Foxtrot Oscar. A classic old Chelsea restaurant that, not uncoincidentally, happened to share its initials with the British military term for ‘get the hell out of here’. Or words to that effect.

Yet Foxtrot Oscar, on Royal Hospital Road, was one of London’s louche and lovely greats. Joe, the barman, shook up restorative bullshots, as racing from Epsom, Ascot or wherever played eternally on televisions above. Dogs were not so much wel- comed as embraced, the ever-pulchritudinous waitresses plucked from the pages of Debrett’s and the idea of lunch without a drink tantamount to treason. The only real sin here was being rude to staff. Quite right, too.

At its heart was the late, great Mike Proudlock. With film-star good looks and lashings of charm, he was a restaurateur of the old school, ensuring glasses were kept brimming over, cigarettes lit (Foxtrot was a smoker’s paradise) and kümmel on crushed ice in constant supply. Le patron always manged ici. I had my 18th birthday party there — and my 21st. Both times, things got rather out of hand and a couple of friends fell asleep in the loos, only to wake up, after midnight, to find themselves locked in. Hey ho. Those were the days.

The food was never really the point, mainly classic British nursery, with a slight American twang. Potted shrimp and herring roe on toast, steak-and-kidney pie, a burger and a fairly edible fishcake. One dish stood out above all others, however: eggs Benedict, a golden-hued, oozing eggy beacon, both blessedly simple and slyly sophisticated. Take an English muffin, split, toast, top with a thick slice of good English ham, then a poached egg, soft boiled, and drape with an excess of hollandaise sauce. It soothed the most vicious of hangovers, the only possible justification for that ghastly thing called ‘brunch’.

As ever with recipes of such renown, there are endless pretenders to its culinary crown. In one story, a retired stockbroker by the name of Lemuel Benedict turns up at The Waldorf Hotel in New York, sometime in about 1894, with a monstrous hangover. He demands ‘buttered toast, poached eggs, crispy bacon and a hooker of hollandaise’. The chef replaces the toast with English muffins, the bacon with ham, and so eggs Benedict was born.

Not true, argues Edward P. Montgomery in a letter sent to The New York Times in 1967. No, the dish was in fact invented by a Commodore E. C. Benedict, who had passed on the recipe to Montgomery’s uncle. It most certainly wasn’t, retorts Mrs Mabel C. Butler in yet another missive to the newspaper. The ‘true story’ behind the original recipe was ‘well known to the relations of Mrs Le Grand Benedict’, a lady who asked for ‘poached eggs on toasted English muffins with a thin slice of ham, hollandaise sauce and a truffle on top’ at Delmonico’s, also in New York, sometime around the turn of the century.

The truth is more prosaic, in that the recipe had probably existed for some time before them all, albeit under a different name. Anyway, eggs Benedict first appeared in a cookbook, Eggs, and How To Use Them, published in 1898, and quickly became an American classic.

Foxtrot Oscar has gone the way of all flesh, but the memories still endure. For those looking for a taste of the real thing, that master restaurateur Jeremy King is your man. His version at Le Caprice (see recipe below) was every bit the equal to those in Chelsea — as they are now at Arlington (or Caprice II: The Return), SW1, and The Park, W2. It just goes to show that times may change, but good eggs Benedict endure forever.

Recipe: Eggs Benedict

This comes from Le Caprice, the cookbook that combines the words of A. A. Gill with the recipes of Mark Hix. Don’t panic about the hollandaise: the key is to add the first two thirds of the butter in a slow trickle. If it splits, take it off the heat, reserve the mixture, clean the bowl and add another egg yolk. Then whisk the split sauce slowly back in.

Ingredients — serves 4

For the hollandaise sauce

70ml white-wine vinegar
80ml water
2 small shallots, peeled and chopped
A few sprigs tarragon
1 bay leaf
10 black peppercorns
400g unsalted butter
5 medium egg yolks
Salt and freshly ground white pepper

To serve

8 slices kasseler (or English) ham
4 English muffins
8 medium eggs
400g of the hollandaise sauce

Method

• To make the hollandaise sauce, place the vinegar, water, shallots, herbs and peppercorns in a saucepan and reduce the liquid to about a tablespoonful. Strain and put aside.

