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It was at 40 Maltby Street, as it often is, somewhere between the lull of dinner plates being cleared and ordering all the puddings, that Vaughn Tan dropped a bombshell on me. We had been talking about the writer M.F.K. Fisher for some reason (perhaps I was reading her, perhaps we had eaten oysters) and I had probably mentioned that I hadn’t quite grasped the scope of her influence, how that highly diaristic, memoir style of food writing which privileges the personal over the political, that Ruby Tandoh called ‘the culinary selfie’, could be traced back to her. “I have a very interesting story about M.F.K. Fisher” Vaughn said. “Do you realise that the rise of Japanese food in America was pretty much down to her?” obviously knowing that I did not realise this, nor would anyone else because it was something only Vaughn knew.

Over the next 10 minutes Vaughn sketched out a small history of Japanese food in the States, that in the 60s it had been dismissed as ‘roots, twigs and raw fish’ by the intelligentsia, that if you look at the articles on Japanese food in the American press, if you delve into what restaurants were being reviewed and how they were reviewed, the shift in tone was not gradual but dramatic, that in the space of a few years Japanese cuisine had gone from the way many Asian cuisines are written about today ─ essentially as fads, to be explained to an ignorant audience ─ to something which everyone commonly understood as the new hegemon. Forty years later Tokyo has more Michelin stars than any other city in the world; French nouvelle cuisine, with its extensive but seldom acknowledged Japanese influences, has been and gone, replaced by a Parisian cuisine which references Japan more explicitly; and in New York, the lives of the ultra-rich are punctuated no longer by filet mignons and rich mother sauces, but by the pointillism of the sushi omakase. And somehow at the centre of this shift, orchestrating everything with well placed letters from her house in Sonoma Valley, California, was Fisher.

“You should write a book on this” I told Vaughn, by now well into our second pudding. “I have” he said. “I just haven’t found anyone who wants to publish it.” I will leave the full story to Vaughn for if and when it ever finds a publisher, but today’s newsletter ─ the last in the cookbook iteration series ─ is on an important strand of it: the publication of the book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, by Shizuo Tsuji, and how it equipped a country with the tools to understand and therefore iterate on an entire cuisine. I’ll let Vaughn take it from here.

Iteration X - Vaughn Tan cooks Shizuo Tsuji

The English-speaking world now takes it for granted that Japanese cuisine has the potential for enormous refinement—in other words, that it can be considered fine dining within the same frame of reference as other Western cuisines. Almost everyone assumes it has been this way for ages. In fact, this “elevation” of Japanese cuisine is very recent: it happened within a few years in the early 1980s in America. 

The usual explanations for this make sense only superficially. Most centre on the fact that from 1960s, Japanese expatriate and immigrant populations grew on both coasts, and the Japanese economy (and Japanese culture) similarly swelled in global influence. The problem with these explanations is that both trends were slow and steady. Neither spiked suddenly. Yet the phase change that resulted in Japanese food becoming fine dining in America was both abrupt and pronounced, happening between October 1979 and 1982, and a book’s publication catalysed it,

In November 1980, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji was published by Kodansha in the US. I first came across the book by accident in 2002 while looking for a more plausible explanation for Japanese food’s anomalous trajectory. In my usual way, I fell into a rabbithole. 

This particular rabbithole involved sifting through a then-uncatalogued archive of M.F.K. Fisher’s personal papers and, eventually, traveling to Japan to meet as many of the original editorial and production team behind Japanese Cooking as I could find decades after the project. The story I eventually pieced together is one of secret influence and cultural change that began with an unsolicited letter from Tsuji to Fisher in the 1970s and, through a chain of extremely unlikely events in which Fisher played a pivotal (but until now completely unknown) role, culminates in Japanese cuisine entering the world of American fine dining via Japanese Cooking and the events that surrounded its publication. But that’s a much longer story for another time.

To Kodansha’s surprise, reviewers of Japanese Cooking were universally enthusiastic. Interest in Japanese food in America had been growing slowly and steadily since the 1960s, but until 1979, the most important food writers and critics in the media—the influencers of their day—still considered Japanese food to be fundamentally different, an “ethnic” cuisine ultimately alien and incomprehensible to the Western palate. As Craig Claiborne wrote in 1974, “who can persuade John Doe that there is much to be said in a positive sense for cooked chrysanthemum leaves?” But the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, House and Garden, and Time, among others, gave the book rave reviews. The Washington Post’s influential food section noted that “what makes a cuisine ‘alien’ is not the national origin of its dishes, however exotic, but rather the inability of the cook to project what the dishes will be like and to understand the originating culture of the cuisine … The cuisine of Japan, while it has become less mysterious, still tends to be viewed as alien … This void has been filled [by the recent publication of] Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art.”

The reaction was so unexpectedly positive that the first print run sold out before the official release date despite an unusually large first printing of 15,000 copies. The book ultimately sold over 65,000 copies in the first four months after it was published—success unheard of in cookbook publishing at the time. It has not been out of print since.

But Japanese Cooking’s success should be measured in more than strong reviews and book sales. It profoundly changed how American food influencers then understood Japanese food, from an alien cuisine to one that could be understood in the same frame of reference as Western cuisine, and thus one with the potential to be considered at a level, or even surpassing, the best Western cuisines. Japanese restaurants began to be talked about as having a rigorous aesthetic standard comparable to, even if different from, the refinement associated with the haute cuisine of France, which was itself influenced by Tsuji via the French outpost he set up for his Osaka cooking school. In truth, it remains the only non-Western cuisine to be widely regarded in this way.

Japanese Cooking was influential then for the same reasons it is worth reading today. It’s beautifully written and structured─a product of an era now long past, when publishers were willing to invest huge amounts of time and money in books not written by social media superstars. But foremost is its dedication to articulating in plain language the everyday knowledge that normally can only be developed by growing up immersed in Japanese food culture. It is the rare cookbook that provides not just recipes but also a pathway to understanding another culture’s approach to food, values, and aesthetics. Such understanding is a prerequisite for elevation, because what isn’t understood cannot be truly appreciated and valued.  

Part One of the book is devoted to this kind of tacit cultural knowledge. In a wide-ranging series of 20 essays and annotated lists that make up more than three-fifths of Japanese Cooking’s 500-odd pages, Tsuji explains—among other things—the aesthetic philosophy of the Japanese meal, the material, social and cultural context of Japanese food, the Japanese approach to ingredients (many unfamiliar then and now), the philosophy and aesthetics of cooking and eating, and how the logic of the Japanese meal is anchored on the main cooking methods of the dishes involved.  

After reading Part One, you’re ready to cook. On to the recipes in Part Two. Here, too, Japanese Cooking excels. Its recipes, unlike those in many other cookbooks, deliver on their intention of helping even novice readers understand and learn the tricks that experienced cooks in a culinary tradition know so well they are taken for granted. For instance, the recipe for simmered chicken and cabbage below goes as far as diagramming how the cabbage is to be sliced. Someone familiar with the dish would know this—but the book is not for such a reader. The diagram is for the benefit of the reader new to the dish (and maybe to Japanese cooking) who might not even know to ask.

While modern cookbooks largely depend on photographs to visually document technique, Japanese Cooking relies instead on a multitude of such diagrams. Line drawings are the default in technical instruction because they focus on the essential and can more easily omit (unlike photographs) the superfluous and distracting. And where photography dates swiftly (just look at any other cookbook from the 1970s to see how styling and other aesthetic choices rapidly go out of date), the line drawings in this book feel of the moment because they were of no particular time to begin with. 

The recipes in Japanese Cooking are long, though like many Japanese recipes they tend to require a relatively small set of ingredients and cooking techniques and to deploy them with great precision. The length is because the recipes go into what may seem (but is usually not) unnecessary detail about the ingredients and techniques used.

A confession: I haven’t cooked paying scrupulously close attention to a recipe for more than two years, but I did this time. The chicken and the cabbage in this dish are simmered separately in the same seasoned liquid for about the same amount of time, then combined for service. The separate simmering seems finicky but is worthwhile for the ability to control the degree of doneness of the chicken and cabbage. Such precise technique is relevant even in an ostensibly homely dish, and shows how simple ingredients and techniques can be combined to produce complex results. I ended up making this recipe twice, because it was genuinely delicious and fundamentally easy to cook. 

I should say too that precision requires attending to necessary detail, not adhering mindlessly to it. This requires both understanding what detail is necessary, and why. This book, through its careful explanation of underlying logics and method, equips the reader for that—and thus permits the reader to go beyond slavish execution of recipes. 

So, lacking some key ingredients, I substituted dried mushrooms for the umami-laden katsuobushi in the dashi, and replaced the sweetly acidic mirin with a diluted mixture of lemon juice (I used cider vinegar the first time, which was less good) and the end of a bottle of Coteaux du Layon. The second time around, I cooked the chicken for much longer than the recipe calls for because I’m at high altitude, and used about half as much sugar. It was better that way. Assiduity, it turns out, is not the same thing as fidelity.

Chicken and Chinese Cabbage

(Tori Jibu-ni) 鶏じぶ煮

There are two entertaining theories as to how this dish came by its name: one that the simmering liquid sounds like jibu-jibu-jibu as it bubbles; the other that it was created by a man called Jibuemon. Grated ginger may be used instead of wasabi horseradish, but the latter is traditional.

4 servings

12 ounces (340 g) boned chicken, with skin (thigh recommended) 

flour

6 leaves Chinese cabbage

for simmering:

1 cup dashi (made from simmering kombu and katsuobushi)

4 Tbsp light soy sauce

4 Tbsp lemon juice/wine mix 

1/2 Tbsp sugar

finely grated wasabi horseradish or ground sansho pepper

To prepare: Cut boned chicken into 2-inch (5-cm) pieces and brush thoroughly with flour.

Carefully separate whole leaves from the head of Chinese cabbage and parboil in a large pot in ample lightly salted water (about 3-4 minutes); drain well. Lay out each leaf and cut into 2½- x -1-inch (6½- x -2½-cm) strips as shown-first cut the leaf crosswise, then lengthwise. If the stem is very thick, slice off a thin layer. Transfer the cabbage strips to a medium-sized pot.

To cook and serve: In a second medium-sized pot mix the ingredients for simmering. Bring to a boil over medium heat and simmer for about 2 minutes,

Pour 2/3 of this very hot simmering liquid directly over the cabbage in the first pot. Place on medium heat immediately and gently boil cabbage strips for approximately 10 minutes, uncovered, stirring occasionally Be careful not to break up leaf pieces.

In the second pot, in which  the simmering liquid remains, lay the flour-brushed chicken pieces. Place over medium to high heat. Shake the pot frequently to keep the chicken moving. The meat will absorb most of the liquid within 7 to 10 minutes, although my tough, pastured chicken took 14. Do not cover.

Remove the two pots from heat. Arrange mounds of Chinese cabbage on small, individual plates or dishes. On these, cushion pieces of chicken (1/4 of amount cooked), skin-side up. Pour 1 Tbsp or so of simmering liquid from the cabbage pot over the chicken. Garnish with a small cone of grated wasabi horseradish or a pinch of ground sansho pepper. Serve immediately.

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Vaughn Tan is a writer, academic and author of The Uncertainty Mindset, a book on how R&D teams in some of the world’s best restaurants show us a new way to think about innovation and uncertainty. You can also find him on Substack at The Uncertainty Mindset.

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A few months ago on social media, someone started a trend of posting the first solid meal you were fed as a child, plus your country of birth. I found the idea oddly moving, marrying the extraordinarily intimate (the food which first gave you nourishment, often fed as an act of love), and the broader cultural context which means that food may be a watery congee, or daal, or pap. One theme that emerged from the exercise was that of mucilage, that semi-liquid state common to many of our first foods, such as the ogbono soup mentioned in today’s newsletter by Yvonne Maxwell. There is something primordial about mucilage, which is why some people can’t get along with it. It reminds us too much of the living, of the secretions animals leave. The Catholic Church are too cowardly to tell us the truth: we come from mucilage and it is to mucilage that we return. It’s no surprise that our first foods and our last foods also come in this mucilaginous state.

Yemisí Aríbisálà is the patron saint of mucilage. If you haven’t read her book Longthroat Memoirs, then you should, not just because she is one of the best prose stylists writing today in any genre, but to read how appealingly mucilage can be described by someone who loves it. Ogbono soup, Aríbisálà says, is “mucilage cooked to pinnacle of comfort food”, with a “smoothness to the movement” and “velvety on the tongue”. In her chapter ‘Okro Soup: Gorgeous Mucilage’, she describes the ideal ‘draw’ of an okro soup: “elegant, light enough for the uninitiated, mucilaginous enough for the lover of mucilage”. She called the draw ‘animation’, reminding us yet again of its living qualities, comparing it to the elastic strings of liquid left between the mouths of two kissers. She knows that the language we talk about things with matters, that these foods, in West Africa, in South Asia, have been scorned by colonisers with insults. But she’s also not above calling it what is is: a pot of goo.

If the first half of this cookbook season was straight iteration, then the second half of it has stretched the limits of its remit in ways I did not expect. Today’s newsletter on ogbono is not technically an iteration of a recipe, but of a story, of the preambles to a recipe which are increasingly integral in the Western canon but are not so common elsewhere. Longthroat Memoirs, in a sense, is nothing but these preambles. Although there is no written recipe for ogbono given in the book, Maxwell takes the spirit of the chapter to heart: that ogbono is a living tradition. That even if we must pay homage to the old hands, we need not be restrained by them.

