Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are publishing Nick Bramham’s recipe for spanakorizo, a Greek spinach and rice dish that is regularly on the menu at Quality Wines.

Recently we published our spring recipe supplement, featuring seasonal soup recipes from three of our favourite food writers: Melek Erdal, Ixta Belfrage and Songsoo Kim. You can access these recipes and dozens more with a Vittles subscription, which costs £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

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You can also support us by buying Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, which is available here.

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Spanakorizo, which literally translates as ‘spinach rice’, is a traditional Greek dish that you are unlikely to find in Greek restaurants, even in Greece (believe me, I’ve tried). It’s typically made at home – an everyday chuck-it-all-in-a-pot-and-forget-about-it kind of a dish, the gold standard of minimum-effort, maximum-reward cooking. Spring onions and garlic are softened in olive oil, then joined by rice, spinach and water and left to simmer gently while you potter about doing something else for an hour. You’ll return to a silky homogeneous risotto-esque mass, which you then spike with copious amounts of dill, lemon and black pepper.

Spanakorizo is a total godsend during this mercurial hot–cold period before the truly exciting spring produce (asparagus, broad beans, courgettes) peaks, when you’re craving something fresh and zippy but also soulful and comforting. I’ve been serving it at Quality Wines around this time for the past few years now, with barrel-aged feta crumbled over the top, a good glug of olive oil and our crusty house focaccia. While this is enough to satisfy most, it does also work well as a garnish for roast chicken, grilled pork chops or steamed fish. I’ll leave you with one piece of advice: do not be stingy with the lemon.

Spanakorizo

Serves 2
Time ~1 hour

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To help you to navigate this shift, we asked three of our favourite recipe writers to come up with recipes that reflect the duality of the season. Almost immediately, we landed on ‘soup’ as a connective thread for this first Spring Recipe Supplement. Although more usually associated with winter, soup captures something of the anticipatory ambivalence of spring: light and vibrant enough to embrace the potential for change on some days, yet hearty enough to encourage slowing down on others.

Our three recipe writers – Melek Erdal, Songsoo Kim and Ixta Belfrage – all have different ideas of spring. ‘We often speak of the power of breaking bread together, but nothing seeps into you like soup,’ writes Melek in the lead essay of the supplement. In it, Melek explores her attempts to recreate a düğün çorbası (lamb and rice soup) made for her by legendary chef Musa Dağdeviren. Her version of this rich, unctuous soup has one foot in tradition and the other in experimentation, capturing the push and pull of building from the past to forge into the future.

In her recipe for rapini doenjang guk (flowering spring greens soup), a comforting, deeply umami broth bursting with seasonal greens, Songsoo writes that to eat spring vegetables is to mirror ‘the act of blooming itself … the first push of life at the start of spring’. For Ixta, meanwhile, spring is a bright, red bowl of spicy fish soup, lifted by a hot red pepper rouille. Her vibrant take on the classic French bouillabaisse draws inspiration from Italian, Turkish and Mexican flavours and is bursting with the vitality of the new.

Some of these recipes can be pulled together quickly, and make for a perfect quick al-fresco meal; others require a bit more time bubbling away on the stove, ideal for Sundays with loved ones. All are very straightforward to make, requiring little more than time and patience. These recipes are worth it though: as spring shows us year after year, good things come to those who wait.

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Melek Dreams of Soup

Melek Erdal recalls her attempts to recreate düğün çorbası (‘wedding soup’), a lamb and rice soup prepared for her by master chef Musa Dağdeviren.

‘As I sit with Luis, I think about the fortifying power of sipping soup together. The many people I’ve made soup for or who’ve made soup for me. I think about the corbacıs (soup canteens) that punctuate the working day back in North London, serving affordable, sustenance to the people who make the city run: soup to ease people into the day and to ease them out … The soup was transportive: the depth of the broth with thin strands of lamb, thickened by rice but still with a fluidity; the smoky heat from the pul biber, and slight acidity from a subtle touch of lemon.’

Rapini Doenjang Guk (Flowering Spring Greens Soup)

Songsoo Kim shares a comforting umami soup made with Korean fermented soybean paste and verdant seasonal produce

‘In Korea, there are many genres of – and many different names for – what in the West is all broadly categorised as ‘soup’. This recipe sits within the guk (국) category, which can easily be translated as broth, and is often served as an accompaniment to a meal … In this guk, doenjang-massaged greens are paired with a deeply umami soup made from dry seafood stock, which complements the dark chlorophyll and sweet flavour of the greens. The result is a deliciously balanced, comforting dish.’

Ixta Belfrage’s Spicy Fish Soup with Rouille

For this bright, zesty riff on the classic bouillabaisse, Ixta Belfrage draws on bold Italian, Turkish and Mexican flavours

‘French cuisine tends to be bound by rules of what ingredients can and cannot be used in a classic dish … These recipes hold no national or cultural allegiances, borrowing inspiration from Italy (the tomato-rich base), Turkey (the red pepper paste) and Mexico (guajillo chilli, cinnamon, lime). The moment I most look forward to is when you’ve just added the rouille to the hot soup: the two begin to meld into each other, but both elements are still distinct, marbling. Add a squeeze of lime, and it’s a party.’

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are publishing our Spring Recipe Supplement, comprising three soup recipes by some of our favourite cooks. This fresh, clean soup, by Songsoo Kim, is based around doenjang, a Korean fermented soybean paste (a cousin to red miso) that perfectly complements the vibrant spring greens. To read the rest of the series, please click below:

• Melek Erdal’s lamb and rice dugun çorbası

• Ixta Belfrage’s spicy fish soup with hot red pepper rouille

All the articles in the Spring Recipe Supplement are paywalled. To view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

Subscribe now

In Korea, there are many genres of – and many different names for – what in the West is all broadly categorised as ‘soup’. There is jjigae (찌개), a rich and thick soup with chunky elements suspended within. There is tang (탕), which can be written with the same Chinese character (湯) to describe long-simmered medicinal soups. And then there is guk (국), which can easily be translated as broth, and is often served as an accompaniment to a meal.

The soup I’m sharing a recipe for here sits within the guk category. It is made with rapini (spring greens). In March and early April in the UK, spring may seem abundant, but don’t be deceived – while the promise of what’s to come is there, little is ready to be eaten just yet. Instead, nature offers what it can in lean moments: nettles, wild garlic – and greens like rapini.

Rapini, like kale shoots, collard shoots, spring greens and flowering brassicas, is most common in the UK as a byproduct of commercially grown crops. Although these greens rare appear in supermarkets or standard shops, they are delicious and versatile in their own right (but you’ll have to head to the farmer’s market or specialist stores to find them). In Korea, we believe that eating vegetables like this carries their energy into us, mirroring the act of blooming itself – the first push of life at the start of spring.

Rapini is excellent simply steamed or lightly sautéed, but its sweetness comes alive when massaged with doenjang, a fermented soybean paste that is a cousin to red miso. In this guk, doenjang-massaged greens are paired with a deeply umami soup made from dry seafood stock, which complements the dark chlorophyll and sweet flavour of the greens. The result is a deliciously balanced, comforting dish, perfect for spring.

Rapini Doenjang Guk (Flowering Spring Greens Soup)

Serves 2
Time 45 mins

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are publishing our Spring Recipe Supplement, comprising three soup recipes by some of our favourite cooks. Here, Ixta Belfrage draws inspiration from a bouillabaisse she ate in Marseille but infuses it with the flavours of Italy, Mexico and Turkey. The resulting fish soup – and complementary garlic-heavy rouille – are full of vibrant flavour. To read the rest of the Spring Recipe Supplement, please click below:

• Melek Erdal’s lamb and rice dugun çorbası

• Songsoo Kim’s rampini doenjang guk (flowering spring greens soup)

All the articles in the Spring Recipe Supplement are paywalled. To view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

Subscribe now

Spicy Fish Soup with Hot Red Pepper Rouille

Last year, I ate a bouillabaisse at Restaurant Michel, a classic Marseille establishment where the menu is reassuringly small and the waiters who’ve worked there for decades buzz around the room as if electrified by nicotine (and possibly cocaine). It wasn’t the best fish soup of my life, but I had a wonderful time: the artistry of the presentation, the brilliant hospitality and the raw-garlic-heavy rouille were impossible not to love.

French cuisine tends to be bound by rules of what ingredients can and cannot be used in a classic dish. Traditionally, bouillabaisse and soupe de poisson are made with fish, shellfish, fennel, saffron and orange peel, with fresh tomato being used only sparingly, for a hint of colour and acidity. In my humble opinion, fish soups that are more tomato-paste heavy (like the ones you might find in Italy) are far more exciting. While some chefs may consider the use of tomato paste to achieve deep flavour to be ‘cheating’, I use it with reckless abandon in my own recipe for spicy fish soup, which I’m sharing here.

The stock for this soup relies on the power of aci biber salçasi (Turkish hot red pepper paste), tomato paste and spices to form the flavour base. The result is a rich, tangy and slightly sweet soup. Some sticklers may protest that this is more a soup with fish in it rather than a fish soup. Fine.

To my mind, a fish soup is incomplete without a rouille, specifically one with unsociable amounts of raw garlic in it. So, I’m also sharing a recipe for a hot red pepper rouille that perfectly complements the dish. Like the soup, the rouille contains aci biber salçasi, along with saffron and lime juice to make it pop.

These recipes hold no national or cultural allegiances, borrowing inspiration from Italy (the tomato-rich base), Turkey (the red pepper paste) and Mexico (guajillo chilli, cinnamon, lime). The moment I most look forward to is when you’ve just added the rouille to the hot soup: the two begin to meld into each other, but both elements are still distinct, marbling. Add a squeeze of lime, and it’s a party.