• Melt the butter and simmer it for 5–10 minutes. Take off the heat, leave to cool a little, then pour off the pure fat where it has separated from the whey and discard the whey. This helps to keep the sauce thick.

• Put the egg yolks in a small stainless-steel bowl with half the vinegar reduction and whisk over a pan of gently simmering water until the mixture begins to thicken and become frothy.

• Slowly trickle in the butter, whisking continuously; an electric hand whisk will help. If the butter is added too quickly, the sauce will separate. When you have added two-thirds of the butter, taste the sauce and add a little more or all of the reduction. Then put in the rest of the butter. The sauce should not be too vinegary; the vinegar should just cut the oiliness of the butter.

• Season with salt and pepper, cover with clingfilm and leave in a warm, not hot, place until needed. The sauce can be reheated over a bowl of hot water and lightly whisked again.

• To serve, lightly toast the muffins and soft-poach the eggs. Place the ham on the muffin with the poached egg on top and coat it with a couple of generous spoonfuls of the hollandaise.

'Dessert without cheese is like a beauty with only one eye,’ declared lawyer, writer and serious eater Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Although his sentiments may err somewhat on the side of the insensitive (the past is a foreign country and all that), he does have a point. A life without cheese would be very glum indeed.

In fact, I’d happily skip pudding altogether and replace it with Welsh rarebit, burnished, bubbling and fresh from the grill. Now, don’t get me wrong. Plain cheese on toast is a very fine thing, blessedly simple, yet noble in its purity. Rarebit, however, is an altogether more exalted affair — the pinnacle, the apex, the triumphant apogee of this particular form.

I once heard of someone so enamoured by the offering at one of the grander St James’s clubs that he consumed eight in a row. Chapeau, my friend, chapeau. Such is the power of the rarebit, undoubtedly the sine qua non of savouries, those small, saltily piquant bites that, in the words of cookery writer Ambrose Heath, ‘often make an admirable ending to a meal, like some unexpected witticism or amusing epigram at the close of a pleasant conversation. It has the last word, as it were, before we turn to the frivolities of dessert’.

As to the great ‘rarebit’ versus ‘rabbit’ debate that has raged over the past three centuries, there’s little doubt that the latter is the original term, first recorded back in 1725. ‘Rarebit’ has to wait another 60 years before making its debut. As to why, however, things become a little less certain. Some see it as a derogatory dig towards supposed Welsh parsimony. Just as the Scotch woodcock, another great savoury, contains no trace of the doe-eyed gamebird, so the bunny plays no role in the rabbit.

That argument is swiftly destroyed by a quick glance through Hannah Glass’s 1745 classic, The Art of Cookery Made Plain And Easy — alongside the Welsh version, she has recipes for one Scotch and two English. Rarebit may have gradually superseded its leporine antecedent, but not everyone was happy with the change. ‘Welsh rabbit is amusing and right,’ harrumphed famed lexicographer H. W. Fowler. ‘Welsh rarebit is stupid and wrong.’

Whatever you want to call it (and I like both names), all proper rarebits start with a roux — but don’t let it get too brown. You want a gentle khaki rather than rich mahogany. An egg yolk adds extra richness, but it’s not as if the dish lacks lavishness. I tend to do without. As to the cheese, you need something hard, sharp and British. Cheddar is the most popular, preferably Keen’s, Montgomery’s or Quicke’s. Snowdonia Black Bomber is equally splendid, as is Mrs Kirkham’s Tasty or Mature Lancashire. Caerphilly is a touch too mild and you should save the Alpine classics for raclette and fondue.

When it comes to the beer, I prefer something dark and malty, a stout or porter, to cosset and flatter the cheese, as well as adding a sonorous bass note worthy of a Welsh baritone. A decent bitter also works, adding a gently nutty tang to proceedings. Lager and IPAs have no place here.