Iteration 9: Yvonne Maxwell '“cooks” Yemisí Aríbisálà

There are so many stories we know before reading them. Stories by privileged middle-class white people line the shelves of every bookstore, exhibiting their authors’ access to travel, to eating for leisure, and to publishers, as they stumble their way through various food discoveries. 

These stories do not interest me. The stories I really want to know are those from voices I never hear: the non-white women staking their claims to the food traditions of their heritage; the recipes that have sustained communities for generations, migrating from across the world and taking on new lives.

As a pupil of West African and Caribbean cuisine, the cookbooks I’ve seen – often written generations ago – do not contain these stories. They are to the bones, purely about the recipes, and omit the anecdotal preamble so commonly used in Anglo-French cookbooks, where every recipe must include a sentimental origin story. For many West Africans, recipes have been handed down for generations via oral traditions, practice and fellowship, where the only unit of measurement is ‘as the spirit leads you’. Through the effects of time and distance, this intuitive nature of cooking has left some people – and the foods they grew up eating – in cultural purgatory, with some techniques and relationships left unnurtured. 

The 80s and 90s saw the early introduction of Black African-authored cookbooks. This followed a rise in emigration from Africa to the UK, with people seeking stability and new financial opportunities for themselves and their children, taking a huge leap into the unknown for what they thought would be a better life for their families. This, in my opinion, is when cookbooks became more prominent in African cooking, as they served to fill in the gaps of our second- and third-generational knowledge. These books continue to provide a traceable map through the past, equipping people with the tools to recreate dishes once prepared by their parents or grandparents and bringing ingredients and dishes from faded memories into life.

The introduction to Yemisí Aríbisálà’s Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds touches on the notion of missing stories within food, and how this has led to foods being excluded from the world stage. She remarks that Nigerian food did not exist internationally until 2013 as ‘its stories had been separated from its consumption’. 

Nigerians have never created that person from speech and stories and exaggerations, so that when I brought him up, the response was like talking about someone who never existed. 

The idea that food must first be talked about and characterised in order to create and nurture its identity is still a fairly new concept within West African food writing. Through her intriguing stories that paint vivid pictures of a layered and complex Nigeria, Aríbisálà flies the flag for both Nigerian cuisine and food stories, showing the world that Nigerian food is a ‘multifaceted cultural treasure trove’ while writing for the Nigerian who already knows this. She writes beautifully on a vast array of Nigerian dishes and cooking techniques, from popular street foods like akara to the very regional (and taboo) consumption of dog meat. My favourite chapter in Longthroat Memoirs, though, is dedicated to the soup supreme: ‘A Beautiful Girl Named Ogbono’.

Ogbono soup is very dear to me. It was my first exposure to solid food as a baby, sat on my mother’s lap in a dimly lit kitchen in Benin, staring at her hand moving from the bowl of soup to her own mouth and then to mine. It is a tie to those I love; a link to my place of birth, to which I have not yet returned; and a connection to my faceless ancestors about whom I often dream.

...people talk about ogbono soup with reverence, longing, and unmistakable notes of addiction in their voice.

Ogbono soup is a classic Nigerian dish made from dried and ground bush mango seeds (known as ogbono) – the grinding of the ogbono releases a beautifully fragrant aroma. If following the basic method of cooking, this is combined with rich palm oil and fried until the ogbono is consumed by the deep red oil. Water or stock is then added until the mixture dissolves and the texture thickens to an okra-like consistency – what we Nigerians call ‘draw draw’, or the ‘animation of the soup’, as Aríbisálà so perfectly puts it. 

The soup continues to boil and is seasoned before an assortment of meat, fish and ugwu (chopped pumpkin leaves) is added. This is married with starchy balls of ‘swallow’ – a staple in Nigeria, these dense doughy balls of, for example, eba, pounded yam or amala, are typically served with soups and stews, segmented into mouthful portions and ‘swallowed’. They are sensually baptised with a glossy coating of ogbono, with its warm turmeric tones and specks of dark green. This is a soup like no other.

Aríbisálà does not include an actual recipe for ogbono soup, although she does gift us with a phenomenal recipe for stock, which she incorporates into her recreations, boasting layers of flavour from the inclusion of root ginger and both fresh and dried Cameroonian peppers. Based on Aríbisálà’s contemporary take on ogbono soup, and the universal debates on the correct composition of the ‘draw’, one can surmise that there is no fixed recipe for ogbono soup. It is a living organism that transforms based on how it is nurtured by the cook. Depending on your preference and experience, the soup may vary from a lightish brown to a deep copper in colour, the quality of the stock may impact the depth of flavour, the ‘draw’ may vary in viscosity, and the levels of umami you are chasing through the addition of dried or smoked fish and meat or seafood will affect the dish’s potency.

A child can rustle up ogbono with someone standing by calling out instructions, maybe helping with liquidity. But the palate, no matter how naive, knows ogbono soup cooked by an old hand.

I prepared the recipe below with my mother-in-law, who, like many West African women, has lived an ordinary yet remarkable life. Born in Islington, she moved back to Nigeria only to become a refugee during the Biafran War, and ended up running a successful business as a tailor before moving back to London with three children to start from scratch. She is one of the nameless women that Aríbisálà speaks of as a custodian of the ogbono tradition. Her consistency of flavours and the level of spice and warmth contained in each bowl of soup is remarkable. She achieves the perfect 'draw draw' each and every time: a true master in her preparation of this superior dish.

I, on the other hand, am not! I follow in Aríbisálà’s footsteps as an ogbono heretic, with countless tweaks and additions, some of which any self-respecting Nigerian would hiss at if merely suggested. For the most part, I have tried to honour the basic format and technique for ogbono. However, inspired and led astray by Aríbisálà’s musings on authenticity and chasing an unattainable high, I have added a rich stock with fiery root ginger, uda pods (grains of Selim), and cinnamon and cayenne pepper for added warmth. I have also added crayfish for extra umami, as well as a palm oil infusion of bay leaves and pimento (allspice berries) – borrowing from my mother’s St Lucian roots.

Trawling through the stories in Longthroat Memoirs brings to life food memories I have held since childhood and creates new imagery of a place I long to return to; flavours I yearn to taste again. Although not technically a cookbook, it provides the non-Nigerian world with an excursion into the richness of Nigerian food through tales of exploration, politics and eroticism, and for the Nigerian (because ‘Nigerian food belongs to the Nigerian’), Aribisala confirms what we have known all along – Naija no dey carry last!

For the ogbono soup – serves 4:

Ingredients

Building the stock/soup base:

• 500g–1kg assorted meats – depending on how much you like offal, this could include goat meat, abodi (the large intestine of a cow), shaki (cow or sheep’s tripe), kidney, and other offals. Alternatively, if offal is not your thing, Aribisala prefers to leave the meat out entirely and throw in large king prawns right at the end to briefly cook in the heat of her ogbono soup. You can also use fresh mackerel, tilapia and catfish

• 1.5–2 litres water

• 3 tbsp ground crayfish (you can source this from your local African market)

• 100g dried stockfish (you can source this from your local African market)

• 1 inch root ginger

• 1 red onion, halved

• 1 tbsp cayenne pepper

• 2 uda pods (grains of Selim)

• 1 small stick of cinnamon

• 2 Maggi cubes

• salt, to taste

Preparing the ogbono:

• 1 cup ogbono seeds – grinding in a mill will give you approx 1 1/2 cups (you can source this from your local African market; be sure to freeze any leftover seeds to maintain freshness)

• 50g palm oil

• 5 pimento seeds/allspice berries

• 2 bay leaves (fresh if you can get them)

• 1 big handful ugwu leaves, finely chopped (you can source these in your local African market; substitute with spinach if you can’t find them)

• 1 cup okra, finely chopped into rounds

• 2 scotch bonnet peppers

• 100ml water

Method 

Wash your meat and place in a large pot with 1.5–2 litres of water, depending on the amount of meat you are cooking. If using offal, you will need to boil this separately, as some cuts may take longer to become tender (you can be less precise with the water for the offal – this will be discarded later). Season the meat by adding the ginger, onion, cayenne pepper, uda pods, cinnamon, Maggi cubes and salt, then bring to a gentle boil. Cover the pot and leave to simmer for 30 minutes. If you are not using meat, build your stock with the remaining ingredients.

While the meat is boiling and the stock is maturing, grind the ogbono seeds into a fine consistency – you will know the consistency is right when bits of the powder begin to stick to the edges of your grinder. Set aside in a dry bowl to prevent sticking.

In a blender, add 100ml water and the scotch bonnet peppers – blend until smooth and set aside. Thoroughly wash the ugwu leaves and chop finely, discarding the stalks (this will ensure a smoother texture once combined in the soup). Now wash and chop the okra – I tend to chop my okra quite thinly so as not to interfere with the velvety texture of the ogbono. Set both the ugwu and okra aside in separate bowls.

Return to the pot of meat and, using a slotted spoon, remove the uda pods, cinnamon, and pieces of onion (onions prevent the ogbono from forming its signature texture). Rinse the smoked fish, tear apart with your fingers, and add to the pot of meats, then drain the liquids from your offal (if boiled in a separate pot) and combine with the rest of the meats. Continue boiling for another 10 minutes.

Now that the meats are tender, add the scotch bonnet mixture and let this boil until the raw smell of the chilli disappears (around 5 minutes). Add the ground crayfish, stirring well until combined, and continue boiling for another 10 minutes – taste and add salt if required. Keep the pot boiling to maintain the heat for the next stages.

In a small pot, add the palm oil and heat gently on a medium flame. Add the pimento and bay leaves and fry gently for 2–3 minutes, allowing the flavours to infuse into the palm oil. Using a slotted spoon, remove the pimento and bay Ieaves and discard. Maintaining the heat of the oil, add the ground ogbono, then remove from the heat and stir to form a smooth paste before adding to the meat stock and stirring well. The stock must be boiling hot before adding the palm oil/ogbono paste mixture in order to prevent the palm oil from curdling. Once added, continue to stir the mixture to encourage the paste to melt evenly, then combine with the rest of the ingredients.

Important: do not cover the pot after the palm oil/ogbono mixture has been added as this will make the soup watery and cause the ogbono to lose its mucilaginous structure.

Continue to cook the ogbono soup on a medium heat for 30 minutes, stirring regularly. The amount of bubbles will increase quite substantially, as will the thickness of the soup and the fullness of the ‘draw’. If using prawns, now would be a good time to add them to the ogbono soup. Add the chopped okra and leave to cook for 5 minutes, then add the chopped ugwu. 

With all the ingredients added, you can now alter and amend the texture according to preference – use a ladle to test the consistency of the soup, and add more water if necessary. I prefer a superior ‘draw’ to my ogbono soup, so I like it to be very thick in consistency. 

Either serve immediately with a swallow of your choice – I prefer eba – or reheat the next day, when the flavours will have had time to fully combine. Let the ogbono soup cool completely before covering. Ogbono soup also freezes extremely well, and I always have some stashed away for a rainy day (or a sunny day … or any day).

For the ‘swallow’ – eba (bowl method) – serves 2

Ingredients

• 350g garri (dried, fermented cassava flour) – can be sourced from your local African market

• around 500ml boiling water 

Method

Boil water in a kettle. Once boiled, add the water to a mixing bowl, then add the garri. Gently turn the garri using a wooden spoon or spatula until it comes together, adding additional water if needed in order to achieve a smooth consistency. Form into a roundish ball and serve with the ogbono soup.

Yvonne Maxwell is a documentary photographer, cooking enthusiast and traveller, whose work focuses on telling stories of food, culture and people across the African Diaspora. Yvonne was paid for this newsletter.

Some housekeeping this morning: if you’re receiving this by email then you may note with alarm that it’s a Monday, and maybe you’ve become subscribed to some paid part of the newsletter by mistake. Don’t worry, this is not a mistake. I’m trialing out a new system of posting as I’ve long suspected a newsletter on Wednesday only provokes a feeling of ‘oh not another one!’ when Friday’s hits your inbox. So I’m spacing them out a bit: Monday and Friday will be the two free slots. For the hardcore people with a paid subscription, you will notice no difference because the paid newsletter will go out on Wednesday. This week’s will be an interview with the associate editor of Eater London, and the founder of In Digestion, James Hansen.

As the cookbook mini-season winds down, I will also start to bring back Season 2 which has been running since August. I have two more cookbook iterations left, so will run one a week in the run up to Christmas along with one article from Season 2, take a much needed break and pause subscriptions, and then return in the New Year with some new announcements and a news season.

If Fozia Ismail’s newsletter last week on Hawa Hassan’s In Bibi’s Kitchen partially interrogated the idea that the purpose of certain cookbooks is to cook from them, then today’s newsletter by Rebecca May Johnson maybe blows my whole remit apart. For Johnson, both the cookbook (a fixed, authoritative way of passing on a recipe), and the traditional structures of the family (less fixed, but no less authoritative), are being superseded by the informal sprawl of the Internet, and the random connections we make through it.

The truth is that many of us don’t cook from cookbooks at all; an ingredient in our cupboard or fridge might provoke a WhatApp message to friends asking for advice or a recipe; the sight of a sandwich or a plate of pasta, glimpsed for a few seconds on Instagram, may inspire our own experiment; a passing tweet may lead to some DMs. In this sense, the Internet is a electronic version of a curiously archaic world, before the printing press, before books. Even Johnson’s own blog, Dinner Document, is less a didactic recipe blog and more exactly what it says on the tin: a loose document of dinners and gestures, that someone 1000 years ago might have scribbled in margins or spread, in Johnson’s words ‘like gossip’; each recipe, like Homer before some villain decided to write him down, simply a retelling of a retelling of a retelling.