Spicy Fish Soup with Hot Red Pepper Rouille

Serves 4
Time 50 mins

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. A quick reminder that the Food in Print Fair at St. Giles Cripplegate on April 11 is just three days away - you can find all the information about the fair here. Remember, it is completely free to attend - no tickets needed!

Today, we are publishing a recipe from our Spring Recipe Supplement, which comprises three soup recipes by some of our favourite cooks. In this lead essay for the supplement, Melek Erdal recalls her attempts to recreate düğün çorbası (‘wedding soup’), a lamb and rice soup prepared for her by master chef Musa Dağdeviren. You can read the other recipes here:

• Ixta Belfrage’s spicy fish soup with hot red pepper rouille

• Songsoo Kim’s rampini doenjang guk (flowering spring greens soup)

All the articles in the Spring Recipe Supplement are paywalled. To view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

Subscribe now

Melek Dreams of Soup

Were you born in the UK? No

Have you travelled to the US before? No

Have you travelled to Cuba, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen or Libya in the last ten years? Yes

What’s the reason for your visit to the US? To make soup

I was sure I wouldn’t be let in, but my visa to the United States got approved days before my flight. I’d been invited to the annual Worlds of Flavor conference in November last year to demonstrate how to make yayla çorbası – a shepherd’s soup – in Trump’s America. The conference was held at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa, California; the furthest I’d travelled for work before then was Sandwich in Kent. And I would be cooking with the culinary anthropologist Musa Dağdeviren: I would be making the most classic Anatolian soup in front of the master.

A few days before the conference begins, I go to La Tapatia Market, a Mexican grocery store in town with a small canteen at the back. The place feels so familiar and welcoming it reminds me of the Kurdish community centre back in London. I sit in the only seat available, next to a man named Luis, a retired tradesman who still lays the occasional patio, but mostly spends his time drying candied pumpkin in the sun. Luis is eating Menudo, which has a deep terracotta seal of oil on top and large squares of tripe that appear each time he stirs the bowl. It’s a hangover soup served only on Sundays, he says. I tell him it reminds me of a soup called İşkembe (which tends to be made with lamb tripe rather than beef). Luis goes to the counter and orders me a ‘sample’ of another soup, the pozole, but they send a full-sized bowl. It comes with shredded cabbage, diced onions, fresh coriander and lime. I smile when I take a sip – all they need to see before turning away, satisfied.

We often speak of the power of breaking bread together, but nothing seeps into you like soup. As I sit with Luis, I think about the fortifying power of sipping soup together. The many people I’ve made soup for or who’ve made soup for me. I think about the çorbacıs (soup canteens) that punctuate the working day back in North London, serving affordable sustenance to the people who make the city run: soup to ease people into the day and to ease them out. About how these çorbacıs have also become the go-to destination to recover after the chaos of a 1000-person Kurdish wedding in a converted Argos warehouse in Edmonton, the late-night workers sharing space with groups dressed in gowns, with up-dos held in place with 1000 hair grips and half a can of hairspray, all sipping soup and catching respite.

Soup is so substantial for something so formless. It forms around you: you become its container and in turn it seeps into you and alters your state temporarily. It’s a momentary escape – when eaten with others, it offers a form of elopement. I dream of the ocean at times in my life when big decisions or events are approaching; before this trip, I dreamt of soup. In my dream, Hasankeyf, one of the oldest continuously inhabited Kurdish towns, had not been washed away by the building of the Ilısu Dam. Instead it had been sealed in soup. An underwater city, forever preserved.

*

Chef Musa arrived in the conference’s test kitchen unassumingly and got straight to work making elaborate dishes that he was adamant were as authentic as possible – recipes that had travelled thousands of miles and as many years. I’ve never been to Çiya Sofrasi, his restaurant in Istanbul, but I imagine it has the buzz of an Edmonton çorbacı. With a name meaning ‘mountain table’ in Kurdish, his restaurant, which he opened in the late eighties (the same time my parents left), preserves the traditional rural food ways of his hometown of Nizip in Antep and wider Anatolia. His episode of Chef’s Table is my favourite. I remember thinking it was a love story: between him, his wife and the atomically charged era of Istanbul they met in, and between him and the master bakers, makers and workers he grew up around and learned from. He was meticulous and romantic, his pace slow and intentional, his voice gentle and earnest. I had long wanted to meet this master magician.

Musa immediately started sending me on side quests to source missing ingredients or find makeshift tools to enable him to keep recipes as close to how they would be made back home. I was both student and interpreter. When making katıklı dolma – dried squash stuffed with lamb and goat meat, cooked in broth and served with garlic yoghurt and chilli butter – he dispatched me to find ‘ice, a bowl and two wooden mallets’, then invited me to ‘beat the mincemeat’ with him.

We dipped our makeshift mallets (rolling pins) in the ice before beating the meat in synchronicity (much to the amusement and dismay of the rest of the kitchen). ‘The beating makes the meat mousse-like and the ice prevents the meat from bruising – but we must do this in rhythm,’ he explained. Learning from Musa felt like listening to folklore: you are told a compelling story, the reasoning of which is not always immediately apparent, but it will come to you in time.

Gentle nudges in the right direction without providing all the coordinates seemed to be Musa’s way, along with an insistence to keep going, to repeat something until you get it right. On the day of the demo, I made my soup. As the audience applauded, Musa leaned over my shoulder and whispered, ‘Well done, you did a great job. But this is not how you make yayla çorbası. Rice is the only thing you need to thicken.’ My mama had always added egg and flour, which emulsified the soup and gave it a silky texture. ‘That is a cheat’s way to thicken,’ Musa explained.

When I told Mama, she responded simply: ‘It’s not Musa’s soup, it’s mine.’ Torn between these two masters, I thought I’d revisit the question at a later date.

On our last day, Musa got up early and used the leftover ingredients from the week’s cooking to make soup for everyone. Of all the elaborate dishes made in the test kitchen by chefs from all around the world, this seemingly simple lamb broth with rice was the only one that made everyone pause for a moment, gathered around the stove. ‘Düğün çorbası’ (‘wedding soup’), Musa declared, stirring the large, still-bubbling cauldron, before ladling small bowls for everyone.

The soup was transportive: the depth of the broth with thin strands of lamb, thickened by rice but still with a fluidity; the smoky heat from the pul biber, and slight acidity from a subtle touch of lemon. I was reminded of the ‘Stone Soup’ folk tale, in which a wise new visitor to the town uses donated ingredients to produce a soup no one had ever heard of, but that was the most delicious thing anyone had ever eaten.

In the taxi journey back to the airport, I was already dreaming about making Musa’s soup. I wanted to recreate the taste and feeling of working with him and the others in the kitchen, but much like the fabled stone soup, it was a mystery how exactly he had made his düğün çorbası. (I was briefly snapped out of my reverie by the driver asking why my Uber rating was so low: ‘I swear if this was night time nobody would pick you up.’ Why exactly my rating had declined so much was also a mystery.)

As soon as I got home, I got to work trying to recreate the soup. If you look up düğün çorbası online, you will find recipes in which yoghurt is added to the broth. Musa had explained that his regional version was similar to a beyran (a lamb soup). Yet his cookbook contains recipes for both a lamb rice soup and a beyran, neither of which seemed to be the soup he’d made.

Beyond the basics – lamb, stock, rice and, obviously, onion – I guessed there was garlic in it. And there was definitely pul biber, which Musa treats as religiously as I do (he’d given me a batch from his hometown as a parting gift, and I treasure it as if it were expensive saffron). I begin my attempts by braising lamb neck in a pressure cooker, before adding water and slow cooking for three hours. Separately I cook down onions and then garlic, and then add the pul biber. I want to add some salça, but I message Musa and he is adamant there was none in his soup. I add a teaspoon anyway, along with some chopped sundried tomatoes. I strain in my lamb stock, then add pudding rice and simmer. I add the lamb meat and some lemon juice. The result is nothing like Musa’s dish – it’s too red and the rice is too thick, giving the soup a porridge-like texture.

The next time, I don’t add sundried tomatoes but add dried reyhan (purple basil). It’s a rogue addition, but I love the perfume it brings. Maybe the colour is still too dark from the salça – maybe he really didn’t use salça? The rice still isn’t right either, so I go out to buy more. I realise that ‘cracked (or broken) rice’ and ‘pudding rice’ are different things – the soup needed cracked rice! I’ve cracked it, I think.

I continue trying to make the soup almost every week for three months. The days get longer, indicating that spring has arrived on the doorstep. It brings fresh hope that I will perfect this soup in time to celebrate the season’s lamb.

On the first sunny day in what feels like months, my attempt at the soup finally feels right. I send Musa’s wife Zeynep a video of the soup first, to ask if she thinks Musa would approve. ‘He’ll say it has too much rice,’ she tells me. I message Musa. ‘It has too much rice’, he replies.

I decide that I’m OK with this. He is the teacher, but I am the interpreter. So, here is a recipe for lamb soup with too much rice – and a smidgen of salça.

Düğün Çorbası (Wedding Soup)

Serves 4
Time 2 hrs 30 mins

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are running a recipe by Ixta Belfrage from Issue 2 of our print magazine. This piece is part of a compilation titled ‘Disrespect your Elders!’ in which chefs shared dishes that defy traditional expectations. In print, Ixta is joined by Feroz Gajia and Rahel Stephanie.

To read the whole compilation, purchase the magazine, chock-full of all things Bad Food, here.