There’s more than a touch of the devilled about a proper rarebit, with a snort of Colman’s mustard powder, a fat pinch of cayenne pepper and lashings of Worcestershire sauce, both in the cheese mix and splashed lustily across the finished dish. One more piece of advice, from Fergus Henderson of St John fame, whose classic recipe you’ll find below. ‘When it comes to eating, irrigation channels are essential: make a gentle criss-cross pattern on your hot rarebit with a knife, creating the perfect flood plain for the Worcestershire sauce.’ Having sold more than half a million of these blessed beauties since opening in 1994, he knows of what he speaks.

Recipe: Welsh rarebit

The Welsh rarebit from St John, Smithfield, London EC1, is a thing of savoury legend and the restaurant sells an average of 45 per day. It’s probably my favourite of them all, although the version of White’s club, albeit smaller, comes very close. Serve with a crisp, well-dressed green salad. ‘Welsh Rarebit is a noble version of cheesy toast,’ says Fergus Henderson. ‘Everyone loves cheesy toast!’

Ingredients

Serves at least 4, depending on the dimensions of your toast

A knob of butter


1tbspn plain flour


1tspn English mustard powder


½tspn cayenne pepper


A very long splash of Worcestershire sauce, and a bottle to serve


200ml Guinness


450g mature strong
Cheddar, grated


4 pieces of good white bread

Method

Melt the butter in a pan, stir in the flour and let this cook together until it smells biscuity, but is not browning. Add the mustard powder and cayenne pepper, stir in the Worcestershire sauce and the Guinness, then gently melt in the cheese.

When it’s all of one consistency, remove from the heat, pour out into a shallow container and allow to set. It will keep happily in the fridge for a couple of weeks in this state.

Take each piece of bread and toast on both sides. Allow to cool just a little, then cover one side with the rarebit mixture to about 1cm (½in) thick—if you find that it doesn’t spread with ease, press it on with your fingers. Put on a baking sheet and place under the grill until golden and bubbling, grilling to just beyond your comfort threshold to allow the flour to cook out.

Ah, Burgundy. Once a Dukedom so rich, so powerful, so splendidly magnifique, that it was every bit the equal of the kingdom of France. Not only did they rule their eponymous lands, but Franche-Comté, Holland and much of Belgium, too. It was the Burgundians who captured Joan of Arc before selling her to the English and her fiery fate, whereas Burgundy’s rulers, known as The Grand Dukes of the West, were more prestigious than the French kings. In fact, had you asked your run-of-the-mill medieval seer, he might have confidently predicted France becoming a part of Burgundy, rather than the other way around. Oh, well, c’est la vie and all that. They’ll just have to make do with some of the world’s greatest wines (bonjour, Montrachet Grand Cru, salut Domaine de la Romanée-Conti DRC) and those buxom snails that feast upon their leaves, plucked, simmered, baked and bathed in bubbling garlic butter.

There’s the majestic poulet de Bresse, perhaps the world’s most glamourous chicken, simply roasted or turned into coq au vin, and jambon persillé, a glittering, set aspic study in parsley and pig. Époisses is one of my favourite cheeses, stinking yet elegant—and Dijon mustard is the only true equal to English. ‘If the attempt were made to sum up the dominant characteristic of Burgundian cooking in a single word,’ wrote Waverley Root in The Food of France, ‘perhaps that word might be “substantial”’. For this is true cuisine bourgeoise, unashamedly robust, with the square jaw, easy swagger and firm handshake of a well-to-do négociant. Hearty, but never basic, ‘his dishes demand lusty, full-blooded sauces’. And there is no dish more lusty and full blooded than boeuf à la Bourguignonne, originally made with another great beast of Burgundy, the Charolais cow. ‘

This is a favourite among those carefully composed, slowly cooked dishes, which are the domain of French housewives and owner-cooks of modest restaurants rather than of professional chefs,’ explains Elizabeth David, before going on to say that ‘such dishes do not, of course, have a rigid formula’. But, at the risk of disagreeing with the saintly ED, this does, for boeuf Bourguignon (as it’s more commonly known) always involves red wine, onions, mushroom and cured pork, just like any other dish bearing that regional name.