Iteration 8: Rebecca May Johnson cooks the Internet

My experience is that anyone can teach you some thing, or a lot, about cooking. Because the primary measure of culinary knowledge is whether it brings pleasure to the body, and to what degree, it is inherently erotic, and has no authority in a text-only format. As with kinks, everyone has their preferences – a ‘special way’ to prepare toast, eggs or rice (or whatever) that amounts to an irrefutable insight, a piece of information that endures because of how it makes them feel.

Earlier this year I sent a Claudia Roden rice pudding recipe that I love to a few writers and asked them to cook it however they wanted and record the experience. They are not writers of cookery books (though some write about food in their poetry and essays) but I was interested to know how each of them would respond to the text. The recipe I sent them from Roden’s Book of Jewish Food blossomed into many puddings, each differing from the others. I found their written accounts absorbing; hyper-specific details of cooking (smashed eggs, burnt pans, getting stoned) and the irritation and pleasure it provoked unexpectedly opened out into deeper truths, buried memory and self-revelation. 

I realise eating it how ragged we’ve all been feeling. I have seconds.

C sits up with us and wants to feed himself, looking at his reflection in the back of the spoon as he does. Reiz kuggle. (Edwina Attlee) 

The cooks’ narratives retained an element of unmediated experience – or, to borrow Nuar Alsadir’s phrase about poetry, ‘a tracking of the grain, the body, emotions’ – as the recipe text became movement before returning to language, weathered by their living through it. 

The experiment was a formalisation of the way that good recipes pass from person to person like gossip. I passed on this recipe because of the occasions in my life in which its custard texture and plain richness have been participants. Gossip is a deeply affective (and effective) form of knowledge transmission, with every retelling taking on the mood and context of the teller. This is also how we teach each other important things, passing on our gestures and annotations. 

In ‘The Nourishing Arts’, Luce Giard gives an account of the transmission of recipes down a traditional family structure: 

Women bereft of writing who came before me, you who passed on to me the shape of your hands or the color of your eyes… As long as one of us preserves your nourishing knowledge, as long as the recipes of your tender patience are transmitted from hand to hand and from generation to generation, a fragmentary yet tenacious memory of your life itself will live on. 

It is a beautiful, romantic passage of writing that tries to pay tribute to the complexity of culinary knowledge, which at every turn shifts between body and mind, gathering traces of each life it passes through. However, Giard’s linear and conservative imagination of family and the hands that possess or share ‘the nourishing arts’ is a shortcoming. Although some say that the palate, each person’s ‘way of seeing’ what they eat, is anchored in (and constrained by) a particular kind of origin story – the family history that Giard describes – I would say that the palate has a potential openness to un-commodified difference and a disregard for parochialism that I dream of seeing in politics. 

This is where I would like to talk about the internet.

If I were to draw a diagram of the sources that have informed my cooking in the last six months, it would not look like a linear genealogy or a neat stack of books; it would look like a tangled web of people who I may or may not know. I have most frequently come by new recipes in the last decade through encountering them online, which is to say, through other people’s advocacy of them. In The Five Senses, philosopher Michel Serres says that language suppresses the sense of taste, which is ‘too close… too much its twin’, and that taste is ‘rarely conveyed well’ in language. I agree that language makes a poor account of the senses, especially taste, sometimes ‘allowing it no voice’. Serres goes so far as to call it oppression. But Serres was writing in 1985, since when there has been an exponential increase in the number of people writing about taste, thanks to the internet. Social media has embedded the activity of writing about food into everyday life, and while companies try to intrude, it is the flashes of reality and personal rituals that I love. Accounts of cooking and eating posted online at the precise moment they are unfolding are able to retain ‘the grain, the body, emotions’. They offer a peep into the erotics of culinary knowledge: kinks of the palate writ large. 

And so, this essay is an ode to the culinary knowledge of people online that I have glimpsed at between reports of state violence, memes, images of world-making protest, make-up advice and book releases. I am grateful for their privately honed methods and accidentally discovered pleasures; recipes given by friends and a remark about how to eat chips; a photo of a birthday party and a conversation with strangers about something unrelated. The dishes I see online are usually outside the context of canonical authority – and my response is physical first and rational second, led by desire towards something for which I haven’t yet got the words. 

I recently made fermented green tomatoes after seeing a photo of them on Olia Hercules’s Instagram: pale green, flecked with red chilli. I gathered further information about the process from talking to Thom Eagle through direct messages. After I posted photos of the tomatoes being prepared, a friend messaged me via WhatsApp to discuss the recipe, intending to make some to use up her green tomatoes. 

I plan to make Hainanese chicken rice soon after seeing Nina Mingya Powles discuss recipes for it on Twitter. I cooked a roast chicken a month or so ago having read Anna Tobias’s account of making it in Sophie Davidson’s TinyLetter, Women Cook for Me. A chat on Twitter with artist Tai Shani about buying pans yesterday, while I was standing at the stove skimming chicken stock, prompted me to make chicken soup with noodles today after she wrote this: 

I love to make my Jewish chicken soup (it’s kind of stock) keep 1/3 w fats 4 stock, have 1/3 Jewish home style w noodles and dill and the carrots, 1/3 becomes Tom Kha w glass noodles shredded chicken and oyster mushrooms it’s best use of kitchen time

I ate the soup with toast made from Nigella Lawson’s sandwich loaf recipe, buttered in a style my father likes – generously, then put in the oven to melt in. With the rest of the chicken, I cooked four dishes (and counting), each one a nodal point connecting fragments of other people’s labour, hunger, and pleasure: recipes. Culinary knowledge was always already a network of desires straying beyond heteronormative transmission – which is to say, a reaching towards the other, an admission that intimacy with what is beyond us is what will nourish us. 

Chicken stock

• 1 raw chicken carcass – buy a chicken, remove the legs (divide into thighs and drumsticks if you want), wings, and breast and freeze in portions, or put in the fridge for another time

• ¼ celeriac, peeled

• 2 carrots, peeled

• 1 onion, halved

• 2 cloves of garlic

• 2 bay leaves

• a few peppercorns, whole

• a teaspoon of salt

Put the carcass and everything else into a pan and cover with water, 1 inch above the chicken, and bring to a simmer. Skim the top of any scum using a spoon, putting it into a bowl to rinse down the sink with hot water. Leave it to simmer for 1.5 hours on a low heat. Leave to cool overnight with the lid on.

Soup

• chicken stock and whatever tiny shreds of chicken you can pull off the bird

• a few carrots, peeled and cut into ½ cm rounds, then halved

• a tablespoon of finely diced parsley

• toast and butter

To make the soup: pre-heat the oven on a low heat to warm your bowls. Put a few ladles of stock into a smaller pan through a sieve – enough for you and one other person to have a bowl each. Pick any tiny bits of meat you can find from the carcass and add into the stock. Bring to a simmer and reduce for a few minutes. Peel 3–4 small carrots, slice into ½ cm rounds, and add in. Boil a pan of water and add 2 small nests of thin/medium egg noodles. Bring back to the boil then turn off the heat and leave for 3–4 minutes, draining when cooked (try one first). Make toast and butter it, and put in a warm oven along with your bowls.

When carrots are tender, finely chop a tablespoon of parsley and stir in. Taste for seasoning. Divide the drained noodles into warm bowls, ladle over the stock and garnish with parsley, making sure each person has equal amounts of carrots and chicken. 

I didn’t have dill but did have parsley and the light soup with flecks of chicken and sweet carrots was seasoned with rich salty toast; it was a very good midday rest. 

Rebecca May Johnson is a writer and academic who you can find on Twitter and Instagram. She blogs at Dinner Document and is working on her first non-fiction book about pleasure and resistance in the kitchen. She was paid for this newsletter.

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Publishers! I have a million dollar idea that will drag your ailing companies out of the toilet. It’s a simple translation book ─ one that can be used abroad when things pick up again, but the brilliance of it is that it is most useful in your home city, on an everyday level. The book only has one single phrase in, translated in infinite permutations across 6,500 languages, the most beautiful and utilitarian phrase in existence: “can I get some hot sauce with that?”

Pepper sauce, shito, nam prik, sambal ─ these can all make or break a meal on their best days, but even more important are hot sauces created for cuisines which, as Fozia Ismail described to me, are made to be ‘fragrant not hot’. Walk down Old Kent Road and buy an empanada from a dozen bakeries and you will get a dozen completely different aji ─ green, orange, yellow, roughly chopped chillis and herbs, emulsions. Such is the importance of the aji to the empanada that sometimes it seems like it’s the aji where the real creativity and spirit of the cook shows itself. I remember my own first taste of Somali hot sauce, bisbas (also written bisbaas, basbaas, and bizbaz), at a small canteen-like restaurant on Kentish Town Road, where I would point at pasta, rice and stews on long metal trays. But even with all three together, I felt like there was something missing, that is until the owner asked me if I wanted chilli, in a quizzical tone. A squeezy bottle filled with bisbas was produced, and I’ve never looked back. From Banaadiri in Shepherds Bush, to Al Kahf in Whitechapel, you will find me spooning bisbas onto rich, aromatic rices and shanks and shoulders of lamb, coddled in blankets of fat, to add the dimension of heat to fragrance and complete the meal. And like aji, no two bisbas are ever the same.

Today’s iteration by Fozia is a little bit different to previous weeks. As a chef cooking within her own tradition, Fozia doesn’t need a cookbook to teach her how to make bisbas. And her recipe, while showing you how to iterate, is still her own, iterated from a long line of Somali women. Rather, today’s newsletter is about the importance of cookbooks as representation, that by centering the lives and stories of those not given voices within the publishing world, they can be more than mere exotica and a way of travelling within the four walls of our kitchen. Of course there is value in learning something new, but in a week in American food media where people are asking once again “who is this for?”, I hope that for some of you this newsletter brings no new knowledge, but simply the quiet joy of being recognised.

Fozia Ismail cooks the Bibis

As a Somali woman you are judged by your elders on your ability to make certain foods: the flaky butteriness of a good sabaayad, or the crispness of the best sambusa. The truly skilled can become known by the whole community for a particular dish, which can become a curse when the requests, often arriving as subtle hints, start rolling in. I can think of one particular edo (auntie) in my mother’s community who makes the best sabaayad and has been stuck for the last 20 years making them for everyone who asks. 

Because of this you spend a lot of time in the kitchen as a girl, particularly during the month of Ramadan, which is a month where you learn about the power food has to transform your consciousness. I remember Ramadan with fondness. My mum would start by waking us for Suhoor, the pre-dawn meal. There is something so special about getting at 4am to eat together before going back to bed knowing that you won’t eat anything until your fast is broken that evening. The blurry-eyed chitter chatter of a packed kitchen in our pyjamas felt magical in the morning twilight while eating our favourite breakfasts: malawah, a sweet pancake, or lahoh, a sourdough crepe, both delicious with butter or ghee. All day was spent cooking. The anticipation of what we would eat later was enough to keep us going through the day because it was the only time of the year my mum made her sambusa, filled with fragrant coriander lamb, and quraac, fried doughnuts spiced with cardamom. After there would be rich basto with minced lamb and cumin; aromatic baris, served with mutton or chicken; pitta with feta; really rich olive oil and za’atar; and always mango juice or fresh lemonade. And of course the essential Somali hot condiment of bisbas, a hot sauce made up of fresh coriander, green bird’s eye chillies and limes, which provides the heat not often found in the dishes themselves.

In the midst of this busy kitchen my mum spent a lot of time gazing out of the window, her mind’s eye always back on Somaliland. London was something to be endured to secure our futures. She didn’t like being in such a built-up environment, she didn’t like the supermarkets and couldn’t understand why you shouldn’t barter at the Tesco counter. She liked the openness of fruit and veg shops, the markets on Ealing Road or Harlesden High Street with their noise. There may have been no camels or goats for sale but it was familiar, the produce was outside and less anodyne, less sterile. Next to the industrialised square box of the supermarket,  these spaces were full of life, with reds and yellows of mangos, vibrant lush greens of coriander, and other herbs and vegetables that reinforced a feeling of tenderness, that these sustaining plants had just been picked for you. Having grown up as a nomadic pastoralist, more than anything she knew the value of rain. It rains so much here and the greenness of England is beautiful. Despite us growing up in a dense part of London in a concrete home high up in the sky, she liked the green park outside our kitchen window.

We see in things what we want. Other people saw poverty, an ugly crop of brutalist high rises, yet there was beauty in the cracks of that landscape if you looked hard enough. I now understand the value of looking onto a little green patch of park. In her thinking spot by the store cupboard, with the ghee in and the huge bags of onions, flour and potatoes, there was an unsettled peace. She had gained security for us all but we did not understand her life. We would not have the same understanding of the land that she grew up in. We would not be able to share in her love of fermented camel milk but we can and do share in her dishes. It was more than feeding us, it was sustaining her Somalia in us. 

This is the feeling that is evoked in reading so many of the grandmother’s stories in the book In Bibi’s Kitchen. Developed by the wonderful Somali chef Hawa Hassan with food author Julia Turshen, In Bibi’s Kitchen focuses on the stories and recipes of women from eight East African countries that touch the Indian Ocean. Bibi means grandmother in Swahili and this book refreshingly centres the lives of Black East African women. It is the first time I have seen people like my mother reflected so accurately in a cookbook. Unlike so many cookbooks, which typically extract cooking knowledge and techniques whilst erasing the very experts in the global south, this is a book that is rooted in a politics of care towards the Bibis, shining a light on the way East African women, whose lives may have been uprooted through migration, have held families and communities together through food. 