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Feijoada Reimagined … as Bangers and Mash

In Brazil, Saturday is the day of feijoada. Traditionally, feijoada must include all the following on one plate: feijão (black bean and pork stew); couve (sautéed greens, similar to collard greens); farofa (a textured condiment made from coarse cassava flour fried with garlic and onions – and sometimes also bacon, banana and egg); vinagrete (a salsa made with tomato, onion, chilli and vinegar); orange slices (usually skin–on) as a sweet and sour counterpart to the fatty beans; and rice.

Iracema, my bisavó (great-grandmother), painstakingly made feijão most days. My mother recalls waking each morning to the scent of boiling beans, simmering salted pork and frying refogado. They lived in Natal, a beachside city in the northeast of Brazil. At the time, dairy farmers would bring their cows to the end of the sandy, unpaved streets and milk them into metal buckets. Iracema would use this to make cream and butter, saving the nata – the thick cream that rises to the top when you boil unpasteurised milk – for herself as a treat to spoon over her feijão. I’ve never heard of anyone else eating feijão with nata, but it’s very special indeed.

My bisavó was serious about her feijão. She would be shocked, therefore, to learn that my mother cooks hers with seaweed, cumin and ginger in an attempt to reduce gut inflammation. She would also be absolutely horrified that I, her great-grand-daughter, add Worcestershire sauce, curry powder, tamari and cocoa to mine – decidedly untraditional pantry staples from the various cuisines I grew up with, which I’ve come to rely on when I need to add serious depth of flavour, fast.

The following recipe emerges from these and other experiments with tradition. It’s a reimagined feijoada that leans into the English half of my background, drawing inspiration from bangers and mash.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles. Some exciting news: Vittles is at GALF (Goa Art and Literature Festival) this week! The festival runs from 12th-14th February; Jonathan will be in conversation with writer, editor and GALF majordomo Vivek Menezes on the 13th. If you are in Goa, or nearby, please come by and say hello!

Today’s recipe is by Shahnaz Ahsan, who writes about reclaiming her favourite food-smells along with a recipe for an easy, delicious, biryani-like chicken and rice.

Issue 2 of our print magazine is also still available to purchase. Buy your copy here.

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Every once in a while, something happens to make me realise how much prejudice I have internalised over the course of my life. The most recent occasion was on a weekend morning, when my husband and I were leaving to take our kids to gymnastics.We were already late, and I had the engine running. ‘Your shirt stinks of curry!’ I shrieked, as he got into the car.

I leaned in to sniff his sleeve – it smelled of onions and cumin. He looked at me puzzled, unsure as to how this counted as a crime, and I realised that, to him, it didn’t.

Since then, I’ve been reflecting on the embarrassment that I carry about the possibility of ever smelling of the food that I cook and eat. The perpetual fear I had growing up of being ‘smelly’ was rooted in casually racist comments from other people, like when a white girl yelled ‘SMELLS LIKE JAL-FREHHHH-ZEH!’ when a new student from Bangladesh got on the school bus.

The fear was also pervasive at home, but I hadn’t fully realised at the time. My mother would cook with a towel wrapped around her head so that her hair wouldn’t absorb any cooking aromas. My father insisted that all the internal doors of the house were shut before we commenced any frying of onions, then after dinner we would fling open our front and back doors, willing the cold Yorkshire air to blow through the house and carry the telltale cooking scent away.

And yet, there was nothing more inviting to me than the layered scents of the countless dinners – mackerel bhorta, garlic-tempered dal, bottle gourd with jackfruit seeds – that we had consumed as a family. I relished being able to smell food from other households in our neighbourhood too; there was something poetic about how everyone’s kitchens came alive at the same time every evening, each family engaged in the same rituals of cooking and feeding, our back-to-back terraced streets filling with the aromas of sizzling onions, deep cumin, savoury eggy bread and lard-cooked chips.

Capitalism tells us that there is a ‘correct’ way to smell of spices – after all, many expensive perfumes contain notes of cinnamon, black pepper and ginger. But I am more interested in the ‘wrong’ way, in undoing the decades’ worth of shame that I have carried about the smell of the food I love to cook and eat. This recipe is the embodiment of that resolution. When I make this dish, I deliberately leave all the interior doors in our house open. Afterwards, I enjoy sinking into sheets that carry the scent of ginger and lemongrass and fennel and ghee.

Partly inspired by Hainanese chicken, yakhni pulao and chicken rendang, this one-pot chicken and rice dish is warming and hearty while not being too heavy. It’s a perfect comfort dish for the whole family but would also work for a midweek dinner with friends. Best of all, it creates the most beautiful aroma in your home. If I could bottle it, I would wear it with pride.

Unapologetically aromatic chicken and rice

Serves 4
Time 50 mins plus overnight marinating

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Denai Moore, the ‘sando queen of Instagram’, discusses how making elaborate sandwiches grounds her, and shares a recipe for a channa roti sandwich inspired by a family trip to Antigua.

Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, is still available. You can order a copy here.

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What does self-soothing look like for you when the world is on fire? What is bringing you ease in the doom and gloom?

At some point in 2024, making food, the thing that I was supposed to love more than anything, began to feel like a chore. I shared increasingly fewer recipes, because I lost the urgency to do so.

I don’t quite remember when or why, but at some point, I started to make increasingly elaborate sandwiches from scratch. At first I made these sandwiches for myself, but somewhere along the way I started to share them with friends. I would hand-deliver them, and we would eat together in judgement-free company.

I’m sure that sandwiches are meant to be more instant than the ones I was making, which sometimes took hours to prepare if you factor in making the bread (which, honestly, just screams ‘self-employed behaviour’). But this inconvenient, clear-my-whole-schedule, all-consuming kind of sandwich-making brought me out of my creative drought – and, most importantly, back to myself. All the residual hope that I have for a tender world is still being held together by these sandwiches.

Like Rome, my sandwiches generally are not built in one day; each one is laboured over and carefully considered, layer by layer (of course, the process can be shortened substantially if it’s lunchtime and you’re hungry). These sandwiches have a pulse to them, each one an idea romantically pursued as soon as it enters my brain. Whenever and wherever inspiration strikes, I turn to my notes app, where no idea or feeling goes undocumented or is unworthy of existing.

Then the journey begins, although the destination often changes along the way. Even if I feel at odds with myself, the commitment of promising a sandwich to a friend helps me to push through, almost like an accountability pact. I’ve never regretted the time and effort that I’ve put into making a sandwich for someone – and my future self is always eternally grateful for the days’ worth of extra focaccia I usually make in the process.

Like most people, I spend far too much time online, more than I care to admit. The internal pull and tug of guilt, shame, dread and fear just feels like the baseline of daily life now. Coffee with a headline that you wish you could just un-read immediately, before you have to get on with your day like nothing is happening. Deranged stories of pop stars going to space for ten seconds and dating former prime ministers are interspersed with live-streamed footage of the Gaza genocide, now into its third year, and global-warming-induced natural disasters. I feel like I have no choice but to scream/tweet/cry in rage/cry from sadness all at once, and all my friends feel equally helpless too.

While the sandwich making has saved me, it’s community and friendship that are really keeping me here. Making plans as an adult can be a logistical nightmare of google calendars and constant messages on multiple platforms. I’ve been guilty of hiding away from my friends because the admin is too much, when all I want is to spend stress-free one-on-one time with them without the need to schedule weeks in advance or secure a reservation at a vibey new restaurant. Sharing the sandwiches I make with my friends has helped me out of my cocoon. I’ve hand-delivered them to pals’ doorsteps or offices, unscripted, unplanned, no big occasion needed. In a world where my time feels like it’s evaporating into thin air, these sandwiches have forced me to slow down.

Now, to the question you’ve all been dying for me to answer: What makes a good sandwich? Of course, there’s no one answer, but as ‘the sando queen of Instagram’ – according to online strangers, at least – I will talk you through what I consider the key factors to consider.

Denai’s Sandwich Philosophy

Inspiration

The first place to start is the inspiration: the source, the reason for the sandwich. You take the reins here. Anything can be a sandwich – a roast dinner, a Thai red curry, a spring roll – so let your imagination run wild. Maybe there’s a core memory dish that somehow involves three carbs all at once (Jamaican-coded), or maybe you have leftover prawn crackers from your takeaway that you want to use up. This is a judgement-free zone. It’s just you and your multi-layered dream.

Bread

This is arguably the most important factor – without good bread, it’s a bad sandwich, I fear. I tend to make focaccia from scratch for my sandwiches, but I appreciate that not everyone has the time or inclination to do that. If you’re making a special sandwich, I highly recommend buying the bread from your local bakery. But remember that ‘good bread’ doesn’t have to mean ‘expensive’ or ‘fancy’; it’s more about matching the vibe of the sandwich. I have a special place in my heart for a PB&J made with squidgy white supermarket bread, which just wouldn’t hit the same on sourdough.

Balance

A sandwich is a balancing act between moistness, juiciness, crispness, freshness, herbaceous-ness, sweetness, tanginess and texture. Each ingredient in a sandwich has its place and a purpose, and you should think about what each one is bringing to the overall experience. Texture feels especially important to me: the last thing you want is too many ingredients with the same texture, leading to either a soggy mess or something all too dry (which is arguably worse).

Don’t limit yourself to the usual suspects – open your mind beyond lettuce and tomato (although of course, they still have their place). Thinly sliced fennel or cabbage are more robust and sturdier, and work fantastically. Herbs are also a big feature in every sandwich that I make: try tearing fresh dill, mint or parsley on top of the filling.

Here are some of my favourite go-to fillings to introduce a play of textures and balance.

• Crispy-ness: Think crispy onions (shop-bought or homemade), crisps of all kinds, tostones (arguably better than hash browns, imo).