As to the wine, this is not the place for a £5,000 bottle of 2006 La Tâche. Or even, for that matter, a civilised £25 bottle of Bourgogne rouge. Although it certainly needs to be decent (no mean cooking wine here), I’d suggest keeping the good stuff for drinking with your dinner and instead go for a Côtes du Rhône, beefy Languedoc, Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon. ‘Boeuf bourguignon needs something with plenty of body,’ advises my friend, wine writer Henry Jeffreys. ‘And make sure it isn’t sweet, as some cheaper reds can be sugary.’

When it comes to the cut of beef, you need something that has done a little hard toil, such as cheek, shin or chuck, so, after a low and slow spell in the oven, it breaks down and becomes beguilingly soft. You want big chunks of meat, too, the size of a baby’s fist. This is Burgundian after all. Brown in small batches, so you get that all important crust. If you have time, cook, allow to cool and put in the fridge overnight. Not only will you be able to scrape off any excess fat (not too much, however), but the flavour also improves. Traditionalists will argue that it must be served with boiled potatoes. What do they know? Mash is the only option and authenticity be damned.

This recipe is from Keith Floyd’s excellent Floyd on France. ‘This splendid stew has been raped and pillaged by pub and wine bar cooks the length and breadth of this fair land of ours —they add peppers and other unmentionable ingredients to what must be a simple, slow-cooked dish with no deviation from this recipe.’ Well, quite. He uses quite a lot of booze (no surprises there), so I’ve adapted it a little. A calf’s foot, easily available from the butcher, adds a wonderful glossy viscosity to the sauce and one more layer of flavour. When it comes to the cut of beef, you need something that has done a little hard toil

Ingredients

Serves six.

• 1.5kg well-hung beef chuck, shin, or cheek, cut in large bite-size chunks, and dipped in seasoned plain white flour
• 5 onions, roughly chopped
• 5 carrots, roughly chopped
• 5 shallots, roughly chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 6 sprigs thyme
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 bottle punchy red wine (see above)
• 6 thick slices streaky bacon or pancetta, cubed
• 1 large glass brandy
• 250ml good beef stock
• 1 small calf’s foot (optional, but preferable!)
• Walnut-sized lump of butter
• Glug of olive oil
• 250g mushrooms, finely chopped
• 200g baby onions, peeled, or small shallots, peeled
• Salt and pepper
• 1 handful parsley, roughly chopped

Method

Marinate the beef, onions, carrots, shallots, garlic and herbs in the wine overnight. Remove the meat and reserve the marinade.

In a large, heavy- bottomed saucepan, fry the bacon in a little olive oil, and then add the meat and brown. Add the brandy and flame.

Barely cover with the reserved marinade, which you have sieved, discarding the vegetables, plus the stock. Add the calf’s foot (if using).

Cover and simmer on a low flame for three hours (or put the pot, with lid on, into an oven heated to 140˚C, for about 3–3½ hours, until meat is soft). Top up with the marinade if it seems to be drying out.

Half an hour from the end of cooking, fry the mushrooms in a little butter and oil, and add to the meat. Then toss in the baby onions (or shallots) to the same pan, and brown.

When the onions (or shallots) are tender, add the salt and pepper and add to the meat. Season to taste. Serve very hot and finish with the parsley.

This feature originally appeared in the January 11, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Gay Hussar was a resolutely old-school Soho institution that served up hearty portions of traditional Hungarian food to various Labour grandees, sozzled hacks and Laurent-Perrier Lefties (as well as the occasional damp Tory). It was a place fuelled not only by lashings of Bull’s Blood, that mighty red from Hungary’s Eger, but by whispers and intrigue, treachery, double-dealing and good old-fashioned gossip.

As to food… well, that was somewhat of an afterthought, more boozy ballast than culinary high art. There was a decent cold cherry soup and a pretty respectable roast duck. But it was the goulash soup (or gulyásleves) that I really remember (well, as much as anyone can precisely recall a lunch at this unashamedly bibulous establishment) — soft beef, sweet paprika and onion, all swimming in a broth as brown as Danube mud.

