French tomato tart
Last year, we grew tomatoes for the first time. And we did so with our characteristic enthusiasm, lack of knowledge…
Vanilla ice cream
I could map out my life geographically and temporally in scoops of ice cream. From the oyster delights handed over…
Cobb salad
They do salads differently in America. Caesar salad, Waldorf salad, even their egg salads and potato salads: they’re big, they’re…
Yoghurt pot cake: the perfect sugary blank canvas
I’m pretty easygoing when it comes to most aspects of cooking. I don’t think there’s much to be gained from…
Duck confit
Of all the myriad ways of preserving, confit always strikes me as wonderfully improbable. The ability to preserve meat just…
Yorkshire pudding
My mother, a Yorkshire woman, would occasionally take shortcuts in the kitchen, but not when it came to a roast,…
Is there anything safe to eat?
It’s not only junk food we should be wary of, says Olivia Potts. Pretty well everything contains additives – and our five-a-day mantra is costing the Earth
Chess pie
Chess pie was, in one sense, new to me when I started learning about it a few months ago. I’d…
Bring back the savoury!
For a while now, we’ve been living through a renaissance of classical British cooking: a whole host of restaurants have…
Kugelhopf
Yeast scares even some of the most proficient cooks. I know home cooks and professionals alike, food writers and fanatics,…
Chicken tikka masala
Chicken tikka masala has become something of a joke. When, in the late 2000s, it was topping lists of the…
Baby monitors
The rise of the nursery spy app
Breton galette complête
When we were little we used to go on holiday to the same place in Brittany, a picturesque, quiet coastal…
The price of love
The heartbroken father endlessly relives his son’s suicide, raking over every moment of Jack’s battle with depression and drug addiction
Sussex pond pudding
I always feel pulled toward citrus at the start of the year. Initially it was subconscious: I’d just find myself…
Come buy, come buy
Unfairly dismissed as hucksters and fishwives, itinerant traders drove the capital’s expansion for centuries, says Charlie Taverner
Duck à l’orange
Duck à l’orange is so deliciously retro, it’s almost a cliché of kitsch. It seems hard to believe that there…
Boiled fruit cake
This time last year, I was disgustingly well organised. Awaiting the arrival of my first baby, with a late December…
Cheese fondue
‘This dish is very you,’ my husband says, as I serve up 650g of melted, boozy cheese to the two…
Bread pudding
I am incapable of throwing anything away in the kitchen. In my fridge, there must be at least half a…
Meatloaf
Meatloaf has some obstacles to overcome: it has an unprepossessing appearance, and an uninspiring, slightly off-putting name, which it shares…
Pride and joy
Since 2011, black Africans have been the dominant black group in the UK. Many of them are the descendants of…
Bananas Foster
I’m a sucker for a challenge. I absolutely cannot resist a little competition. Throw down a gauntlet, and I am…
Moules mouclade
Mussels were probably the first thing I ate as a child that I knew at the time was ‘an acquired…