• Salad-y bits: Experiment with white or red cabbage, fennel, radishes, sprouts or grated carrot, but don’t sleep on the classics either – cucumber, tomatoes, red onion and celery are popular for a reason.

• Freshness/herbaceousness: parsley, mint, coriander, dill, coriander, chives and spring onions all work well.

• Sweetness/tanginess: chilli jam is nearly always a good call, but choose any condiment that your heart desires (just not tommy k). Also: pickles of all forms, sauerkraut, kimchi.

Layers Matter

Here, I am more concerned with depth of flavour rather than neatly distinct strata. Your sandwich should have layers of taste that build on top of each other. For example, I love a hit of allium in my sandwiches to bring an extra something – try mixing some spring onions into the mayo, or some pickled red onions as a final topping.

Make It Yours!

My God, if it’s going to be your sandwich, make it yours! No mustard? Cool by me. The weirdly liberating part about this whole thing is that, in the beginning, these sandwiches were mine, all mine, eaten messily in my garden without anyone’s gaze. So, throw caution to the wind and make the sando of your dreams!!!!!

Channa Roti Sando

I began working on this piece last summer, when the UK was enduring a heatwave that felt like a punishment. In this heat, a memory flashed into my mind of a LIFE-ALTERING roti that I ate with my family in Antigua in 2022. Thinking back on the warmth now is helping me get through the depths of winter.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Serena Coady shares a recipe for a vegetarian kari debal, a fragrantly aromatic – and fiery – curry enlivened with a swirl of vinegar that is associated with Malaysia’s Kristang people.

Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, is still available. You can order a copy here. Our event next week with Ixta Belfrage, Rukmini Iyer and Melek Erdal is nearly sold out, so if you’d like to attend we’d recommend buying tickets ASAP.

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Every family has its own unique language, a collection of inside jokes and nicknames that can immediately transport you to memories formed long ago. In my family, one of our hidden languages has a name – Kristang.

The language of the Kristang people, who are of Portuguese–Malaysian descent, is classified as ‘severely endangered’ by UNESCO, with only a few hundred speakers left worldwide. I was born in Malaysia to a Kristang mother, and an Australian father, and moved to Australia as a child. Still, many childhood Christmases were spent in Melaka’s Portuguese Settlement, the small seaside village where most of Malaysia’s Kristang people are based. By day, my sisters and I would ride scooters to fetch charred chicken sticks from the satay vendor. By night we strolled Jonker Street, the fumes from the night market scenting our hair. Back in the family home, aunties, distant cousins, nearby neighbours and even the local priest would gather around a spread of Malaysian roti, Australian barbecue prawns and the uniquely Kristang dishes: seybak, pang susi and, of course, curry devil.

Curry devil is the dish most commonly associated with Kristang culture. As a child, its name often bent my brain. To me, a curry devil was someone who’d eaten so much of the hot, hot curry that they’d transformed into Satan (given that I was raised on a combination of midnight mass – Kristang translates to ‘Christian’ – and a Southeast Asian penchant for superstition and myth, it’s little wonder I held such confused beliefs). I was in my twenties when I found out that curry devil was in fact called ‘kari debal’, from ‘debal’, which means ‘leftovers’. The dish was traditionally made with what’s left of Christmas dinner, and because it was spicy, the suffix ‘devil’ was added.

The main components of kari debal are an aromatic base of lemongrass, galangal, garlic, shallots and chilli, with a swirl of vinegar added near the end. The vinegar, which was traditionally included to preserve the dish in pre-fridge times, is the perfect enlivening note to complement the fragrant bursts of lemongrass and chilli and the brown sugar sweetness of the dish. Every family’s version is different: while we use fried mustard seeds, others prefer English mustard. Some homes include sausages as the main protein, whereas we go all in for chicken or pork. But even if the dish is flexible, there are some hard limits, I discovered.

One Christmas, I returned to Melaka’s Portuguese Settlement with box-dyed copper hair and hips that had suddenly made their presence known. I was fifteen. The family took these changes in their stride, but then I dropped the real bombshell: I was now a vegetarian. Feedback flooded in from a battalion of aunties. To them, forsaking meat meant I was as good as dead, so the idea of a vegetarian kari debal was out of the question.

Last year, I started to think about this question again. It had been six years since I left Australia for London, and just as long since I’d last visited Portuguese Settlement or heard the familiar rhythm of Kristang. But I knew I could rely on food to bring me back. I wondered if making kari debal – my own vegetarian version – could bring me closer to the family and the traditions I’d grown up with. There was just one problem: I wasn’t sure I had the right to. Who was I to touch this vast, beloved legacy? I asked my Uncle G, who is also now based in the UK, for his opinion on who makes the best kari debal. His reply – ‘Well, mine is the best to me! That’s because we all make it how we like it’ – felt like tacit permission to give it a try.

I began reaching out for stories, recipes and guidance, all while knowing I would likely stray from what I was told. The following two weeks were a frenzy of ingredient hunting, cooking questions over WhatsApp, and kitchen experiments. While fresh turmeric, lemongrass stalks and galangal were no bother to find, candlenuts proved harder to obtain than a same-day GP appointment. I finally found some at an Asian grocer in Deptford, where a debonair cat held court.

The actual cooking was a breeze – just a matter of grinding the aromatics in a blender and then throwing everything into a pot – but I tried many variations to get it as close as possible to the family recipe. I learned that I preferred the taste after an overnight soak because it gave the tofu more time to absorb the flavours. I also chose to up the umami with soy sauce and liquid Maggi.

Then came judgement day. When presented with the dish, Uncle G sniffed the air. ‘Smells right, but the colour’s off. Use Kashmiri chilli powder next time.’ He paused. I held my breath. ‘It works,’ he said. ‘It just needs ... pork!’ When shared in our extended family WhatsApp chat, messages of approval rolled in (though one uncle, echoing Uncle G, wrote: ‘Yep, Pork on your fork, luv !!!’). I waited for someone to decry my culinary edits as sacrilege, or to be visited in my dreams by my frowning great-grandmother, but the fallout never came. Uncle G even went in for another bowl – proof that meat wasn’t what made Kari Debal worth eating. With so many elders gone and our language disappearing, maybe changing the recipe wasn’t heresy. Maybe it was another way to keep Kristang alive.

Vegetarian Kari Debal

Serves 4
Time 1 hr 20 mins

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, we have three recipes for quick South Asian snacks. But before that, an announcement about an upcoming Vittles event at the London Review Bookshop.

To mark the release of our second print issue titled ‘Bad Food’ (which you can still buy here), writers Sheena Patel and Lauren J Joseph will discuss the short stories they contributed to the magazine. Patel and Joseph will be in conversation with Vittles editor Odhran O’Donoghue about the relationship between food and the erotic in their writing. Tickets cost £10 are available here.

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Three South Asian snacks for teatime

The chef and writer Thomas Zacharias recently wrote in these pages: ‘In India, hosting friends has suddenly started implying cheese boards, dips, olives, crackers. I’ve often found myself wondering, Where’s the South Asian food? Why should we only bring out our recipes when it’s time for dinner?’ So, here are three (more) recipes for SouthAsian snacks from cooks and writers across the subcontinent: Kelyache Umber or Maharastrian banana fritters, the popular Afghan snack Shor Nakhud, and Singapore-inspired Lotus Root Crisps. All these recipes are quick and easy to whip up, and go well with a beverage, be it beer or chai.

Kelyache Umber (Maharashtrian Banana Fritters)

by Advaita Raut

One rainy afternoon in August, I pulled up the CCTV app on my phone, which offered me a bird’s-eye view of my parents’ sunlit kitchen in Naigaon, a little town in Mumbai’s northern suburbs. I watched my mother scoop balls of a sweetened, caramel-hued batter and fry them in glassy-hot oil. She was making kelyache umber, or Maharashtrian banana fritters. Their fragrance – sweet banana mingled with a hint of cardamom – seemed to miraculously waft via the camera’s grainy vantage to my apartment in Singapore.

Throughout my childhood, kelyache umber only ever made an appearance on special occasions, but now I eat and cook them often. They’re soft, fluffy and bite-sized, with a slightly chewy texture reminiscent of toffee. The appeal of kelyache umber lies in their simplicity and lack of pretentiousness: the product of just a few ingredients mixed in a bowl, without the need for fuss or precise measurements, these misshapen and oddly sized treats make for an imperfectly perfect snack.

Kelyache umber taste best when you pop them in your mouth straight off the stove as you’re frying – as a well-deserved award. They’re an ideal impromptu treat when friends drop by and you have some bananas languishing in your pantry that need to be used up.

Makes 25–30 fritters
Time 40 mins

Ingredients

4 over-ripe bananas (roughly two cups, mashed)
2–2 ½ cups (approx 275–350g) regular atta (wholemeal flour)
1¼ cups shaved jaggery or 1 cup (125g) icing sugar (see notes)
1 tbsp semolina
a pinch of ground cardamom or cinnamon

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Nick Bramham shares a recipe for fegato alla veneziana inspired by a mythical trip to the City of Masks. This hearty, warming dish is an ideal meal in the run-up to the Christmas season – comforting and with a sense of occasion, but easy to pull together.

Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Foods, is now available. If you order today, there should still be time for UK delivery before Christmas.

Finally, last week, Jonathan Nunn published his complete list of the 99 best restaurants in London. Check out the full list – including where Nick’s restaurant, Quality Wines, placed – here.

