This is classic British comfort food. Corned beef hash, sticky toffee pudding, cottage pie, macaroni cheese, Welsh rarebit, kedgeree, kippers, toad-in-the-hole and spotted dick with custard. Food your mum cooked, school canteen classics, dishes from the officers’ mess and City dining rooms. Just flicking through the book and reading the recipes makes me feel like […]

I used to find Jamie Oliver immensely irritating. All that ‘luvvly jubbly cheeky chappy with a loft apartment riding around on a scooter’ stuff. And a vintage VW camper van for sloping off to Italy – lucky bastard, I want one. Maybe it was his campaign to improve school dinners, the concept of Fifteen, and […]

My copy of this book has seen a lot of action in my kitchen; many of the pages are now smeared with oily thumb marks. I love this man’s approach to cooking, that the difference between mere fuel and something that is a joy to devour is an understanding of the little things that make […]

Just mention The Silver Spoon to The Italian and his eyes glaze over. It’s where it all began, he says, ‘It’ being his insatiable love of food and cooking. The Silver Spoon was first published in 1950, is one of the most popular cook books ever in Italy, and is considered the bible of Italian […]