This is something so rarely seen in the publishing industry. Despite setting up a supper club and loving food I am not a confident cook, and maybe this is why I am interested in erasure – ‘the removal of all traces of something; obliteration’ – of the body, particularly the African body and ways of cooking that are so wantonly erased in the publishing industry. This is the space that I work in, hunting down traces of Somali cooking, which you will generally not find in cookbooks. Yet the joy, warmth and familiarity that emanates from the book is wonderful. The cover, with ochre-tipped fingers that have been blessed by henna delicately breaking open cardamom shells, is a familiar and welcome sight on this grey lockdown day. These could be my mother’s hands. It is a beautiful cover.

This is not the usual romanticised kitchen of food lifestyle publishing, but a kitchen that understands how food can anchor you to each other in times of trouble, upheaval and insecurity around your immigration status, in a world that is still cruelly unjust to many who try and reach safety. It also of course a place of deep, deep joy, as illustrated by the many women that are interviewed. There is also a recurring theme in the stories across the women, beyond sustaining their families, a feeling that their cultures are contained in the dishes passed down. As Ma Sahra says on Somali womanhood: ‘When we sit together like this, I’ll tell you everything.’ Whether it’s a story or it’s cooking, I feel very lucky to have passed time like this with Somali women elders. It’s a true privilege. 

The recipe I have chosen from the book is bisbas, or basbas depending on which region of Somalia you are from. As I write about bisbas, I think of my mother looking out onto that green patch of park. So much time spent in between cooking, looking out of a window. Lockdown has played with our sense of time and forced a sort of difficult reconciliation with our bodies and their fragility. If you are struggling with food needs, I am sorry that this shabby government and society has failed you. I hope that you find ways to access the food that gives you joy, sustenance and connection through this difficulty. I hope that you also have a green patch of earth to look onto.  

Bisbas 

I feel uncomfortable around the written recipe, as if to commit it to a page fixes it in place, like an exam test I am doomed to pass or fail. I learnt to cook from watching, as being shown instructions was rarely detailed in my mother’s busy kitchen. She had no time to explain and still doesn’t. It is an embodied experience of cooking by eye, smell and repetitive practice so typical of diasporic kitchens where Bibis pass on traditions, not through the written word but practical necessity. 

My mum’s bisbas would use cumin rather than xawaash (a Somali spice mix), but I like it with xawaash as it adds a different complexity and I tend to have that to hand and am far too lazy to grind up cumin seeds. I think either is fine but the key thing is to grind up your spices as you go. I don’t tend to use ready-ground spices, it’s really not the same. Hawa’s recipe has no spices in it but it does have coconut, a southern/coastal variation, which adds a fruity richness to the flavour of the bisbas. This can make it feel heavier but without the spices it adds a layer of depth that would otherwise be missing. Either way, it’s a delicious Somali condiment that improves enjoyment of so many dishes. I use it as a side to eggs, in wraps, with rice, in tacos, as dip with sambusa, on grilled meats…the choices are endless and they are yours to make. 

• A bunch of fresh coriander (about 100 grams) 

• 2 freshly squeezed limes 

• 1 medium tomato or a handful of cherry tomatoes 

• 5 green bird’s eye chilies coarsely chopped 

• 2 large garlic cloves 

• 2 teaspoons of honey or sugar syrup to taste

• ½ teaspoon of ground cumin or xawaash spice mix (there is a recipe for xawaash here, or you can buy it from Somali food shops in Harlesden and Wembley)

• Pinch of salt (or more to taste)

• 2 tablespoons of natural yoghurt (optional – to cool) 

Method

Combine the garlic, green chilies, tomato and coriander in a blender or jug if using a hand-held blender and blend the ingredients to a paste. 

Add the lime, honey/sugar syrup, salt, ground cumin/xawaash – mix these thoroughly but remember to balance out flavour to taste. Sometimes I blend all the ingredients together but I find it can be a bit more difficult to get the right balance between the acidity, heat and salt. You are not looking to make it overly sweet either. You can then add yoghurt to it to cool down or leave it as it is if you enjoy a little pain with your meal. Without yoghurt the mixture can be stored in the fridge for up to a week in an airtight jar (I also cover the top with a little olive oil).  

All the above measurements are approximate (chilies vary in heat, lime varies in sourness and fresh coriander varies in potency). You can really make bisbas whichever way you like it; it is not a fixed condiment. It is made in so many different ways but always with chilies, lime and coriander. I love the coconut flavour in Hawa’s version. 

If you are lucky enough not to be struggling with food needs, take your time. Deshelling cardamom is a laborious and wonderfully fragrant meditative activity that forces a kind of fiddly stillness. Better still, make some of the recipes from In Bibi’s Kitchen. Bisbas is such a wonderfully verdant hot sauce; it’s uplifting, zingy and adds life to dishes on these grey days. I particularly love it with sambusa. I can’t think of a better way to pass the time listening to stories whilst making some of Ma Sahra’s spiced chicken and onion sambusa. 

Hawa set up a company specialising in this delicious Somali condiment in the USA called Basbaas, so if you are lucky enough to be stateside go and purchase it. 

Fozia Ismail is a chef, writer and social anthropologist based in Bristol. She runs the supper club Arawelo Eats as a platform for exploring East African food. She was paid for this newsletter

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If the Guardian-Observer recipe section was a football team it would be Barcelona, a well oiled machine made up of big name signings (Yotam, Thomasina, anyone from Bake Off - the Guardian Food feeder club), little known talent plucked from blogs or forums (Tim Hayward), and home grown talent, with Nigel Slater as Messi, untransferable ─ even if he put in a request it would be turned down on account of him having ‘Observer DNA’.

These names are now such a big part of our weekend that you forget that they had to be ‘discovered’ first. How they got discovered is a small history of how we communicate with each other ─ Slater had to be discovered in person, by a customer who needed a recipe tester, Tim Hayward as an angry voice on egullet and reply guy on Guardian articles, Ruby Tandoh from TV, and now most chefs who get a column graduate straight from Instagram. I made a joke on Twitter three years ago about Jamie Oliver banning eating ass, and now you’re reading my intros twice a week.

In the middle of this was the food blog, the dominant alt-form of the early to mid 00s, and this is where Rachel Roddy first started writing about food. You can see why the Guardian had to have her from reading those old posts ─ although I slightly miss that looser, shaggy dog feel that you can’t quite get in a rigorous column format, the meandering ruminations that don’t quite lead to a conclusion but it doesn’t matter because it’s all about the journey. I say miss, although from time to time you get a column which seems like a blog post reborn, this recent one for instance contains no recipe but just a snippet of life distilled in a few hundred words.

As Simran Hans points out in today’s newsletter, the brilliance of Roddy is the way in which she breathes new life into what could easily be a tired format ─ the Englishwoman abroad, as Hans puts it, “beguiled and corrupted by the wild sensuality of the continent”. The ‘two kitchens’ could easily refer to the kitchen in Italy from which she writes and those kitchens in Britain which cook from her each week, not unreconciliable because Roddy’s writing reminds us less of our differences with the continent and more of our similarities, what Roddy calls ‘reassuring connections’ ─ the long tradition of working class offal cooking, say, or the way if you squint slightly, the Roman trattoria looks a lot like a pub in Oldham.

Perhaps that’s why Roddy’s kitchen comes with no defining adjectives; it is a kitchen in Rome, not a Roman kitchen. A small distinction perhaps, but where one reminds us of an unbridgeable space and the other of the commonality of kitchens everywhere, it is all the difference.

Simran Hans cooks Rachel Roddy

“Lid on or lid off?” I ask my mum, phone pressed to my ear. “Lid on AND lid off,” she replies unhelpfully. Like quantities and cooking times, her method is intuitive. She is a spectacular cook but her recipes are not recipes – they are “just dinner”, a normal part of a normal day.

I’m a writer, not a chef, and only a cook in so much as I am an eater. In a year of “just dinners”, I am increasingly finding comfort in things that have been tried, tested and written down. I have been cooking from Rachel Roddy’s Two Kitchens: 120 Family Recipes from Sicily and Rome, a book that collects memories and dishes from summers spent in Gela, Sicily, where her partner, Vincenzo grew up. By asking the right questions, Roddy finds commonalities between the home cooking prepared by Vincenzo’s grandmother, Sara, and the food of Rome, where she lives. She discovers that both are shaped by tradition, frugality, practicality, guts – often literally. 

As I assemble her aubergine parmigiana, her potatoes and greens, her lentil and chestnut soup, I feel Roddy’s hand on my shoulder; an encouraging, approving pat. She asks the same questions I ask my mum except, unlike me, she is patient enough to wait for an answer (“sweat the onions in butter, lid on”). I read her book like a novel, and return frequently to my favourite chapter, which uses preserved fish to trace the history of Rome. It contains a much-used recipe for pasta with anchovies and onions. 

An Englishwoman abroad, Roddy is not the first to bring the romance of Mediterranean cooking into British homes. Elizabeth David and Patience Gray both wrote about the food of countries including France, Italy, Greece and Spain with scholarly passion and fierce care. David began brightening the grey kitchens of postwar Britain with sunshine-y olive oil and garlic, lemons and fresh herbs with A Book of Mediterranean Food in 1950. She had been seduced by the culture and its direct line to pleasure following a jaunt around the Mediterranean sea with a married man at the age of 25. Gray, a contemporary of David’s, co-wrote Plats du Jour with Primrose Boyd in 1957 and is best known for extolling the virtues of salt-curing, foraging and bitter weeds in her 1989 memoir Honey From a Weed, inspired by her travels across Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and the wilds of Apulia in southern Italy with her partner Norman Mommens (referred to in the book simply as ‘the Sculptor’). “It is of course entirely owing to the Sculptor’s appetite for marble and stone that this work came into existence in the first place, and that I am held in the mysterious grip of olive, lentisk, fig and vine,” she writes in Honey From a Weed’s acknowledgements.

Like David and Gray, and probably every other British woman who has found herself fleeing to the continent, Roddy’s story is romantic, too. An impromptu trip to Italy drove the cook and writer into the arms of a Sicilian drummer. She settled with him in the Roman neighbourhood of Testaccio, had a son and started writing a blog, which led to a Guardian column and two cookbooks (a third, on pasta, is due next year). Aside from this, all three women share a reverence for seasonal produce and simple preparations, as well as an understanding that knowledge must be earned, not extracted. In their writing, cooks are not artists but craftspeople who find grace in utility (Gray’s cooking must first and foremost satisfy “a workman’s appetite”). English cuisine, at least in the twentieth century, has a reputation for defaulting to the utilitarian blandness of Things Boiled, or else awkwardly aspiring towards the pomp of haute cuisine – “a sham” as David put it in A Book of Mediterranean Food. It makes sense that David, Gray and Roddy consider the “honest food” of the Mediterranean, with its emphasis on flavour, nutrition and practicality at each mealtime, a useful thing to import to a British public. The trio are linked by ethos rather than style; David was an aspirational figure with excellent, discerning taste and a stern, authoritative voice. Gray’s writing is more anthropological, interested in recording things that have vanished.

Where Roddy differs, though, is in her sense of humour. Two Kitchens includes a recipe for mint and chocolate semifreddo (“When I eat it I am 10 and back on the Finchley Road”); a section on flour references the children’s book George’s Marvellous Medicine. Her writing is bodily, and often a little rude. “Like a child irresistibly drawn to a finger-sized hole, I find it almost impossible not to dig my nails into the skin of a lemon,” she writes in the introduction to chapter on lemons. She explains how the citrus was introduced to Sicily by the Arabs, documenting her lusty impulse to “unleash another wave” of its hot, sweet scent. Oranges – “antidepressant, antispasmodic, antiseptic, aphrodisiac” – activate similar pleasure centres.

Tomatoes are chiappe (bum cheeks), preserved in salt and perved on until they are “dense and dry with a faint juicy potential”. Rosemary is “virile and almost muscular and adds a very different note from the sweet mustiness of oregano”. Almonds are “brown husks, pitted like an alcoholic’s nose”. Roddy playfully explains the big business of Sicilian peaches: “provocative beauties, blushing with perfect curves and bottom-like creases”, “tickling fuzz” and “lush flesh”. These peaches have been groomed for the mass market and trained on an industrial scale. The oddities from the farmers’ market are more seductive, fruits with “small with uneven creases and birthmarks that could be considered defects”. 

It’s this cheerful bawdiness, I think, that sets Roddy apart from her predecessors. She challenges the cliché of the repressed Brit beguiled and corrupted by the wild sensuality of the continent. With her cheekiness and fart jokes, Roddy’s writing is less inhibited than the prim David or the scholarly Gray. Still, she herself is the first to acknowledge the path their recipes have laid for hers. A recipe for braised chickpeas is an iteration of Gray’s, while her sugo namechecks David, as well as Claudia Roden and Anna Del Conte, two other essential culinary expats. In Two Kitchens, she includes David’s recipe for roasted almonds, Del Conte’s torta caprese and Roden’s orange and almond cake. There is a bright pot roast chicken cooked with white wine, potatoes, anchovies and rosemary, inspired by Roden’s writing about the evocative acid tang of lemons. (I cooked it once for a party of seven, a meal that began as a polite dinner and ended as a bacchanal).