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I really wish I could tell you a story about a perfect lunch I once had in Venice. About how, late one morning, on a perfect winter’s day – deep-blue sky, a brisk chill in the air but the sun warm on my skin – I alighted from a water taxi at Piazza San Marco and strolled straight into Harry’s Bar, where, as I was enjoying a croque monsieur and one of their punishingly cold and extremely dry martinis, a stranger at the bar told me where to find the best fegato alla veneziana on the archipelago.

About how I headed off on a pilgrimage, weaving along the colonnaded waterfront of the Grand Canal, down ever narrower and darker alleyways with fewer and fewer tourists, until finally I arrived at a tiny osteria, just as a cigarette-smoking fisherman was handing over a heaving sack of soft-shell crabs to the smiling chef-patron, who waved me across the threshold into a pleasingly cramped space: faded wooden beams, peeling plaster, four rickety tables. Where, within seconds, I was seated, poured a tumbler of red wine from a chipped porcelain jug and presented with a steaming plateful of fried liver and onions; beams of white light streamed in through the misted windows and a quiet descended as I raised my fork.

It was a picture-perfect scene … only it didn’t happen. None of this happened. I’ve never actually been to Venice. Rather, this is the romanticised Venezia of my imagination, the place to which my mind wandered while cooking and eating perhaps the signature Venetian dish at home on a rainy afternoon the other week. Does this version of the city – a hallucinatory mash-up of Death in Venice, Don’t Look Now and Sam Youkilis’ Instagram page – actually exist? I can’t be sure. All I know is that fegato alla veneziana takes me there every time I make it – and I wholeheartedly recommend your taking the trip too.

In its purest form, fegato alla veneziana comprises thin strips of calf’s liver that are quickly sautéed with local Chioggia onions, hit with a splash of white wine or vinegar and slid onto a plate. When cooked well – with thoughtfully sourced and prepared ingredients and a short rest to let the juices mingle – this evocative, transportive dish is an immensely satisfying and comforting plate of food, a delicious interplay between the tender, lightly-frazzled-but-still-blushing-pink liver, the gentle savouriness of caramelised onions and the sweet and sour jolt of good-quality vinegar.

Fegato alla veneziana is usually served with polenta, though I prefer to serve mine with coarsely mashed potatoes, laced with seams of barely melted salted butter. A couple of glasses of light red wine would be a good idea, ideally served in small tumblers to really lean into the whole clichéd Venetian fantasy thing.

Fegato alla Veneziana with Buttery Mash

Serves 2
Time 1 hr 15 mins

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Good morning, and welcome back to Vittles! In case you missed it, we published the Vittles 99 last week — our list of the best restaurants in London right now. You can now read the guide in full, with all addresses added, here.

In today’s newsletter, Monica Cardenas has written for our Cooking from Life column, a series of essays that provide a window into how food and kitchen-life work for different people. Monica portrays the challenge of recreating her mother’s dishes in the wake of their estrangement.

Also, a reminder that this is the last week you can buy a copy of Issue 2 of our print magazine to guarantee it arrives before Christmas (if you are in the UK). You can buy the magazine on our website here, along with prints from our favourite illustrators and photographers. If you have pre-ordered a magazine for Christmas and it hasn’t arrived yet, then please let us know and we will sort it out.

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Do we peel the cucumbers for mac salad? Do we add salt to the zucchini breading, or just salt it at the end? My sisters and I ping these kinds of questions around in our group chat, ‘4 Non Blondes’. What we mean is: How do we cook this like Mom? Our resources are our memories, and trial and error. We haven’t had a relationship with our mom for almost twenty years – all of our adult lives, and some of my younger sisters’ teen years, too. But even though she is no longer there for us, and many childhood memories are far from comforting, those familiar tastes and smells can still release a spell of contentment.

My mother never followed a recipe from a cookbook or tried anything new. There were no advanced techniques or special equipment in our kitchen (except that one time she splurged on the apple corer-peeler that spun an apple into a slippery white slinky). Her repertoire was beef stew, chicken and rice, lasagne, fried zucchini, Spanish rice, macaroni salad and her homemade riff on Hamburger Helper. She used onion and garlic powder. We drank Lipton iced tea, mixed from a tall canister that came with its own scoop, and used the crumbly, artificial kind of parmesan cheese.

My sisters and I cobble together favourite childhood meals based on vague memories of which spice jars came out of the cabinet (oregano, we think), or what we regularly picked up at the grocery store – large cans of crushed tomatoes were always on the bottom shelf, and as kids we’d heave them like kettlebells to our chest. Although it has been decades since we last ate Mom’s food, when we’re able to capture exactly the right flavour, texture, consistency – it’s thrilling.

But there is one recipe of hers I’ve always struggled to get exactly right. Perhaps the problem with pasta fasul, as we called it at home (more commonly known as pasta e fagioli), is that it appears simpler than it is – a few high-quality and specific ingredients, and a particular technique that eluded me for years. I’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out how to make it like she did.

If you order pasta e fagioli at Olive Garden, a popular Italian chain in the United States, you’ll get soup. The restaurant’s version is a tomato broth with kidney beans and ground beef, all of which is very different from the thick, vegetarian dish with white cannellini beans my mother always prepared.

So, the first time I visited Italy, I scoured menus for it, eager to get a taste of the real thing – the dish my mom used to make. It was understandable that a fake Italian restaurant in America got it wrong, but surely in Florence it would be like home.

Wrong. What I received was nothing like the dish I grew up eating. The Florentine version had the white beans, at least, but it was still too soupy.

This was in the early aughts, when my mother and I were in the first stage of our estrangement and everything about her felt unanswerable. If the soup I was served in Italy was the ‘real’ thing, then what had my mother been cooking all those years? And were we even really Italian?

The small town in northeastern Pennsylvania where I grew up was teeming with people who called themselves Italian, but for how many generations can a person identify this way without any actual experience of living in Italy or within an Italian culture?

I found an article from the 1970s in the local newspaper about my ancestors’ family reunion. It was big ‘news’ because, at the time, there were nearly 150 descendants of my great-great-grandparents. The article explained that the matriarch had immigrated to Pennsylvania from Guardia Lombardi, Italy. An answer. Her daughter, my great-grandmother, married another Italian immigrant, and my grandmother married a man whose heritage I can’t quite trace.

I was still a bit unsure about my roots, given the apparent inaccuracy of one of my family’s signature dishes. I always felt that my Italian genes were greatly diminished by the time they reached me, and while my father’s Peruvian genes were evident on my face, as a first-generation immigrant, he was more focused on being American than passing on his heritage. Meanwhile, my mother bought our pasta from a little old lady who made it in her house, dried it, and delicately boxed it in long, thick strands. (In keeping with Mom’s miserly ingredient preferences, this was still cheaper than Barilla.) Distant aunts and uncles – my great-great-grandparents’ fifteen children – died at regular intervals, and we mourned each of them in exactly the same way: viewing in the evening, mass in the morning and burial, followed by a baked ziti and vinegary salad brunch in the church hall. We went to mass Sunday mornings, and in the afternoons ate spaghetti in Great-Nana’s basement.

So even if Mom’s pasta wasn’t ‘right’ – it feels like an integral part of my heritage.

Most nights I cook for two, but when I’m alone I gather the ingredients that I remember Mom using for pasta fasul. Crushed tomatoes, ditalini, cannellini beans. Good olive oil. Real onion and garlic – for this dish she didn’t scrimp.

Ditalini doesn’t have a good stand-in. It’s like a very small rigatoni. A tube about the size of my pinky nail. Shells and elbows and even farfalle are too big and too much, and the little stars you sometimes see in soups are far too small.

Despite the care I take in sourcing the same ingredients as my mother, the end result has never been quite what I recall. And since there’s no one I can ask for my family recipe, I turned to a professional chef I met in Italy on a recent trip.

‘What can you tell me about pasta fasul?’ I asked her.

‘You say it correctly!’ she exclaimed.

I was baffled. ‘I do?’ I assumed my pronunciation – copied from my mother and a full syllable short – was the result of the Italian ‘fagioli’, mangled over the generations, like in a game of Telephone. But she explained that ‘fasul’ comes from the Naples region, while everyone else in Italy calls it fagioli. I opened a map, and there, yes, was Guardia Lombardi, just centimetres from Naples. An answer.

‘But what about the tomatoes?’ I asked. ‘My mother’s always had a tomato sauce.’

She told me everyone makes it differently. Her Neapolitan grandfather would sometimes use the juice from only one tomato, whereas I distinctly remember a full can of crushed tomatoes going into the pot. Then my new mentor added: ‘Sometimes people cook the pasta in the tomatoes.’ Another answer.

All these years, I’d been making a sauce then adding the cooked pasta. That was the wrong way around.

Days after I returned from that trip to Italy, ditalini simmered away in a pot of tomato broth and my kitchen filled with familiar smells. Before I even tasted it, I gave it a stir and said aloud, ‘This is right.’

The satisfaction that comes with successfully recreating one of Mom’s recipes is always fleeting. Just like my journey to understanding our estrangement, the answers I find only offer a glimpse of a tapestry I’ll never see whole. It’s taken me years to come to terms with our broken relationship, but her food is a safe remembrance: I can choose when to open the door to those memories, and when to close it.

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Pasta Fasul

Serves 6
Time 35 mins

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 tsp dried oregano
salt
2 x 400g jars of tomato passata or cans of crushed tomatoes
1 x 400g of cannellini beans in water
450g ditalini pasta

Method

1. Heat a large, deep pan over low heat. Add the olive oil. When the oil is hot, add the onion and stir. After 2–3 mins, add the garlic and oregano, salt generously and stir again.

2. Once the onions are softened, but not browned, add the passata or crushed tomatoes. Refill the jars or cans with cold water and add to the pot, then bring to a simmer. Add more salt, then the can of cannellini beans (including their liquid) and the ditalini.