Yet, despite being the national dish of Hungary, you’d be pushed, these days, to find a goulash or, to be more correct, a gulyás, on local menus, as the word simply means ‘cattle herder,’ or ‘cowboy’. No, you’d be after a pör-költ. Or is it a páprikás? Or even a tokány? All use meat and onion, cooked in lard with paprika, but then things get complicated. A pörkölt has nothing to do with the pig and is usually made with veal, although beef, mutton, game and even pork can be used. It never includes sour cream and is said to have a more pronounced onion taste than the páprikás, which also includes veal or chicken and never sour cream. A tokány is made with beef or veal, cut into pieces the size of French fries, and throws in mushrooms, goose liver, peas, asparagus and parsley roots. It may or may not contain sour cream. Confused? Join the club. There was me thinking that goulash was the simplest of stews.

To make any sense of anything, we must travel back to the beginning, to the Magyar cattle ranchers of 9th-century Hungary, who roamed the Great Plains with their herds. Every year, before setting out for pastures new, they would cube beef and cook it with onion and spices (mainly black pepper) in a heavy iron kettle (or bogrács), hung over an open fire, until all the liquid had evaporated.

The beef was then dried in the sun and stuffed into a bag made from a sheep’s stomach, a technique used for millennia by nomads across the world. When hunger panged, the ranchers could add water and, depending on the amount, cook up either a gulyás stew or a gulyás soup. A proto-ready meal or, in the words of Albert Jack in his 2012 book What Caesar Did for My Salad: The Secret Meanings of our Favourite Dishes, ‘the earliest example of the stock cube’.

Paprika, however, was a relative newcomer to the party, probably arriving in Hungary with the invading Ottomans, but not gaining widespread popularity until the 1820s. Black pepper had traditionally been rubbed on raw meat, together with salt or sugar, as a preservative. Paprika was used in the same way. The effects weren’t quite the same, but did produce the most delectable crust. To pörköl meant to slightly burn the surface, hence the new dish being known as pörkölt. The key, however, to any of the above, is gently cooking the onions in lard so they reach a subtle shade of soft gold.

But whatever the dish is called (and don’t even get me started as to whether a pörkölt or páprikás can include potatoes or pasta), all that matters is the end result. A paprika-stained taste of Hungarian history and a stew of the mightiest succour.

Recipe: Bográcsgulyás

This comes from The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire, part of the legendary Time Life ‘Foods of the World’ series. Published in the 1970s, it features some of the finest food writers, as well as lavish (if slightly dated) photography. Anyway, this is named after the cast-iron pot it was originally cooked in, but is by no means an authentic gulyás. It has tomatoes, for a start. But what really matters is that the onions are cooked in lard, and there’s a lot of sweet paprika. Finish with a generous blob of sour cream.

Ingredients

Serves 4 to 6

2tbspn lard


2 onions, finely chopped


1tspn garlic, finely chopped


3tbspn sweet Hungarian paprika


800g shin of beef, cut into 1½in cubes

½tspn caraway seeds


600ml chicken or beef stock


½tspn salt


Freshly ground black pepper


2 medium potatoes


4 big tomatoes, peeled, seeded and finely chopped


2 medium-sized green peppers, with seeds and ribs removed, finely chopped


½tspn marjoram

Method

Heat the lard in a four- or five-quart heavy saucepan until a light haze forms over it, then reduce the heat to medium and add the onions and garlic. Cook them for 8–10 minutes or until the onions are lightly coloured. Off the heat, stir in the paprika until the onions are well coated.

Add the beef cubes, caraway seeds and stock to the pan and season with the salt and pepper. Bring the liquid to a boil and partially cover the pan. Gently simmer for two hours or until the beef is almost tender.

Parboil the potatoes in boiling water for 8–10 minutes or until they can be easily penetrated with the point of a sharp knife. Peel the potaoes, cut them into 1½in cubes and add them, together with the tomatoes, the peppers and the marjoram, to the pan.

Partially cover again and cook over a medium heat for 25 to 35 minutes or until the potatoes are done and the beef is tender.