The following recipe is an iteration of Roddy’s, inspired by David’s advice to adapt my dish of pasta “to my state of mind”. An unassuming man first served me this unassuming tangle of anchovy and onion spaghetti in a shallow, blue speckled bowl. He introduced me to Roddy’s cookbooks, a staple of his kitchen. I fell in love with him, and now it’s my kitchen, my blue speckled bowl, too. The dish was simple but I remember being shocked by its savoury richness. When I make it, which is often, I ignore Roddy’s instruction to use “mild white or red onions” and use yellow. The dish is very good as is but I have added fried breadcrumbs, their textural crunch a decadent addition to the luxurious, butter-slick spaghetti.

Spaghetti with anchovies and onions 

Serves 4

• 2 large yellow onions

• 50ml extra-virgin olive oil

• 50g butter

• 1 tin of best-quality anchovies in oil, drained

• 500g spaghetti

• A generous amount of freshly pounded black pepper

• Breadcrumbs, warmed through in a little olive oil, to serve

  Thinly slice the onions and gently sweat in the oil and butter, lid on but lifting to stir occasionally. They should be soft but not coloured. Slowly melt the anchovies into the cooked onions, taking care not to sizzle them. Boil a kettle for the pasta, add the water to a large pan, salt when it reaches a rolling boil. Add the pasta and cook until al dente. Drain, reserving some of the cooking water in case the sauce needs loosening, add to the onions and anchovies, and stir. Season generously with freshly pounded black pepper and top with fried breadcrumbs.

Simran Hans is a writer and a film critic for The Observer. She has a newsletter called Treats, and she co-presents the podcast TwentyTwenty about pop-culture from the year 2000. She was paid for this newsletter.

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Unlike Hester van Hensbergen I have no romantic story about the first (and only) time I ate fideuà.

A few years ago, my partner at the time and I were experiencing what millenials have come to term ‘burnout’ and everyone else just calls ‘laziness’. Exhausted from our jobs, we seemed to come back even more exhausted from our holidays ─ week-long city breaks where we tried to fit in as many cultural activities, as many museums, as many good restaurants, as an actual inhabitant of that city would aim to do in a year. When her extended family announced a two week long break in Tenerife, with those two, beautiful, terrifying words “all inclusive”, we snapped at it. Two weeks of not having to think about what to do because what to do was lounge by the pool, swim in the pool occasionally, and put in a drinks order on the hour every hour. The Atlantic Ocean was 100m away from where we were tanning like basted chickens ─ we never swam in it once.

The only problem was the food. If you’re staying somewhere for two whole weeks ─ a secluded house, a hospital, prison ─ you better pray the food is ok. The food was served in that infinite wonder of permutations called a buffet. On the left side of the buffet you had all the local food, by which I mean the entirety of Spanish and Canarian cuisine ─ paella, assorted seafood stews, potatoes with allioli and mojo picon ─ which the Brits might try if they were feeling exotic. On the right, chicken nuggets and chips. On the first evening I had the fideuà, slightly sloppy and way too sweet, little spaghetti sweepings in a saccharine pinkish sauce that reminded me of Heinz spaghetti which had been used to deglaze a pan someone had just been cooking squid in. I couldn’t quite work out how a tiny island could be privy to such bad seafood. The second night I turned right instead of left, and spent the rest of the holiday working out novel ways to eat chicken nuggets.

What I wouldn’t give for that holiday and buffet now stuck here in my cold corner of Camberwell: the oppressive heat, my insistence that I don’t sunburn and my immediate retraction (an admission of defeat in my ongoing war with the sun), the little towns around the resort which had been colonised by the British with twee cream tea rooms and pubs, a Leigh-on-Sea where the sea happens to look out to Western Sahara, the queasy feeling of trying to stay buoyant in a pool while weighed down by three pints of beer, a bottle’s worth of Campari and at least 50 chicken nuggets. Still, at least I will able to cook fideuà properly this time, and shed a tear in remembrance for the British diaspora, thousands of miles away across the ocean.

Hester van Hensbergen cooks Sam and Sam Clark

One summer, my godmother Debbie, who lives in Barcelona, showed me how to cook fideuà, a Catalan seafood pasta. In the morning, we bought cuttlefish with its melsa (spleen) intact, clams, rockfish and the ugly, gelatinous head of a monkfish from the fishmonger in the covered market. Then we went south to the ice cream shop on the corner for bitter chocolate and fig sorbet in thick polystyrene tubs. Once home, the monkfish and rockfish went into the pressure cooker for stock and we had breakfast ─ yoghurt and flat peaches ─ on the balcony in the rising warmth of the day. 

After dark, when the damp air became more stifling and the concrete radiated stored sunshine, she cooked. First, she fried the cuttlefish in the pan before removing it, leaving the juices of the iodine and umami-flavoured melsa behind to be soaked up by the sofrito (or sofregit in Catalan) of grated onion, fresh tomatoes and a small carrot to balance the tomato’s acidity. Next, she briefly toasted the short pasta noodles – fideos – in the pan before adding fish stock. It was cooked until the pasta burned a little at the base, nutty and caramelised. This burnished, hidden delight is called socarrat.

Fideuà is named after the pasta used in the dish. It is more akin to paella than to Italian seafood pastas, because the fideos are cooked like paella rice: slowly in rich stock without stirring until they begin to crisp underneath. According to the most common tale of its invention, fideuà was actually first conceived as an early twentieth century iteration on paella. Fishermen working off the coast of Valencia, who would cook paella in tin washing bowls whilst at sea, once used pasta because they had run out of rice. The resultant repast was so divine it got its own coinage and geographic stamp (Catalan because Valencia is part of the historic Països Catalans). Iteration had strayed into origination.

Debbie’s own fideuà was ink, smoke, saffron and sea, with rich, part-silken, part-scorched pasta. We ate it with its essential companion, allioli, in two heavy mortars. One of the two was ‘emphatically thick’ (as Colman Andrews memorably describes it in Catalan Cuisine) – stiff as meringue when tipped upside down – while the other was much looser, pushed beyond emulsion to form allioli negat, ‘drowned’ allioli. We ate both bowls, which were garlicky to the point of drug-like intensity.  

Later, I learned a different permutation of fideuà from Sam and Sam Clark’s second cookbook, Casa Moro. The Moro recipe does away with some of the basic tenets of traditional fideuà, foregoing cuttlefish in favour of monkfish and adding anise sweetness and light smoke with fennel seeds and sweet paprika. It’s a gentler version as a result, less like travelling to the dark inky depths of the ocean and more like walking along beachgrass-covered dunes. There is a danger here though: fideuà is meant to be powerful, and muting it risks the possibility that the pasta can’t stand up to the allioli. But the Clarks’ recipe treads just the right side of that line, especially when it’s cooked until the pasta singes and smoulders. It’s an undeniably delicious version, and one that has formed, in combination with Debbie’s recipe, the basis of my own iterations over the years. 

I learned fideuà as a summer meal, eaten late at night. The first time I made it in the winter was purely associative. It was Christmas but I turned instinctively to the last time I had cooked in that kitchen, reaching for the paella pan and the pasta on the shelf. I made the dish with what seafood we could get: calamari, king prawns and monkfish. In place of fennel seeds, I used the more festive and pungent star anise and, towards the end of cooking, I threw in some cognac. Since then, I’ve often used sherry in the fish stock. In later years in England, when I’ve been unable to find good squid or monkfish, I’ve used cod cheeks, which retain their shape well.

Once you know how to inhabit and iterate on a recipe, it can travel more easily, both geographically and seasonally. None of the tenets of a dish are truly fixed. In permutations born of necessity or irreverence, there is monkfish instead of squid, cod cheeks instead of monkfish, and broken-up spaghetti instead of fideos. Even one’s sense of the ‘pure’ form will be highly individual; for me, that means not just my godmother’s cooking, but her particular city cartography too – the same fishmonger, the same friend’s heady and emphatic allioli, brought across from a flat two buildings down the street, and the same humidity. But abandoning purity can free one up to play with different ritual associations of spices and liquors across seasons, or to be governed by the best deal at the local fishmonger. 

There is always a limit to iterations, though. In the case of fideuà, it’s worth remembering that not everything Iberian was once a pig. The addition of any kind of meat strays out of the terrain of the dish altogether, from iteration to creation. 

A recipe for Festive Fideuà, adapted from Casa Moro

Serves 4 

• 40 threads of saffron

• Olive oil 

• 12 king prawns in their shells

• 1 litre good quality fish stock (see the end for a simple recipe)  

• 100ml fino sherry  

• 300g cod cheeks 

• 1 Spanish (aka, a regular) onion, grated 

• 1 small carrot, grated 

• 5 garlic cloves, chopped

• 3-4 ripe tomatoes, halved then grated 

• 1 green pepper, sliced

• 1 or 2 star anise (or ½ teaspoon fennel seeds for a milder flavour) 

• 2 bay leaves 

• 300g fideos, grade 2 thickness (I buy Gallo Fideo No.2 in 250g or 500g bags, which you can get online or from R. Garcia and Sons in Portobello) or spaghetti broken into 2cm lengths (use spaghetti rather than angel hair as that is too thin) 

• 250g clams, washed with broken or open shells removed 

• Allioli (see options below)

• Chopped parsley and lemon wedges to serve

If your saffron threads have any moisture, lightly toast them in a frying pan for a few moments to dry them out. Crumble the dry threads into a small bowl with a couple of inches of warm water and set aside to steep. 

In a paella pan or a large frying pan, heat two tablespoons of olive oil over a medium heat. When the oil is hot, fry the prawns until just cooked, then remove from the pan to a clean plate. Stir fry the cod cheeks for a minute or two until just cooked, then remove to a plate. Leave any juices from the prawns and cod cheeks in the pan. 

When the prawns are cool, remove the prawn heads and place them in a large saucepan with the fish stock over a high heat. Simmer for 15 minutes to infuse, then strain the stock through a sieve. Add the saffron water and sherry to the strained stock and keep warm. 

Add three more tablespoons of oil to the pan, then add the grated onion and carrot, and cook on a low-medium heat until the onion begins to soften. Add the tomatoes, garlic and green pepper and continue to cook, reducing any liquid in the pan. When the mixture is beginning to dry out into a soft mulch, add the star anise and bay leaves and cook for one minute. Add the fideos and stir to coat in the sofrito, allowing it to toast a little for a minute or two. 

Now add all the stock, turning up the heat to medium-high. Season with salt and pepper. Try to evenly distribute the pasta in the pan at this point and resist the urge to stir subsequently. Like paella, the dish will become claggy if it is stirred and socarrat won’t form on the bottom unless the pasta is left undisturbed. Simmer until the noodles are al dente, and the stock is mostly absorbed. Add a little water if it starts to dry out. Add the cod cheeks and clams, pushing them down into the pasta, and turn the heat to low. Cook until the stock is fully absorbed and you can smell the pasta beginning to toast a little underneath, no more than five or so minutes. If, instead of adding sherry to the stock, you wanted to add a splash of cognac or brandy, now would be the time to do so. Take the pan off the heat, distribute the prawns across the top, and cover in foil. 

Take the covered pan to the table and leave to rest for five minutes while everyone finds a seat. Uncover and sprinkle with parsley. Serve with wedges of lemon and generous quantities of allioli. 

Simple recipe for fish stock:

The stock can be prepared a day ahead. Put a kilo of white fish heads (hake, cod, monkfish – whatever the fishmonger can give you – or a mix of heads and bones is fine too) in a saucepan, along with a large onion (chopped), a bouquet garni, a sprig of thyme, 1 tsp peppercorns, 2 bay leaves, 2 sticks of celery (chopped), ½ fennel bulb (chopped), a handful of parsley stalks, 2 cloves garlic, 1 tsp fennel seeds. Cover with water and then boil and simmer for 25-30 minutes until the gelatin is extracted. Cool then sieve and put in fridge for later. 

Options for allioli, to be made by a sous-chef while you focus on the fideuà:

1. Traditional allioli (from Colman Andrews’ Catalan Cuisine):

Ingredients: 6 cloves garlic (or more to taste), ½ teaspoon of salt, 240 ml mild extra virgin olive oil (or a mix of olive oil and a milder oil). 

Peel and chop the garlic cloves finely. In a pestle and mortar mash the garlic and salt gently until it forms a thick paste. Add the olive oil very slowly, a few drops at a time, while slowly and evenly stirring, always in the same direction. Continue adding oil until an emulsion forms. Do not continue adding oil once you have achieved emulsion, unless you are looking to drown your allioli. Serve immediately.

2. Modern allioli (from Catalan Cuisine):

   Ingredients: 6 cloves garlic (or more to taste), ½ teaspoon of salt, 1 egg yolk, 1 whole egg, 240 ml mild extra virgin olive oil (or mix of olive oil and a milder oil).

Prepare a garlic paste as in the previous recipe, then put the paste into a food processor. Add the egg yolk and whole egg. Process for several seconds, then, with the machine running, pour a slow, steady stream of oil through the feed tube, until an emulsion forms. Serve immediately. 

3. Cheat’s allioli: Crush as many cloves of garlic as you can handle (4 or more) in a pestle and mortar with salt. In a bowl, mix with 200g of shop-bought mayonnaise. Add a generous couple of glugs of olive oil. Finish with a squeeze of lemon. Taste and adjust with more salt and lemon. 

Hester van Hensbergen is a PhD student in politics and an occasional food writer. You can find her on Instagram at @hestervandelemme. Hester was paid for this newsletter.

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It’s hard to imagine now, but London has only been getting Nick’s cooking untrammeled by anyone else for only two years: the restaurant/wine bar he is head (and sole) chef at, Quality Wines, only recently became an off-shoot of its larger sibling Quality Chop House. At the time, it didn’t seem like there was much need for another wine bar serving small plates, but we were wrong. Whereas many restaurants try to oversell and under-deliver, his dauphinoise is a distillation of Nick’s approach to cooking which is to undersell , to take something which seems very simple ─ a porcini mushroom, a saffron risotto, a cannolo ─ and then execute it with the utmost technical precision while retaining it soul. He may be a chef’s chef (Feroz Gajia has described his talent as “infuriating”), but ultimately he cooks people pleasing food.