3. Simmer, uncovered, stirring frequently to ensure ditalini doesn’t stick for about 15 mins or until al dente. If the mixture thickens too much as you cook, just add more water.

4. Take off the heat. Cover with a lid and leave to rest for 10 mins while it thickens, then serve.

Credits

Monica Cardenas holds an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. She authors the Bad Mothers newsletter, and hosts a sister podcast on maternal estrangement. Her work has been published in The Audacity, Huffington Post, Literary Hub and Litro, among others. Originally from the US, she resides in Chiltern Hills near London.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Issue 2 of our print magazine is officially out this week – if you’ve received it, please let us know what you’ve been enjoying!

You can buy Issue 2 - titled ‘Bad Food’ - on our website here, along with prints from our favourite illustrators and photographers.

The magazine will also start to hit shops in the next few days too – you can find a full list of stockists around the world here. If you are a shop or restaurant and wish to stock Issue 2, then please get in touch with us, or our distributor Antenne Books at maxine@antennebooks.com or mia@antennebooks.com.

And now for today’s piece – recipes to make the ingenious and delicious mushroom stroganoff focaccia dreamt up by Chloe-Rose Crabtree for the launch of Vittles’s first print magazine earlier this year.

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When Bake Street, where I am head baker, was asked to make snacks for the launch party of Vittles Issue 1 earlier this year, I knew I had to include stroganoff on the menu. Jonathan had been lobbying us for a stroganoff burger special – a request we’d sadly had to reject, as it would have been just too messy to eat such a creamy, saucy dish from a takeaway box. However, I’m never one to pass up a chance to combine two unlikely dishes into one, so I decided that focaccia would instead be the perfect vessel for a mushroom stroganoff. The resulting bread is fluffy, with explosions of stroganoff sauce hiding in the dimpled dough.

Focaccia dough needs to rest for at least twenty-four hours before baking, and this recipe works best if the stroganoff is chilled before spreading it on top of your bread dough. I suggest making your dough and a large batch of stroganoff for dinner, then using the leftover stroganoff when baking your focaccia the next day. Whether you dip the focaccia into yet more stroganoff is up to you.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, musician Bethany Dixon writes about the innate links between food and music, and shares recipes inspired by – and illustrations of – ‘flavour chords’ that she has fixated on.

Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Foods, is still available for pre-order for a few more days. If you order before 1 December, you can get the magazine for just £18 (RRP £20), with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details). Pre-order here.

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Most people can point to a colour and say, ‘That’s blue.’ They don’t have to think about it; they just see it and immediately it registers as blue. In much the same way, when I hear a note, I can point to it in the air and say, ‘That’s a B.’ And when I taste something – a fruit, or herb, or spice – it sounds to me almost exactly like a note in the air. When I think about flavours in combination, I hear them as if hearing a chord, each note coming together to form a harmonic unit. Whether it’s a form of synaesthesia or just a weaving together of my oldest sensory threads, I’m not certain.

I can become fixated on turning these flavour notes into music in the shape of recipes, which I call ‘flavour chords’, and have spent a decade or more trying to conjure the sound of a specific sonic memory in the kitchen. I get similarly obsessed with certain phrases in music, and have spent months and sometimes years learning a long and thorny piece just so I can play that one incandescent phrase. The sensory experience of both taste and sound is brief, lasting only seconds. Yet memories of these sensations can have a resonance that continues sounding for years, and which for me can provide continued creative sustenance.

Here I’m sharing flavour chords for chamomile, hazelnut, and smoked honey sablés, and for a bay leaf, ginger, and clementine hot chocolate, centred around two flavour obsessions – chamomile flowers and bay leaves, respectively – and the notes that fibrillate in concert. I’m also sharing soundscapes to accompany tasting them.

Chamomile, Hazelnut, and Smoked Honey Sablés

I return to Lea Desandre and Thomas Dunford’s performance of Charpentier’s ‘Sans Frayeur Dans Ce Bois’ again and again. I am a sucker for a basso continuo, and Dunford’s lute opens with a bouncy, hopeful octave leap, then rambles and climbs down and around, for all the world like a fearless wanderer into the woods. I still don’t know how to precisely describe Desandre’s voice, but it pours in like cool water and fills every part of the music.

Charpentier’s piece is gentle and sweet, but its lyrics are actually quite strange: a young woman walking alone in the woods (a rarity in any myth or folktale, where amorous men are sure to be lurking) encounters Thyrsis, the personification of the pastoral, but is ‘unmoved’ by the experience. The young woman’s refusal to engage in the encounter as romantic, or to show fear, disrupts an otherwise predictable pastoral scene.

In the kitchen, the gentle disruption of the expected is where I most like to wander. For me, the flavour chord of these sablés – based on Dorie Greenspan’s sablé dough – captures the essence of the piece. The chamomile is gentle and sweet, but not simple or saccharine – it’s a delicate persistence. The hazelnuts taste like a sun-warmed forest, while the smoked honey is the low sweetness of the basso continuo, scaffolding the rest of the music.

Note: you will need a stand mixer for this recipe.

Beyond the paywall: the sablé recipe, plus a recipe for bay leaf, ginger and clementine hot chocolate.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Tarana Khan writes about how food connects Rampur and Kabul, with two recipes that make for a quick, easy and comforting meal.

Pre-order Issue 2

Yesterday we announced Issue 2 of our print issue, which is on the theme of Bad Food. The issue features more than 150 pages of all-new features, interviews, essays and fiction, all centred on the decidedly unglamorous, unaspirational and occasionally terrible aspects of food and food culture. You can read more about the contributors and content here. If you pre-order the magazine before 1 December, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers. Pre-order now!

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It was a balmy, sunny winter day and we – Iffat, Laila and I – decided to cook outside in the courtyard of my home in Rampur, North India. Iffat and Laila are mother and daughter, Afghan refugees living in Khirki, South Delhi. I met them by chance a few months ago, and we had ended up eating together, discussing the connections between Afghan and Rampuri cuisine. Our conversation led us particularly to borani banjan, a dish made from aubergines and yoghurt that is said to have been introduced to Rampur by Pathan migrants centuries ago.

Rampuri borani is a dish of fried aubergines served with a thick layer of yoghurt flavoured with garlic and cumin, whereas in the Afghan version, the aubergines are cooked with tomatoes and onions and then layered with yoghurt. Both iterations are lightly spiced and easy to prepare, and work well as accompaniments to flatbreads or rice dishes like pulao and khichdi.

As we cooked, Laila explained that ‘borani’ is a Dari word used to describe dishes that combine vegetables with yoghurt. The aubergine in Iffat’s borani banjan was soft and nourishing, with the tartness and freshness of the tomatoes and yoghurt balanced with the light sweetness of the onions. ‘The balance of colours is essential for the presentation of each dish,’ Iffat added, as she plated the dish, a pleasing mixture of purples, reds, greens and the creamy white of the yoghurt.

Food is one of the most tactile and immediate ways to evoke homelands. Dishes endure across timelines and borders; their names and recipes pass down seena-ba-seena – as intergenerational memories. ‘When I cook the dishes of Afghanistan, my heart feels comforted,’ Iffat told me, using the term ‘rahati dil’– a tranquil heart.

Iffat Gazimi’s Borani Banjan

I often prepare borani during Ramzaan (Ramadan). In addition to Iffat’s recipe for borani, I’ve provided a recipe for khichdi below (they are often eaten together in Rampur, but both can also be eaten on their own). These recipes are simple to prepare and ideal for the autumnal months.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Nick Bramham shares his method for producing a quick cheat’s version of salt cod, plus a recipe for a salt cod gratin that comes together in under an hour but packs a complex flavour punch. He also discusses the historical links between the emergence of salt cod, European conquest and the transatlantic slave trade.

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Despite the fact that cod are only found in the icy depths of the North Atlantic, salt cod has been a core part of Mediterranean cuisine since medieval times. Salt cod’s history is inextricably linked to Europe’s legacy of conquest, colonialism and exploitation. Plucked from the heaving seas of the recently settled ‘New World’, huge quantities of cod were beheaded, eviscerated, splayed open and rubbed with salt, before being air-dried until hard as planks of wood, packed into crates and shipped around the Atlantic.

Salt cod was a core commodity of the triangular trade for centuries, thanks to its ability to remain unspoiled for months, even in harsh conditions. It was sent first to Europe, where the best-quality fish were traded for wine, coal and iron. In the Mediterranean, the appetite for salt cod was due in no small part to Catholic observance of the many fast days in the religious calendar: while partaking of the flesh was forbidden, eating fish was allowed. The salt cod rejected by the Europeans was then transported to the Caribbean, where it was traded with rapacious plantation owners as a cheap, non-perishable form of sustenance for the enslaved population. This fish became known as West India cure, and it is a testament to the ingenuity and resilience of enslaved people that this apparently inferior product ultimately yielded the greatest salt cod dish on the planet: ackee and saltfish.

Salt cod in its raw state is bone dry and, as its name suggests, extremely salty – it’s essentially inedible. As a result, it needs to be rehydrated and desalinated in multiple changes of water over a couple of days before it can be used. Once this painstaking process is complete (in today’s Mediterranean food markets you can buy salt cod conveniently pre-soaked, saving you the time and trouble), there are a multitude of fantastically delicious dishes that can be prepared with it. I’ve yet to try one I didn’t like.

