more in her Edinburgh kitchen & deals with loss, home & smashed bowls.
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Two pressure cooker cookbooks from the mid 1950s, when the pressure cooker was considered a glamorous and time- and energy saving device (to me, it still is). One of the books is English and one is Spanish…
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I’ve been dreaming of going to @Ballymaloe for twenty years. The person who first told me about it died 16 years ago. And finally I went. And it was all even better than I imagined, from the banks of wild garlic to the dessert trolley to the brown bread at breakfast.
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And huge congratulations to @DoctorChrisVT whose ULTRA-PROCESSED PEOPLE won Debut Food Book of the year #fandmawards @Fortnums (and congrats to all the other winners including @BBCFoodProg @fuchsiadunlop Emiko Davies Ajesh Patalay @FT)
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A cookbook is the most collaborative thing I’ve ever worked on. It was wonderful to catch up at #fandmawards @Fortnums w/ photographer Matt Russell whose images added so much to THE SECRET OF COOKING. Also thanks to my publisher Patrick Hargadon @4thEstateBooks
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On the subject of #crackers, here were fenugreek crackers with sambal at @SambalShiok on the Holloway Road, London, earlier today.
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And this was ‘An Excellent Trifle’ based on an 1816 recipe by Mrs Rundell (the custard is richer than in her other desserts) but using fresh raspberries instead of jam and some jelly (absent in the original). It really was excellent. @PersephoneBooks
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This was their interpretation of a dish called ‘Love in Disguise’ from 18th c (GOOD THINGS IN ENGLAND by Florence White). The original calls calf’s heart stuffed w/herbs & lemon coated in vermicelli. But this was beef heart tomato plus artichoke purée & burrata. Still with herbs.
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I had so much fun talking w/ @we_are_food about cookbooks at the @PersephoneBooks festival in Bath at the weekend over a lunch cooked by Castle Farm, Midford, re-imagining some historic recipes from Persephone books as modern vegetarian dishes. Pix by Suzy Slemen.
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‘A fairyland of deliciousness’. I was so happy to talk to @killianfox0 for @ObsFood about one of my favourite Cambridge food shops, the lovely @CulinarisUK which is brimming with wonderful things,
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Some writers have a voice so strong that you feel you know them. I felt this way about @tamareadler ever since I read her book AN EVERLASTING MEAL. It was wonderful to meet her for real yesterday in Hudson for a conversation about THE SECRET OF COOKING at Talbott & Arding
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Plum sorbet at Superiority Burger NYC. Today was the second time I’ve eaten it this week, before I fly home. To see a plum sorbet at all is a nice surprise. But to find that it’s the plummiest sorbet you’ve ever eaten is even better. Damson-tart but also nectarine-floral. 💜
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Thank you so much to @DanBarber and all the chefs and farmers at @StoneBarns for having me over to talk after their family lunch yesterday. I talked about how ‘the secret of cooking is the person who cooks’. And also the greatness of Claudia Roden & Zuni Cafe Cookbook
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Food, I sometimes think, is mostly about rituals. One of my most important rituals w:my sister @EmilyRCWilson consists of getting the tofu banh mi hoagies from Fu-Wah deli every time I visit her in Philly. I wrote about these sandwiches & recreated them in THE SECRET OF COOKING
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If there is a more beautiful table colour than this in New York City, I haven’t seen it. 💚 at @cafechina_nyc yesterday. Also, the food! Szechuan pickled vegetables, dreamy eggplant (aubergine) with string beans, soup dumplings. And the company of @ericjoonho 💙🙏
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Excited to see the U.S. edition of THE SECRET OF COOKING @wwnorton actually on the shelf in New York independent bookstores including @ShakespeareCoUS Broadway and the lovely @kalnyc. So grateful to all the booksellers for supporting the book.
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One day last week, the third-most viewed article on The Guardian website was an angry debate between a couple about whether it was OK not to preheat the oven or not. Many of the comments seemed to agree that preheating was essential. But it really isn’t, as this cake proves…
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An Everlasting Meal by @tamareadler is one of my all-time favourite food books. I'm so looking forward to having a conversation with her about The Secret of Cooking @wwnorton next Thursday (11th April at 7pm) at @talbott_arding in Hudson, NY. Do join us. Free!
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A pot of treasure. Thank you, @jasorourke, for this pot of school-produced honey from the bees at @washingborough. As well as doing huge amounts of vegetable gardening and cooking, the children at the school get to experience beekeeping.
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The part I totally failed to say, even though it was at the top of page 1 of my notes and @FranABox had kindly briefed me with the latest figures was that TastEd (@tastedfeed) now has more than 1000 schools and nurseries signed up! 771 schools & 471 nurseries.
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Feeling proud to have had the chance to talk about the benefits of @tastedfeed and why food literacy is essential in the House of Lords yrday @HLFoodObesity alongside @ChefsinSchools @sfmtweet. Pictured in the background is @jasorourke!
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