It wasn’t too long before the Olney comparisons started to happen. The history is somewhat disputed, but Virginia reckons it was she who first told Nick that his cooking reminded her of the cuisine Richard Olney conjured up in his books, even if his domain was Provence and Nick’s was Italy. I vaguely remember at the time Nick hadn’t read Olney, but a year later he would be cooking a Grand Aioli from today’s book, and joining forces with Gus Gluck on a food and wine dinner based solely on Olney recipes (this gives you a taste of Virginia’s very specific influencer status, which extends as far to convincing Nick to add candied cedrat to the cannoli).

If you haven’t read Olney before, then I recommend picking up any of the books mentioned in today’s newsletter. He is a one man experiment in how many gratin recipes someone can fit into a single career; a riposte to anyone who who feels that cookbook writers never add enough garlic to recipes. If you try to double the amount of garlic in an Olney recipe you will soon see the face of God. I don’t think it’s a mistake you’re starting to see his influence on the London food scene again; everything is cyclical, what started with Simon Hopkinson and Alastair Little and Jeremy Lee is being repeated with chefs like Alex Jackson, Steven Williams, Anna Tobias and Nick. When the pendulum swings too much one way, it needs someone like Olney to reset it: someone who knows the power of a well-executed fritter, a pungent aioli, and “30 good anchovies”.

Nick Bramham cooks Richard Olney cooks Lulu Peyraud

I often feel guilty when writing recipes. To capture what one can of elusive, changing experience... and imprison it in a chilly formula, composed of cups, tablespoons, inches and oven temperatures, is like robbing a bird of flight.

So begins Richard Olney, in his (or is it really his?) 1995 book of recipes from the Domaine Tempier Vineyard. Domaine Tempier is home to perhaps the world’s most famous rosé, but back then it was progenitor of a way of cooking as a sort of assumed Mediterranean lifestyle, practiced and preached by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse (who gives the foreword), Zuni Cafe’s Judy Rodgers and Olney himself.

Raised in the US during the Great Depression, Olney never intended to fall into food writing. He fled to France in his early twenties to pursue painting, hung out with WH Auden and James Baldwin (similarly exiled gay intellectuals) in Paris, before moving to Provence where he befriended his neighbour Lulu Peyraud and wrote some of the most influential cookbooks of all time.

The first two – The French Menu Cookbook and Simple French Food (released 1970 and 1974, respectively) – described food that was seasonal, local, un-messed around with. He was exacting in detail but made cooking sound easy, thrown together. The fastidious freestyler. That this was revolutionary at the time and seems par for the course these days is only testament to how many chefs and writers he influenced.

Lulu’s Provençal Table, released two decades later, shares a similar tone but raises some interesting questions. It reads like romanticised reportage, Olney part eyewitness, part fanboy, hovering around the matriarch, Peyraud (the owner of Domaine Tempier), over the course of a year, tugging at her apron strings and badgering her for recipes as the seasons ebb and flow with the evolving demands of the winery – but there’s a built-in ambiguity as to whose recipes these actually are. Are they Lulu’s, or Olney’s, or a bit of both? Are they simply records of tradition?

The book begins with a brief history of the vineyard and the Peyraud family, skips to ‘The Vigneron’s Year’, which covers the quotidian challenges of running a vineyard and juxtaposes nerdy winemaking trivia with Lulu’s typical seasonal menus (Fall: Anchovy Puffs, Sautéed Wild Mushrooms, Provençal Braised Beef, Radicchio & Lamb’s Lettuce Salad, Crepes with Apples). Olney describes a bucolic lifestyle: foraging for herbs and wild mushrooms amongst the woodland garrigue; trips to the coast to purchase live seafood from the day boats; smashing whole heads of garlic in her giant pestle and mortar; a gathering of international guests every night washing down grilled anchovies and seasonal cheeses with glasses of cool Tempier Rouge; all before getting into the meat of the matter – the recipes.  

Tapenade, brandade, anchoiade, pissaladiere, bouillabaisse, bourride; six pages just on omelettes, seven on apples, 11 (!) on rabbit. Pretty much every savoury dish contains garlic and what isn’t cooked on the barbecue or hearth is either gratinated or eaten raw. The centrepiece of the book is Lulu’s recipe for (and Olney’s description of) a Grand Aioli – that joyous celebration of garlic mayonnaise. It’s served with poached salt cod, braised octopus, hard boiled eggs and a cornucopia of cooked and raw vegetables. Lulu always prepares three mortars of aioli for the table…

One, relatively mild, for les estrangers (Parisians, Americans etc.); one, generously dosed with garlic, for the Provencaux; and one, overpowering, for Lucien [Lulu’s husband], who likes a ‘bite’ in his aioli (the Parisians and Americans invariably end up wiping Lucien’s mortar clean).

That’s my favourite passage in the book: I love the generosity of spirit in Lulu preparing three separate batches when she needn’t have bothered – her guests fully drinking the Kool-Aid, as I suspect they always did. But nevertheless, when myself and Gus Gluck (my friend, retired sommelier and up-and-coming wine merchant who actually first turned me on to this book) threw our own Grand Aioli celebration at Quality Wines last year, pouring vintage Tempier wines, I prepared the requisite three strengths of aioli. By hand. And every single guest went for the strongest batch.

Olney’s cooking, his writing, his philosophy – ‘respect the seasons’, source the best natural produce and don’t mess around with it too much – may be ubiquitous these days, but nowhere else has it been so beautifully communicated. Via chefs like Simon Hopkinson, and those who cooked under him, it’s likely that his words had inspired me before I’d even heard his name.

What really interests me is food embedded in local tradition. The kind of food that Olney writes about, the kind that Lulu served her guests. That’s increasingly what I look for when I eat out, or when I am lucky enough to travel. I have spent a good chunk of time (and change!) chasing ‘cutting-edge cuisine’ in Michelin-starred restaurants around the world but soon realised that the real pleasure and enjoyment came from peripheral meals at bouchons, tavernas and diners, at family-run joints where the food felt rooted in some kind of shared cultural history and was prepared and served by an actual person (as opposed to sous-vided and tweezered into a trompe l’oeil by a 50-strong brigade). This is the kind of food I try to cook myself.

I’m a bit of a pizza obsessive so for that reason alone I’m adapting Lulu’s (or is it Olney’s?) recipe for pissaladiere, that Provencal pie covered with all things umami – caramelised onions, Nicoise olives and a lattice of salted anchovies. Lulu uses shortcrust pastry, as do most modern iterations, but tradition suggests an olive-oil-rich bread dough, as do I. Most recipes add the anchovies before baking, which is a waste of good anchovies, as they turn into a sort of crisp brackish mush after 20 minutes in the oven. Far better to drape them on just after baking, allowing them to just begin to melt and release their oils and aromas into the warm pillowy bread.

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A recipe for pissaladiere

Ingredients:

Base

• 500g strong bread flour

• 400g water

• 50g leaven

• 30g extra virgin olive oil

• 15g sea salt

Toppings

• 8 brown onions

• About 30 of the best quality anchovy fillets you can afford

• A good handful of pitted nicoise olives

• Extra virgin olive oil

• Thyme

• Black pepper

Make the dough: mix the leaven thoroughly with the water and olive oil before folding in the flour. After half an hour, mix in the salt. Stretch and fold four times over the course of two hours (I’m assuming you’re down with the lingo if you have access to leaven but if not YouTube can explain this process far better than I) and when fully developed cover and pop in the fridge for 24 hours.

Slice the onions and gently cook in plenty of olive oil with a pinch of salt until sweet and lightly caramelised – remember they will continue to cook and darken in the oven – and throw in a tablespoon of thyme leaves and a few cracks of black pepper.

Tip the dough out on to an oiled tray, stretch out until uniformly half an inch thick, and top with the cooled caramelised onions. Dot with the olives at regular intervals, bake at 180c for 20 or so minutes and, when cooked, drape the anchovies over the bread in a lattice effect. Drizzle over more olive oil and open up a bottle of Bandol rosé. Trotters up.

Nick Bramham is the chef at Quality Wines in Farringdon. He was paid for this newsletter. Pictures of the pissaladiere courtesy of the author.

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There’s this moment I love in ‘I Like Killing Flies’, the lo-fi documentary made about Kenny Shopsin in 2004, where Shopsin finally gets to show off his skills. It’s not a piece of intricate knifework, or a technique handed down from generation to generation or chef to chef. He starts by getting his spatula and heating it directly on the hob, as if he was going to brand someone with it. Behind him, pancakes are cooking on the griddle. “Watch this” he says, before taking the now red-hot spatula and immediately caramelising the sugar on top of the row of pancakes. It’s a distillation of what it means to be a chef rather than a cook: of how to get from A to B as quickly and as easily as possible.

I Like Killing Flies is one of two documentaries that really examine what it means, not just to be a chef, but to dedicate your whole life to cooking. The other, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, tends to get more plaudits. Both films feature the chef as cook-philosopher, both films are about one man who got to 90/100 very quickly, spent years getting to 95, and will spend the rest of their life incrementally improving everything they do to get to 100 ─ one happens to be dedicated to one of the most refined sub-cuisines in the world and the other is a line cook.

Yet I find I Like Killing Flies the more joyous film. The most interesting thing about Jiro by far is the role of the son, who has dedicated his life to his father’s work in that very Japanese way, only to be in his shadow constantly, frustrated by his father refusing to retire but with no way to vocalise it. Shopsin on the other hand, is an archetypal New York grouch, frequently offensive, ribald, seemingly constantly at war with his customers, but it’s really just a facade. His regulars, some of whom seem to have walked straight off the set of a New Yorker version of Twin Peaks, talk about him not with fear but with love, and the few times his children appear it’s clear they’re not being pushed to take over the family business. In many ways, Shopsins seems like the healthier environment.

Today’s cookbook iteration is by Feroz Gajia, the chef and co-owner of Bake St in east London. That he is cooking from Shopsin’s cookbook is no mistake ─ I’ve made the comparison before in these pages. The last time I did, I got a message from a newspaper editor who lives near Bake St and used to live in New York saying he couldn’t believe he had missed the comparison, that Bake St finally made sense. But of course it is also necessarily different because London is different ─ I had this sandwich two weeks ago and couldn’t work out what the seasoning was (it felt like a false-Coronation chicken) but the secret was Berbere, the east African spice mix readily available here if you know where to look. Of course, Feroz (sober, pious, humble) is different too from the irascible Shopsin. I’d love to come back to this sandwich and to Feroz in ten years time, and see his next iteration.

Feroz Gajia cooks Kenny Shopsin

I never went to Shopsin’s. I tried, but they were moving, closed that day or I’d gotten there too late. Kenny would probably say it was for the best; better to imagine it through the eulogised accounts and mythical New York lore surrounding the various iterations of the restaurant than to be disappointed by a grumpy bastard not cooking you what you really want because you were seduced by something in one corner of the vast menu.

Vast might be an understatement – the Shopsin’s menu regularly had upwards of 900 items with 200+ soups alone on the menu, all made to order. This required a clever use of a multiplying effect akin to a ponzi scheme, where each element is used in multiple dishes in its basic state but then is also combined with something else or modified in the cooking process to create a whole set of variations. For instance, if you have mac ‘n’ cheese made, why not stick it in your freshly made pancakes because a customer can’t decide whether to have one or the other? Or if you get the timing just right on your eggs cooked on the griddle, you can make a blanket of eggs and now suddenly you have a vessel for a plethora of dishes. Multiply all these lived-in ideas, trials and successes by the amount of time the restaurant was open and the 1,000+ items that have graced the Shopsin’s menu doesn't seem so strange.

My missed encounter with Shopsin’s was in the late 2000s a lifetime ago. Since then, Kenny passed away, in 2018, and I've not had the chance to travel much. Life has changed and I've gone from a picky know-it-all diner who knew nothing to a picky know-it-all-diner who happens to cook for a living. To that first version of me, Shopsin’s was simply a curiosity, an absurd menu of the kind you would never get in London. The first time I saw ‘I Like Killing Flies’, the lo-fi documentary film made about him in 2004, he just seemed like a rude narcissist who hated his customers, overeager to share his often crass philosophies with the world. 

The second time I watched it was during lockdown: it was an uncomfortable, enthralling experience. Here was a man I recognised in myself, a grumpy abrasive person that just wanted to bring joy to people on his terms. Someone at his best and worst, was surrounded by those he loved. He was simply a man manipulating everything around him to create things he liked and share them with the people he liked. This Mr Heckles revelation, that the endlessly complaining grumpy man was correct, led me to buy his book ‘Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin’.

How to be smarter, better and different, but still yourself, is something I’ve struggled with and still struggle with. The tendency to want to please others is always the strongest feeling – no matter how much I say I hate other people – and the book shows you someone who has achieved a balance between love and disdain for people while enjoying where life had taken him.

While I made my way through the book I continually noticed things that I intensely agreed with, not just philosophies about life but about customers and cooking and technique. Using flour tortillas soaked in eggs and milk to create perfect crepes was a strange bit of ingenuity on his part and paired well with his in-depth introduction to griddling in the pursuit of great pancakes. Even the infamous rules that could have got you kicked out – no phones, limit of four people per group, one entrée per person minimum – make sense when you read the reasoning. Often they were just ways to improve the atmosphere for customers and alleviate any possible resentment from the staff (mostly from Kenny). 