At Quality Wines we make our own cheat’s version of salt cod by sprinkling the fish liberally with salt and then curing it in the walk-in for just a couple of days. As it’s nowhere near as dry or salty as the real thing, it doesn’t need rehydrating before use, and while not quite as punchy as bona fide salt cod, it does share a similarly robust flavour and pleasingly firm texture. It’s savoury, pungent and extremely versatile. Having some to hand is a godsend when racking your brain for menu ideas (or craving a late-night snack).

We use our house salt cod in various ways: in a Portuguese-inspired salad of chickpeas marinated with coriander, parsley, red onion and vinegar, topped with pearlescent white flakes of steamed salt cod, sliced hard boiled egg and a big glug of good oil; or to make baccalà mantecato, the iconic Venetian preparation of salt cod poached in milk, then beaten with olive oil until ethereally light and smooth, to be scooped up with slices of fried polenta or garlic-rubbed toast. Or the Provençal feast that is ‘le grand aïoli’, in which we served (just the once actually) thick slabs of poached salt cod with heaving platters of raw and boiled summer vegetables, octopus stewed in Bandol rosé and an arsenal of pots of heady aïoli.

The following recipe is a riff on one of my favourite new dishes we served at Quality Wines this year: a salt cod, spinach and white bean gratin, in which the ingredients are bound in a lighter-than-typical béchamel made with white wine, milk and cream, with only a tiny pinch of flour in the roux. Topped with chunky breadcrumbs, a mix of gruyère and parmesan, and a sprinkle of cayenne pepper for a lick of heat, this is simple – yet decadent – cooking of the highest order. It is very easy to throw together on a weeknight, great with a good bottle of white wine, and could absolutely be scaled up for large groups and Christmas parties.

Salt Cod, Spinach & White Bean Gratin

Serves 2 generously
Time 1 hr, plus at least 24 hrs’ ageing of the fish

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Abril Macías writes about how corruption and political crisis have engulfed bananas in Ecuador, and shares recipes for maduros con queso, sal prieta y encurtido manaba (whole ripe plantains stuffed with cheese, peanuts and a spicy salsa); bolones de verde (mashed green plantain balls packed with porky chicharrón and hot sauce); and emborrajados de guineo (crispy banana fritters).

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In my small, freezing apartment in Munich, I stare at a banana. It is pale, uniform and flavourless – the only kind available in European supermarkets. These bananas are sourced from a handful of Latin American countries, where they are grown expressly for export, harvested green and then shipped off around the world in cold, stainless-steel containers. They are just ghosts of the small, creamy, aromatic bananas I grew up with in Ecuador, which had flavours ranging from vanilla and caramel to more acidic, sour-sweet profiles that resonate with citrus and red berries. In Germany, surrounded by sterile, flavourless Chiquita bananas, I feel the full weight of their absence.

While bananas are not native to Ecuador (they were introduced by Spanish colonisers in the sixteenth century), today the country exports more of them than any other nation, feeding worldwide cravings for smoothies and pancakes and filling up lunchboxes, especially across the West. To satisfy that appetite – and guarantee the associated income – Ecuador has sacrificed local biodiversity for monoculture, with vast plantations of identical Cavendish bananas grown for the international market. Meanwhile, the non-standardised, more flavourful bananas that come in different colours, shapes and sizes (such as maqueños and oritos, along with abundant plantains) remain in the domestic market. In Ecuador, they are both comfort and sustenance, an everyday staple and indulgent treat – baked, fried or poached, or in stews, soups, desserts and snacks.

But bananas are not a simple pleasure: over the past five years, bananas have come to be at the epicentre of a conflict in Ecuador. As drug cartels have expanded their operations, banana shipments to the Global North have been used to carry cocaine. In January of last year, after a surge in violence linked to organised crime, President Daniel Noboa declared an ‘internal armed conflict’ against cartels. Despite his ostensible tough-on-crime stance, Noboa has repeatedly been linked to these same scandals. He is the heir to Grupo Noboa, one of the biggest banana-exporting empires in the world, in whose shipments cocaine has also been found, underscoring the intertwined world of power and corruption in which bananas exist.

So here I am, thousands of miles away from home, hate-eating an underwhelming banana and doomscrolling about cocaine found in Ecuadorian banana crates opened in German supermarkets. There’s only one solution: I have to reclaim bananas for myself. Not the insipid, soulless kind I find at the supermarket, but something that tastes real. I seek out bananas and plantains from African and Indian minimarkets that offer different varieties and try to recreate some of my comfort foods: adaptable, flavour-packed recipes that are nearly impossible to mess up.

I turn to three of the simplest, most joyful expressions of banana-based Ecuadorian cooking: maduros con queso, sal prieta y encurtido manaba (whole ripe plantains stuffed with cheese, peanuts and a spicy salsa); bolones de verde (mashed green plantain balls packed with porky chicharrón and hot sauce); and, to finish, emborrajados de guineo (crispy banana fritters) served with a spoonful of yoghurt and a drizzle of honey. These are the kind of recipes that work for breakfast, lunch, dinner or anytime in between. They move easily between savoury and sweet, with hints of acidity and spiciness from the sauces that go with them. When I cook these recipes, I imagine a version of my country that isn’t unravelling, one I hope can exist and that I can meet again.

Maduros con queso, sal prieta y encurtido manaba

Sal prieta is a peanut-based condiment made with salt, cumin, annatto seed oil, and corn, while ají manaba is a spicy pickled vegetable salsa featuring carrots, cabbage, onions and banana vinegar. Because banana vinegar can be hard to find outside Ecuador, I provide instructions for how to make your own simple banana-infused vinegar.

Serves 6–8 (as a starter or snack)
Time 30 mins plus at least 30 mins’ infusing

Beyond the paywall — recipe for Maduros con queso, sal prieta y encurtido manaba; plus two other banana-based snacks.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Loukia Constantinou shares a recipe for the ultimate Cypriot comfort food, a fragrant and deeply satisfying pasta dish.

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Pasta, Chicken, Cheese, Mint, Lemon

If you search for a Cypriot pasta recipe, chances are the first thing you’ll come across is makaronia tou fournou: baked ziti and mince, topped with a halloumi-enriched bechamel sauce. Makaronia tou fournou is considered one of the national treasures of Cyprus and is the pasta you’ll tend to see on Cypriot restaurant menus, but I would argue that it’s not our best pasta dish – and it’s certainly not the one we cook most often at home. That accolade goes to the recipe I’m sharing today.

There’s no one name for this dish. Rather, Cypriots refer to it by various monikers that list some or all of its constituent parts. My Turkish-speaking Cypriot friends call it ‘magarina bulli’ (pasta and bird) or ‘tavuklu makarna’ (chicken pasta). Among Greek-speaking Cypriots I’ve known it to be called everything from just ‘makaronia’ (pasta) to ‘makaronia me kotopoulo’ (pasta with chicken), ‘makaronia me trima’ (pasta with shavings), ‘horkatika makaronia’ (village pasta) and just plain ‘vraston’ (boiled). Whatever you call it and however many of its ingredients you list, you always know what you’re going to get: pasta with chicken, cheese, mint and lemon, a dish that is satisfyingly savoury, lifted and fragranced by citrus and dried herbs.

Part of every home cook’s repertoire, this is a meal eaten after travelling; to soothe illness, hangover, heartbreak or other ailments; or to break religious fasts (often at ungodly hours, following godly late-night services). It may not be the Cypriot national dish, but I’d wager it’s the nation’s favourite comfort food, and requires very little effort to put together.

Similar to our Levantine neighbours, Cyprus tends towards a vegetable-forward food culture, but like a lot of good comfort food, the joy of this meal lies in its simplicity and beige-ness. There isn’t a vegetable in sight in this dish, and it’s all the better for it. My favourite version is made using thin, hand-cut tubes of pasta – ‘makaronia tou sherkou’ (pasta of the hand) – but if you don’t happen to have a yiayia like mine, who produces it in vast quantities for the entire family, then any tubular shape (macaroni, penne, rigatoni) will work. The cheese should be halloumi or anari, aged and hard. The mint, dried. The lemon, plentiful. As for the chicken, it can be a whole bird or pieces of leg and thigh, ideally on the bone to bring more depth to the stock that you prepare and then cook the pasta in.

Although some cooks blast their poached chicken under a hot grill to get a crispy and bronzed skin or forgo the poaching altogether in favour of roasting, for me this misses the point of the dish. This is no place for crisp or crunch, or the layered flavours of grilling and roasting. Rather, I luxuriate in its inviting range of similar textures: the very slight bite of the pasta, the gelatinous lemon-drenched skin of the poached chicken giving way to its tender meat, the salty cheese that doesn’t melt but stretches with the heat of the stock, clinging onto whatever it comes into contact with. This is food that’s soft, subtle, yielding – the perfect soothing pick-me-up after a long day.

Pasta with Chicken, Halloumi, Mint and Lemon

The recipe I’ve provided includes instructions for making chicken stock from scratch, but if I’m feeling lazy, I just use a couple of low-salt chicken stock cubes instead. You can also make a quick, vegetarian version of this dish by leaving out the chicken and cooking the pasta in veggie stock (further details below).

Serves 4–6
Time 1 hr 20 mins (slightly less if you don’t prepare the stock from scratch)

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, we’re publishing a bonus Cooking column, a sequel to the cultural history of the polski sklep by Kasia Tomasiewicz and Marta Zboralska published last year, Marta brings us two recipes you can make using ingredients from the polski sklep: zupa owocowa (fruit soup) and naleśniki z serem (pancakes with sweet cheese filling).

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I know what you’re thinking, because many of my Polish friends feel similarly: fuj! (Yuck!) Fruit soup is a divisive dish, even in Poland, but one that I have long loved. It is generally associated with school – particularly nursery schools, alongside warm milk that always had a skin, Inka (a cereal alternative to coffee) and vanilla-flavoured semolina topped with raspberry syrup.

