On Food & Drink
Onions, ghee, and many aunts
When I was young, there was one thing I resented every Ramadan. It wasn’t the 12 hours of fasting, but the dish that formed the centrepiece of our evening meals for 30 days.
Like eunuchs in a brothel
A bowl filled near to the brim with spat-out red sits on a denuded table. The Yellow Bittern has just finished a wine tasting session. Post-luncheon cigarettes go up all round, lit, of course, by Cook’s Matches. Hugh Corcoran, sat at the table, is a busy maître. Our conversation is squeezed in before a book launch being hosted that evening at The Bittern.
Chinese sailors and kung pao chicken
Over the years working in my parents’ Chinese takeaway, prepping ingredients and cooking became second nature. From a young age, I was trained to mindlessly slice through crates of carrots, quarter white button mushrooms, and chop green and red peppers into neat slivers, all prepped for the night’s chop suey orders.
Cappuccino art at the National Portrait Gallery
Among the 70-odd Google reviews of Audrey Green, the National Portrait Gallery’s gleaming white strip of a café, is a one-star review from a Mrs. Beaver. ‘It is called latte art,’ she writes, giving it priority over thoughts on the bad staff, food and temperature, ‘as you do it on a latte NOT a cappuccino.’
Flat stems and wonky shots
On my 18th birthday, my godmother gave me two short-stemmed lead-crystal glasses. They’re small and obviously hand-blown, one contains a few small air-bubbles, the other contains one big one. They do not match.
Chinese sailors and kung pao chicken
Over the years working in my parents’ Chinese takeaway, prepping ingredients and cooking became second nature. From a young age, I was trained to mindlessly slice through crates of carrots, quarter white button mushrooms, and chop green and red peppers into neat slivers, all prepped for the night’s chop suey orders.
A quick word at the bar
I felt sorry for the American journalist. Sorry, and a little bit guilty. I’d arranged to meet her in a pub at lunchtime, to talk about pubs. I didn’t know that she’d just got off the Red Eye and come straight from the airport to the boozer. I didn’t know it was her first visit to Britain.
Meat and Right
In the opening sentence of her 1966 classic, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, Jane Grigson makes a bold claim: ‘It could be said that European civilisation – and Chinese civilisation, too – has been founded on the pig.’ Once, even the lowliest agricultural family would have kept, fattened and killed a pig to feed themselves in the long cold months of winter, and some of us are still going at it.
The lost fish of Doggerland
Oyster farmer Willie Athill on his plans to repopulate a sea gasping for breath