I’m not a technically skilled or gifted cook; I’m not particularly disciplined and I definitely do not have an enviable CV stretching back to my teens, filled with stages at the finest kitchens and Michelin-starred mentors. But what Kenny taught me is that you don’t need these things to create inventive food. What you do need is a fertile imagination for what could work, and a boundless curiosity about the most mundane things. This means going down rabbit holes, exploring an idea, dish, flavour, sauce, format before cooking a single ingredient. The idiosyncratic way Kenny did things was born out of ingenuity, necessity and a drive to make the best food in the fastest and simplest way possible. This was cooking between two points with a straight line: there were no fussy garnishes or extraneous flourishes, just endless iteration; tout partout (everything, everywhere), a never-ending list of possible components to be balanced like a 100ft tall game of Jenga. 

I don’t have a clear idea of who I was once, or who I am now, but what is clear is that how I view food has changed. Before, I knew innately if something was not good, not delicious. What I did not know innately was all the reasons why something might not be good; this is something that has been learned painfully over time in the kitchen. I may not have learnt exactly the same way as Kenny did but I understand him a bit better now, his need to “get the job done with as few ingredients, as little effort, and in as short a time as possible”. All while trying to make delicious, absurd and heartfelt food is what brought him joy and kept him going for so long. And he was apparently a stubborn bastard; a trait I increasingly recognise in myself.

The book itself is full of unique inventive recipes and is not without its flaws, especially the reductive way Kenny approaches cuisines outside his understanding. But what I pore over is the techniques and tricks that he devised to make something the best it could be while fitting into his way of working in the kitchen. I happened to choose two techniques that he integrated into sandwich-making – mayonnaising chicken and garlic bread. Magpie that I am, I’ve coupled that with shallot preparations based off a multitude of meals at 40 Maltby Street, and added a few touches of my own. It’s this accumulated knowledge that ensures even the simple recipes will continue to change, just as I will too.

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 A (Spiced) Chicken Sandwich

This sandwich ten years ago would have been a loud and brash celebration of Americana, all Frank’s Redhot Sauce, blue cheese mayo and celery with extra Old Bay seasoning and maybe deep-fried pickles served in a hoagie (roll). None of that sounds bad, but I prefer the more considered sandwich below now, because it has better textures and layering of flavours as well as attention paid to the temperature.

Serves at least two greedy people

Chicken

• 2 medium chicken breasts (total weight ~350g)

• Vegetable oil

• 2tsp proprietary seasoning (Old Bay, Berbere, or best alternative)

• 1tsp fine sea salt + ground black pepper (9:1 ratio)

• 120-160g of mayonnaise (store-bought works better but homemade is fine)

• 15g of Berbere (can be found online and in independent supermarkets that carry East African ingredients)

• 5g paprika

• 10ml rice vinegar or any milder vinegar to suit your spice mix of choice

Fried shallots

• 2 banana shallots

• ~100ml frying fat of choice

• Fine sea salt

Garlic spread

• 6 medium cloves of garlic

• ~60ml vegetable oil

• 50g butter

• Fine sea salt

• Grated parmesan (optional)

• Finely chopped parsley (optional)

Sandwich assembly

• 2 medium size ciabatta/bread of your choosing (needs a crisp exterior and minimal interior. No mouth-shredding fancy baguettes)

• 2 good tomatoes, sliced and seasoned with salt and pepper

• ~30g landcress

• Washed and dressed with a little lemon juice and oil or vinaigrette if you’re making a salad anyway. 

• 1 banana shallot, finely sliced directly into cold water

For the chicken

As per Kenny’s instructions, “cook your chicken breast however you like; if you can’t cook chicken by now, I’m not sure I can help you.” This will also work with leftover chicken and overcooked chicken is not a problem as it will become moist during the mayonnaising process.

I marinate mine in a little veg oil, salt, pepper and a light dusting of a proprietary spice mix. You can use the berbere here, or something like Old Bay, but anything that isn’t overwhelming should be fine as it’s just a background note.

Mix the mayonnaise, Berbere, paprika and vinegar in a bowl.

Cut your cooked and cooled chicken into rough 2-3cm chunks, drop it in your bowl of mixed mayonnaise. Between your thumb and fingers gently rub the mayo into the chicken in a similar way to rubbing butter into flour for pastry. What this will do is expose the fibres of the chicken to the mayo and as it relaxes it will reach moisture-based equilibrium.

Shallot frying

To some cold vegetable oil/clarified poultry fat/beef tallow add two shallots worth of fine shallot semi-circles and turn up the heat to medium high. Fry till just no longer transluscent and just a little colour has developed; they will get darker as they cool. Pour the fat through a metal sieve over a metal bowl so that you can save the fat. Tip the shallots out onto a kitchen towelled tray and season with salt while hot.

How much fat? Depends on the vessel, you want at least 5cm of oil as this isn’t shallow frying. If you were in a restaurant you’d just lower the shallots into a hot fryer or do loads in a large pot of oil but at home it’s easier to start cold and as a bonus you get a very nice shallot infused fat to use for other things (spooned over rice with some butter and soy never fails).

Garlic spread

Your garlic spread can be as simple or as complicated as you want, you just need at least two types of garlic to give you a little depth of flavour (garlic powder/garlic salt is totally fine as one of your garlic types). The basic recipe being two types of garlic, made fine, added to a mix of butter and a little oil and parmesan or salt to season and optional chopped parsley.

For mine the first garlic consists of two cloves of garlic chopped quite finely, added to 2-3cm of oil and cooked in the same way as the shallots above.

The second type is two cloves finely minced garlic in a metal bowl while you heat 50g of butter in a pan. As soon as all the moisture evaporates from the butter pour it over the garlic in the bowl and give it a mix. The third type is two cloves finely minced with salt and made into a paste, which will be added last.

Take your garlics and, once cooled, mix together with some mayo, parmesan/salt and parsley (optional).

Assembly

Split your bread of choice, slather with garlic spread and put under a hot grill/salamander till toasted.

Lay your sliced raw shallots, dressed landcress/salad leaves and then your seasoned tomatoes.

Top with enough mayo chicken so that it’s roughly twice the height of the toppings below and then top with plenty of the fried shallots. Close it up and consume or keep open so you can have your sandwich with a side of garlic bread.

Feroz Gajia is the chef-owner of Bake St in Rectory Road. He was paid for this newsletter.

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Ok, it may just be the chefs I’ve chosen and the ones who could file their copy the quickest, but it’s amusing that two iterations into this cookbook season and there is already a pattern emerging of acclaimed chefs reverting back to peasant cooking. Or maybe they just thought who else but Vittles will publish recipes as untrendy as beans and weeds, and rollmops? Of course, everything is cyclical and everything comes back on trend eventually. Twenty, thirty years ago and it was just common knowledge that John Lennon was the best Beatle, and you felt his influence on his swaggering imitators. Now, we all know that the correct answer is actually Paul, and the music changes accordingly. I happily await the Ringo era in anticipation.

It’s no mistake that it took a whole generation for the ideas of Patience Gray and Elisabeth Luard to be fully absorbed. Both released their most famous cookbooks in 1986, coincidentally around the same time both the chefs writing about them were born. In those 30 or so years there has been a reckoning in British food culture, or rather a series of reckonings. The first was the rising influence of the ‘simpler’ food from Italy and Spain, and an appreciation (veering on fetishisation) of their food cultures. The second was the realisation that much of Britain’s own peasant traditions were lying dormant, and needed to be picked up again. Many ascribe the awakening to Fergus Henderson’s first St. John book, but I would posit another writer whose first book was also written in 1986. Was Brian Jacques and his Redwall series actually the most influential food writing of our generation? I would say: look at the children who grew up reading them.

That, however, is another newsletter for another time.

Iteration 2: Thom Eagle cooks Elisabeth Luard

Elisabeth Luard’s European Peasant Cookery is the same age as me, although it feels older. All text and line drawings and equipment lists, flicking through it looks like an Elizabeth David or a Patience Gray, although lacking perhaps the patrician tone of one, the witchiness of the other; like both, it is, above all, practical. A little recipe for Provençal devilled peppers nestles alongside one for making 25 kilograms of sauerkraut in a well-scrubbed wooden barrel, and the way they sit there, each clearly described, makes either equally possible – as soon as you have bought a barrel, of course. Although short, bright essays dot the text – on bouillabaisse, on pig slaughter, on mushroom picking – the real poetry of the book comes in the recipes, in unexpected juxtapositions. They are arranged by ingredient and technique rather than by country, with recipes jumping across borders of nationality and time. Greek trahana pasta – one of the earliest known in Europe, with dried remains in ancient Knossos – follows the Hungarian tarhonya, and you see they are the same.

Before she was a food writer, Luard was, among other things, a wildlife artist, producing rapid watercolour sketches of birds on the wing, a habit she still continues. I have a portrait of myself cooking that she drew when she came into Littleduck a few years ago, and gifted me by way of a tip. If I say that the recipes in EPC have something of this sketch-like quality it is not to say that they are imprecise but rather that they are made to be worked with, to engage the reader as an active participant in the folk process of cooking with as little interference as possible. Some looseness, of course, is inevitable; as Luard says in her introduction, “one might say that as soon as a recipe has been written down it has … been compromised, that the fixing of what is of necessity fluid and adaptable has already changed its nature”. Try telling an Italian that their recipes are fluid and adaptable, you might think, but the fact of the matter is that writing a recipe is a form of translation, from a physical act to a verbal record. Something might always be lost in that process, but just the fact of acknowledging that loss – the imprecision of our technical language, the allowance for differences in ingredient and utensil – can let us find it again, or something new.

One of the appealing things about EPC as a collection is that it gives as much of its time to northern Europe as it does to the more fashionably rustic Mediterranean countries. A section on ‘small fish’ dealing exclusively with the various grilled, fried and pickled preparations of Greece and of the Iberian Peninsula is immediately preceded by a number of recipes for herring drawn from the cooking of Holland, of Sweden, of Scotland and of Germany. Plump, oily and in their abundant season as I write this, herring are a fish which have long held a special fascination for me (I have one tattooed on my left arm), largely I think due to a lengthy passage on them in WG Sebald’s The Rings Of Saturn. I read it while living and working in the East Anglian landscape he travels in and describes, and where until the last century a vast herring industry prevailed through cycles of astonishing gluts and poverty. The fish are transient, pelagic. “The routes the herring take through the sea have not been ascertained to this day”, Sebald writes, and so folk knowledge has played a huge part in this industrial enterprise, which involved an equal effort on land as sea to gut and prepare the fish. The freshness of herring is transient too, its flesh prone more than most to decay, and so it is almost always eaten preserved in one way or another: dry-salted, brined or pickled.

When I decided to try pickling some into rollmops, it was EPC I naturally turned to first. It’s that kind of book, although I think even on that first attempt I didn’t follow the recipe properly. In fact, I didn’t even make rollmops at all. Motivated by a number of reasons, but chiefly by an unwillingness to fillet a box of herring, I pickled the fish cleaned and beheaded but left whole on the bone, which made the process take twice as long with and made them impossible to roll into mops, mops referring in German to a pug dog, presumably in allusion to their roly-poly appearance. I did follow Luard’s instructions, as almost every old cookbook will tell you and almost no contemporary one will, to soak the fish in a strong wet brine before its immersion in vinegar, left pure and unsweetened. The result was reminiscent of the herrings you get in delis and in the Polish sections of supermarkets, as of course it should be. The recipe is in that sense correct. To my mouth, though, the bloating effect of the brine gave the pickled flesh a too-pappy texture, which alongside the strong taste of the herring’s oils and of sharp white vinegar is simply not pleasant to eat in quantity. An overnight cure of dry salt and sugar, I found, kept the flesh firm even after a week or more in sweetened vinegar, a method tallying almost exactly with that of the St John cookbook, which I wrote down in Summer’s Lease. 

Now, a year after testing that recipe, I have changed my mind again. Through our first lockdown and now again I have been with the Goods Shed farmers’ market in Canterbury as they try to keep their supply chains open, preserving, fermenting and pickling the produce the restaurant could no longer sell. This includes, now especially, a great number of herrings. I use a pure cure of grey sea salt now, and sit the fillets in them for just an hour before rinsing, drying, rolling and pickling the little fish in cider vinegar alongside slices of onion and carrot, coriander, mustard and lovage seeds, sometimes a little fresh chilli. They last better like this, I think, and the contrast between the firmly cured flesh and the sweet vinegar is very pleasing. Only the fish and the salt, really, remain from Luard’s recipe, which is just as it should be; it was never hers to begin with.

ROLLMOPS

You’ll need

some cocktail sticks.

8 herrings (or sardines if you can’t get them), butterflied (get the fishmonger to do this)

100g fine sea salt

500ml cider vinegar

150g sugar

A couple of tablespoons of mixed pickling spices, like mustard seed, coriander seed, celery seed and pepper

1 white onion, halved and sliced in thin half-moons

1 carrot, peeled and sliced very thinly

1 red chilli, finely sliced

2 bay leaves

• Sprinkle half the salt in a container, lay the herring fillets over it, and sprinkle over the other half. Give them a little rub and roll to make sure they’re well coated. Put in the fridge for an hour and a half.

• Meanwhile, heat the vinegar, sugar and spices gently together, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Bring briefly to the boil and let cool completely.

• Rinse the salt off the herring and pat dry. If you have time, leave them uncovered in the fridge for a couple of hours or overnight: it really helps the texture.