Between the ages of six and fifteen, my school lunch consisted of the same rotating set of dishes, served in the same canteen. Every day, there were two courses – a soup and a main – and in the summer months in particular, one of these might have been sweet. It was not unusual to have fruit soup as the first course and to follow it with pan-fried liver. Another seasonal pairing was tomato soup and cold, slightly overcooked rice with cream and blueberries. And while the set meal required a monthly subscription, the bottomless soup alone was always free for everyone, no questions asked.

Fruit soup’s relative infrequency on the menu made it exciting – a break in the delicious but endless stream of gherkin and potato – a pink anachronism for post-communist children growing up in the age of Fruit-tella excess. Made from a mixture of red summer fruits, such as strawberries, redcurrants and cherries, the dish is, in essence, a soup version of kompot: a juice made from stewed fruit that is Poland’s answer to squash. Often served over pasta, fruit soup is thickened with potato starch, generally in the form of kisiel: a delicious fruit gloop like barely set jelly, beloved of children and students alike, that is available in dozens of instant varieties (these days including a ‘Shrek’ version, a more slime-oriented alternative to the dominant hues of pink). For me, fruit soup works best when finished with a dollop of śmietana, or soured cream (NB: this is not the same as the sour cream you get in standard UK supermarkets – so make sure to head to the polski sklep to find it).

During my Polish school years, it never occurred to me that starting with sweet before moving to savoury, or making pastas with fruit, might be anything out of the ordinary – and still, to my mind, pasta works well with creamy soups and sauces of all temperaments. I think that much of the hatred of fruit soup has less to do with its flavour than with a childlike incongruity, a sweet–savoury ambivalence that feels at odds with adulthood, when people drink bitter coffee, not sweet Inka, and are known to enjoy olives.

More acceptable to grown-ups as an occasional treat is another Polish staple: naleśniki – pancakes, or, more precisely, crêpes, although they are not quite the same – filled with sweet curd cheese and rolled into loose scrolls or neatly tucked into triangles. Naleśniki are endlessly customisable: the curd filling can be applied sparingly or in excess, range in texture from grainy to silky smooth, and vary in flavour from the sour to cheesecake-sweet. The pancakes are eaten cold or hot, or even, once assembled, refried in the pan in some more butter to make the edges deliciously crispy, and can be served with a sprinkling of sugar, a dollop of śmietana (again sweetened to taste) or on their own. Though they might be less playful than fruit soup, they can have a sense of childish transgression if you serve them as a sweet main – a messing up of the order of things, a refusal of delayed gratification.

Making either of these dishes will necessitate a trip to your local polski sklep. While there, enjoy the fading spoils of the Polish warmer months: huge raspberry tomatoes, whole sunflower heads to pick seeds from, and ogórki małosolne (cucumbers in salt brine) – if you’re lucky enough to live near a sklep that has a tub.

Zupa Owocowa (Fruit Soup)

Serves 3
Time 25 mins

Ingredients

2 x 900g jars of summer fruit kompot (choose two different varieties; see notes)
250ml apple juice
1 x 30g Dr Oetker Słodka Chwila cherry or strawberry kisiel sachet (see notes)
80g śmietana (12% fat; I used the Piątnica brand – this is soured cream, not sour cream!)
150g fusilli

Method

1. Use a slotted spoon to transfer 200g of fruit from each of the kompot jars into a large saucepan. If you’ve chosen a flavour that contains stones, such as sour cherry, destone if you prefer (or if serving to children). Strain 250ml of juice from each jar into the saucepan with the fruits, and mix to combine.

2. Add the apple juice to the pan and put over a medium heat.

3. Meanwhile, in a separate jug, dissolve the kisiel in 50ml water and mix until thickened.

4. When the kompot mixture is hot, pour in the thickened kisiel. Cook, stirring, for a few more minutes until you feel the soup thicken slightly. Make sure to take the pan off the heat before it starts to boil. Set aside to cool.

5. Cook the fusilli according to packet instructions.

6. When the pasta is cooked, put the śmietana in a small bowl. Add 5 tbsp of the soup, which should by now be lukewarm, and stir until the mix is loosened and combined. Pour this mixture into the saucepan and stir into the soup.

7. Divide the pasta between three serving bowls and pour over soup. Serve lukewarm, or cold if you prefer. If you have not destoned the fruit, don’t forget to be careful.

Notes

• I like the Edmal brand of kompot. In terms of flavour combinations, I particularly recommend sour cherry with strawberry – ie kompot wiśniowy and kompot truskawkowy. Note that sour cherry kompots are likely to have stones!

• You will find kisiel in the jelly or custard powder section of the polski sklep. Ensure that you choose the smooth variety of kisiel (ie without freeze-dried fruit chunks) – look for ‘kisiel’ on the packet rather than ‘kisiel z kawałkami owoców’.

• Keep the leftover kompot in the fridge. Dilute it with water to make a refreshing drink.

Naleśniki z serem (Pancakes with Sweet Cheese Filling)

Makes 5–6 (depending on the size of your frying pan)
Time 30 mins

Ingredients

25g unsalted butter
180g plain flour
a pinch of salt
200ml milk
100ml sparkling water
1 egg
icing sugar, to serve (optional)

for the filling

250g twaróg półtłusty (half-fat curd cheese; I used the brand Łowicz)
1 x 16g sachet cukier wanilinowy (vanilla sugar; see notes)
1 heaped tbsp caster sugar, plus extra to taste
200g 12% śmietana (soured cream) plus extra to serve (optional)

Method

1. Melt the butter in a large frying pan, then transfer to a small bowl and allow to cool slightly.

2. Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl. In a separate jug or bowl, whisk the milk, sparkling water and egg together.

3. Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, then slowly pour in the wet mixture, whisking until smooth and evenly combined, with no air pockets left.

4. Mix the melted butter into the batter.

5. Wipe any excess butter off the frying pan, but leave a thin layer. Place the pan over a medium heat.

6. Once the entire pan is hot, pour a ladle of batter into the middle and swirl evenly around the pan. You want the crêpes to be thin – but not paper-thin. Fry on both sides, using a thin fish slice to turn, for 30–45 seconds, until cooked and golden. Set the pancakes aside on a plate lined with baking parchment while you make the filling.

7. Mix all the filling ingredients in a bowl until you achieve your desired texture. It might be useful to use a fork to mash the curd cheese. Taste the filling and add more sugar if necessary.

8. Spread the filling evenly over each crêpe, or experiment with different filling-to-crêpe ratios, then roll into a scroll or fold into a triangle. If you want, fry the folded pancakes in a bit more butter until crispy (triangles lend themselves better to this).

9. Serve hot or cold, with a dollop of śmietana sweetened to taste, or a sprinkling of icing sugar, or just on their own.

Notes

• You will find cukier wanilinowy in the baking section of the polski sklep.

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Marta Zboralska is an art historian working on a book about art and Witold Gombrowicz.

These recipes were photographed and tested by Georgia Rudd.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Apoorva Sripathi brings us two recipes for quick sundals - flavourful, fun snacks made from legumes, pulses and whatever seasons you have lying around. Plus a new take on sweet lassis - this one is made with in-season peaches.

Here are also some other quick, delicious South-Asian recipes:

Diya Mukherjee’s recipe for Hash brown chaat; A regional snack set from chef Thomas Zacharias; a Cape Town dish of pickled fish on hot cross buns, and three toastie recipes for when you want something between a meal and a snack.

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More than just dal

Across South Asia, there are myriad uses for lentils and pulses beyond dal, khichdi, stews, and soups. My favourite is sundal, a South Indian dish. Sundal is both salad and stir-fry, in which cooked lentils or other legumes are dressed up with a crunchy tempering of spices and coconut in hot oil. It’s eaten at home and as street food (and is also prepared during festivals), and can be served either hot or at room temperature. I grew up eating sundal as an after-school snack, sometimes instead of crisps, but also sometimes with them, using the wide base of a chilli-dusted crisp to scoop up pale plump chickpeas and transport them to my mouth.

Across the UK and the Western world, lentils, and pulses have been maligned as unworthy or unglamorous. Yet now in the age of gains and Bold Bean Co supremacy, they have been elevated to the mainstream, as a healthy, natural source of protein and fibre. Yet, legumes are more than a collection of virtues. They are classic, understated ingredients that transform into dishes involving texture and savouriness that, crucially, can be whipped up quickly as a break from daily routine.

Here I’m sharing recipes for two of my favourite sundals, which are great as a quick working lunch or snacks to serve when you have friends over (both are also vegan). The first pairs green lentils with charred corn and is flavoured with tempered mustard seeds and fresh curry leaves. The other is a variation on the popular thenga maanga pattani sundal served with coconut and raw mango on beaches in Chennai, in which I use cooked chickpeas instead of the traditional dried peas. I’m also sharing a recipe for a roasted peach and rosewater lassi. Refreshing and delicately perfumed like a heaving midsummer night, this lassi pairs beautifully with sundals.

All three recipes can be easily adapted. In the lassi, you could substitute the peach with a sweet Alphonso or Kesar mango (depending on the season), or use tinned mango pulp instead. In both sundals, meanwhile, you can use dried or canned lentils, or swap them for a bean of your choice. Sometimes even a frozen bag of peas or sweet corn will do – the magic of the final tempering will tie everything together, transforming even the most mundane of dishes into something more distinguished. The lexicon of legumes is vast and delicious, so feel free to experiment with these recipes.

Charred Corn and Green Lentil Sundal

Serves 4–6 (as a snack)
Time 20 mins

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