• When you’re ready, roll each herring round a slice or two of onion and secure with a cocktail stick. Layer them up in a tub or jar with the carrot, chilli and bay leaves, then pour over the cold vinegar and tuck over a piece of baking parchment to keep it all tidy. Leave to pickle in the fridge for a week, then eat at your leisure.

Thom Eagle is a chef and author of two books: First, Catch and Summer’s Lease. You can find him on Twitter, and at the Goods Shed in Canterbury. He was paid for this newsletter.

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You don’t need to know that Patience Gray was almost 70 when Honey from a Weed was released to recognise it as an example of late style. There is a sense of urgency about the book, that the knowledge she had been accumulating for decades from trips across Apulia, Catalonia, Provence and the Cyclades, knowledge that doesn’t come from book but comes from experience, hardship and repetition, needed to be put down somewhere. It is a strange old book ─ beyond aspirational in its ambition, it describes a lifestyle, a knowledge of the ground, that was and is slowly vanishing from this part of the world, with little thought given to the considerations of a housewife living in a city or indeed any sense of how the book is economically viable. In some ways the book is Gray stripping herself of everything ─ basic amenities, the trappings of modern living, her Britishness ─ to the bare essentials, even if those bare essentials somehow include 3 (three) mortars and pestles.

Honey from a Weed is therefore a cookbook I love to read more than I actually cook from, although there is a recipe for green sauce that cuts it close with Olney’s almost-100%-garlic aioli recipe for the condiment I’ve made the most. I do see it as a chef’s cookbook, not in the way those huge hyper-luxe tomes of some three star Basque restaurant are chef’s cookbooks, but after learning all that technique Gray’s pared-back philosophy represents a reset. In some ways it reminds me of those musicians who play extremely technical jazz over at the Vortex in Dalston, next week going over to Cafe Oto to blow air arrhythmically into a muted trumpet. In that sense, I can see how reading Honey From A Weed could be liberating ─ it might change the way you cook, or might take you out of kitchens entirely.

It was no surprise to me that Alex Jackson, one of our most thoughtful of chefs, chose Patience Gray for the first iteration of this cookbook season, and this particular recipe. I’ve always had the feeling that if left to his own devices he would just put beans and bitter weeds on a menu; instead he is now at Noble Rot in Soho, where he works on his own iteration of sorts, translating some of the old-stagers of The Gay Hussar into the 21st century. He has so far (cleverly) avoided putting the cherry soup on on the basis that it is ‘unseasonal’ ─ you can’t help but feel Gray would approve of the excuse.

Iteration 1: Alex Jackson cooks Patience Gray

Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed is my favourite cookbook. It’s a book about ”Fasting and Feasting”: a cycle of hardship and plenty that was for millennia familiar to the people of the areas of the Mediterranean she tells us about. Gray writes so terribly well about ‘basic food’, by which I mean recipes that came from real hardship. As she writes of the island of Naxos, “poverty at all times stared one in the face”. One aspect of the ‘honey from the weeds’ of the title is the knowledge of bitter foods, and how to transform them into something delicious, a thing “handed down, chiefly from Mother to child, while stooping to gather the plants”. 

When I first started cooking professionally I made a Gray-ian soup of mixed wild greens that I think was a fourth-hand recipe, most probably never written down, from my head chef’s friend’s grandmother in southern Italy: a molto rustico broth of cicoria, tenerume (courgette shoots), puntarelle, dandelion and garlic, with a little fried soft salami for fatty flavour. Forgive me, for I knew not what the hell I was doing: the broth was insipid, slightly slimy and irredeemably bitter. I remember a restaurant reviewer coming in that night: not ideal, although quite charitably the only negative thing she said about my soup was that it was served cold.

If I had read Gray before making this dish, I would have known that for the people of the land these weeds were a last resort; something to eat when there was nothing else, for without good olive oil, fresh cheese, ripe citrus, salt pork, croutons or vinegar, these plants tasted disgustingly bitter. In their raw state these leaves are unpalatable, but as Gray knew, with the touch of an experienced cook the harshness could be tempered. A few chunks of soft fennel sausage, fried at the start to render its fat, a few cubes of potato, salty sheep’s cheese, olive oil and a little squeeze of lemon. Starch, fat and acid help to make the bitterness palatable, and suddenly the soup is balanced: delicious.

Last November I was lucky enough to be invited to spend a week in Sicily at Anna Tasca Lanza’s cookery school for a workshop exploring the theme of bitterness. Its film, Amaro, explores the depth of meaning associated with the bitter taste, and the glorious complexity of food culture in Sicily. As Fabrizia Lanza, the director of the school, puts it: “Bitterness is a taste that is as profound in its flavour as it is in its cultural implications”. In Sicily, as in many other places, foraged food is the food of the poor, and a deep knowledge of the land comes with a stigma attached. One of the aims of the workshop was to explore the idea of how to tame this bitterness. With Sicily’s famous citrus fruits – an acid to cut through the bitter; with fat – a fresh, rich sheep’s milk ricotta, and a drizzle of new season green-gold olive oil; with salt – a strong brine to submerge an initially inedible olive, or a weaker one to gently pickle; it’s possible to leach out excess bitterness and replace it with a complex umami. 

My mum’s family is from Mid Wales – at least four generations of smallholders – a people with a long-rooted connection to the country. But apart from a basketful of blackberries or a few field mushrooms I can’t ever remember hearing about anything foraged. My grandma was a chef, but there was never so much anything resembling a nettle soup or a dandelion salad on her table. Perhaps for them poverty never extended that far, or perhaps they never cared for it, but perhaps there’s a knowledge that we somehow forgot. I spotted a few Bay Bolete mushrooms growing in my uncle’s garden once: he said I was welcome to have them, not realising that you could eat them. I cannot help but wonder about what led us down this route: have we lost an understanding that we once had? Fabrizia Lanza had a theory that the industrial revolution, as much as the good it has done for the British, may have been a factor. Mass migration of the rural population to the cities pulled them out of poverty and into work, but machines and factories made us forget what it is to live off the land. They allowed us to leave behind the flavour of bitter weeds and grow a taste for tinned beans instead. 

A shame, for what is life without bitterness? And how much more delicious is a meal full of weeds? Thankfully there are still a few eccentrics, cooks, eccentric cooks and general enthusiasts who realise that a walk around the fields of Sicily, the forests of Poland or the towpaths of London can become a little adventure. Thom Eagle, a cook and food writer who joined us on our trip to Sicily, writes of the British and “our general fear of wildness”, and we are surely almost alone on the continent of Europe in our alimentary distrust of anything alien. In her chapter on Edible Weeds, Patience notes that, “Edwardian Englishmen laughed at French governesses for picking wild chervil, dandelions and sorrel in spring for salads, for cutting nettles-heads for soup … Knowledge of these and other plants was for centuries our common European heritage. The English, once familiar with these weeds and their specific virtues, as described in early herbals, are now showing a revived interest in this heritage.” 

In that spirit, and once again furloughed, I took myself off for a walk through the Olympic Park and came back with a plastic bag full of weeds – dandelion, nettles, wild fennel and sorrel – and made a soup. I’ve never read anyone write quite so beautifully about boiling beans as Gray does in Honey from a Weed, and “La Zuppa di Fagioli seemed right for a crisp Sunday afternoon in November. This is a recipe that tempers bitterness with fats and starch, but also one in which bitterness helps to cut through the rich broth. She encourages the addition of the bone from a prosciutto, which when simmered for a long time with the beans imparts a deep flavour. I didn’t have a ham bone to hand but, as she explains, any salted and cured pork will do the job nicely; from a few scraps of prosciutto fat to a piece of proper green bacon or some thick slices of Polish smoked sausage from your local polski sklep. All would be equally delicious – I didn’t have any of them this time and it was still pretty good. 

Serves 2, with leftovers

½ packet dried white beans (soaked overnight)

Some kind of salted or cured pork – scraps of ham fat, some diced pancetta/guanciale, a piece of smoked bacon, or slices of smoked Polish sausage, cotechino, butifarra, etc.

1 large onion, sliced into half moons

2 fat cloves of garlic, sliced 

1 bay leaf 

1 tsp fennel seeds

A celery heart, sliced

1 carrot, diced

1 peeled tomato from a tin, washed of its weird juice

1 potato, diced

A handful of soup pasta, smashed up penne, or broken spaghetti

A big handful of weeds – e.g. dandelion, sorrel, nettles, wild fennel – washed well and roughly chopped

Olive oil, to serve

Cheese, to serve (if you like)

• Soak the beans overnight in cold water. In the morning, drain and wash well, then bring to the boil in unsalted water. Boil for five minutes, then drain, wash and cover with fresh water. Bring to the boil, drizzle in some olive oil, pop in a clove of garlic (no salt) and simmer for around an hour until your beans are soft. This might take longer. 

• Meanwhile, if you have some kind of salt pork, then cut it into appropriate shapes and fry it in a lick of olive oil. When some of the fat has rendered, add the sliced onions to the pot with a pinch of salt, the bay leaf and fennel seeds. Slice the celery heart and garlic, dice the carrot, and add to the pot. Fry slowly, for a good half an hour or more, until nice and soft. 

• Squish the tomato into the pot with your hand and stir into the soffrito, followed by the potato.

• Next, add your beans to the pot, followed by a good few spoons of their cooking liquid and some water (I usually add half cooking liquid and half water) to cover and then some. Bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook for half an hour until all is soft and tastes good. 

• Add the pasta, cook until al dente, then add the chopped weeds and stir. The soup should be quite thick but add water if you would prefer it thinner.

• Let the soup rest for 5-10 minutes – the pasta will finish cooking off the heat - before serving with a big glug of your finest olive oil and some grated cheese.

Alex Jackson is a chef and writer based in London. Formerly the head chef at Sardine, he is now the head chef of Noble Rot in Soho. He was paid for this newsletter.

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One of the few pleasures of the last few weeks has been suddenly making time for myself to do things other than work; time which I’ve found unexpectedly, like a big bag of Democratic mail-in ballots in the corner of the counting room. I’ve mainly been finding the time to read, which of course is a type of work too, albeit a far more pleasurable one. In this strange pre-Christmas season there has been a glut of cookbooks too good to ignore: Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage’s Flavour, the new Towpath book by Lori de Mori and Laura Jackson, which appealingly cites ‘Lea and Perrins’ alongside ‘Lee, Jeremy’ in the index, and Cook, Eat, Repeat by Nigella Lawson. I must admit unlike other food writers I’m not a particularly voracious reader or user of cookbooks, but those I do read I prefer to read for their writing rather than recipes. In a book like Richard Olney’s Simple French Food, there is a philosophy sown through it with a trussing needle, on how to cook, how to eat, and how to live; a certainty that things should be done the correct way or not done at all. Or in Thom Eagle’s Summer’s Lease, as in his recipe-less First, Catch, there is a sense of rhythm, of the kitchen and of seasons, of how cooking can be a communion with nature and the world around us.

Which is to say, I’ve mainly been reading Cook, Eat, Repeat to soak up Lawson’s romantic prose, which here is untrammeled by ungenerous word counts or a sense of what sells newspapers: a gorgeous 5000+ essay on that princely condiment, the anchovy, for not much reason other than to introduce a couple of anchovy recipes. In the opening essay, as in some of the recipes, such as the take on Ash Sarkar’s (or is it Ash Sarkar’s mum’s?) now notorious fish finger bhorta, there is a sense that the title ─ while extremely catchy ─ is something of a misnomer. We never truly repeat any recipe because if we did then we would be doing it wrong. The physical recipe is just one bus stop on a route that never quite ends; every recipe is an iteration on something else, every recipe will be iterated on by those who read it. In the bhorta for instance, the recipe makes the addition of pink onions (judicious) and substitutes out mustard oil (controversial), and all of a sudden ownership of a childhood Bengali-assimilation food is temporarily transferred, unlikely, to Nigella Lawson, which will then be transferred to whoever makes the dish next. Having made one version, I’m sure I will make the other, and then my own version, unbalanced towards my own unsubtle palate, which tends to deface recipes with the brutal additions of chillis and various peppercorns.

So what has all of this got to do with Vittles? A few things have happened recently which have made me slightly rethink this newsletter. I’m well aware that this landing in your inbox is an intimate privilege I have. In a world which is already depressing enough, I’m not sure it’s my job to always depress you further. I was so heartened by the reaction to last week’s regional chippy guide, which seemed to inspire what can only be described as ‘joy’ for a lot of people, even those who don’t normally read food writing. I think it’s something I could be doing more of, given we are (in the UK at least) about to go into a lockdown of an indeterminate length.

While we’re all cooking again, and in need of things to preoccupy us, I’ve been commissioning writers and chefs to do their own iterations of recipes. Over the next few weeks, and possibly for as long as lockdown goes on, I’ll be publishing small essay-recipes, each one on the theme of a cookbook with an iteration on the recipe contained within. It wont be quite as ambitious as an idea I’ve had for a while (which Lawson shares) of an endlessly iterative recipe, like the book in Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, but hopefully this type of writing will have us engaging with our cookbooks in a more imaginative way, reminding us that cooking from a recipe is always a collaboration, an act of translation. And on a personal level, it will give me some time off from editing 3000 word essays on failing supply chains.

This not-quite-full-season will start next week, with Alex Jackson on Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed. Pitches will not be open for this as I am commissioning everything myself, but I do hope you enjoy reading them. Normal service will continue whenever normal service continues.

Jonathan Nunn is a writer based in London and the editor of Vittles. You can find him on Twitter as @demarionunn and you can find Vittles on both Twitter and Instagram.