Skim off the surface fat and taste for seasoning.

Serve the goulash in deep individual plates.

'There’s something so nostalgic about mashed potato, liver, bacon and lots of gravy,’ notes Sir David Beckham, between bites of his favourite recipe. ‘It’s one of those British comfort classics that my mum used to make for me and was also my granddad’s favourite dish. It’s not to all tastes,’ he smiles. ‘Two of my kids love liver, the other two hate it. But for me, there’s something very special about it.’

Cooking is in David’s blood. ‘My mum, Sandra, is a great cook and this is her recipe,’ he reveals, as he piles buttery mashed potato onto a delicate sliver of pink liver. ‘She taught me how to cook and my love of cooking comes from her. My gran was also a great cook, and it was always a treat going down to the pie and mash shop in Chapel Market.’ He adds, eyes agleam: ‘If I had to choose my last meal, it would be pie, mash, liquor and jellied eels.’

At home, David does all the cooking. He may be one of the most famous people alive, but he’s warm, eloquent and refreshingly down to earth. He’s also completely obsessed with food, a man who really knows his Roscoffs. Over lunch, conversation ranges from the joys of ex-dairy Galician beef (‘that fat and depth of flavour’), via his love of his vegetable garden and bees (‘out of everything we’ve created in the country, honey is the most rewarding’) to his passionate support for British farming. ‘I’ve always championed British food and products, wherever I’ve been in the world,’ he attests. ‘When you spend a certain amount of time in the country, you see the struggle of the local farmers, of farmers in general.’

We talk about his time at Manchester United, when ‘diet was really not important. Every day we had steak and chips, followed by either jam roly-poly or chocolate sponge’. Things are rather different these days, which is, he admits, ‘good for the game’. His first dates with Victoria took place at The French, in Manchester, ‘the poshest place I’d ever been to’. At that point, he admits he had ‘no idea’ about food or wine, save that ‘I liked good food and wine’. They always ordered a bottle of Champagne and a bottle of red. ‘I bought the most expensive bottle of wine simply because I assumed that’s what was best.’ He grins. He’s now a serious collector of serious claret and knows his Petrus from his Palmer. ‘I buy wine I like to drink, not sell,’ he says firmly.

The Sunday roast is a Beckham family institution. ‘Wherever we are in the world, we have a Sunday roast. It was a big thing as a kid and with my kids — the time where we sit down and eat together. They all laugh at me, because I pile my plate so high.’ He’s equally obsessed with his barbecue. ‘I’m in charge, although there’s a bit of competition now from my sons, as they all love to barbecue. Especially Cruz. He barbecues in sun and rain alike. The problem is, he’s bloody good.’

In Oxfordshire, the Beckhams spend ‘a lot of time’ in their tented outdoor barbecue WildKitchen, which was designed by his friend Guy Ritchie. ‘Victoria will say: “Do we have to go to the tent again?” She knows, once we’re in the tent, we don’t leave the tent.’ He has ‘a few beers, then the wine comes out and the kids come over and we end up spending the whole day there. That’s what we love doing as a family’. Family and food are the two non-negotiables in his life. In London, the Beckhams don’t eat out much — ‘I rarely go to places I’ve never been’ — although he cites Dorian and Core as two favourites in Notting Hill. ‘We cook at home most of the time.’

David, as you might imagine, travels a lot, but, as ever, family and food come first. ‘Work trips are built around the restaurants I want to go to. It’s really important for me to have the evenings where I can go and have a nice meal with my family or my team.’ His tastes are certainly adventurous. ‘My career has opened up my eyes to different cultures and foods.’ Including percebes (goose-neck barnacles) and angulas (elvers) in Spain, and something that resembled ‘a grilled marshmallow’, prepared by his favourite chef in Japan. ‘It was puffer-fish sperm,’ he says, casually. ‘And tasted amazing. I try everything.’

Everything, save parsnips. ‘I’m not too keen on parsnips.’ On that bombshell, Sir David, after thanking everyone profusely, leaves the room. Not only a football icon, but also a gardener, griller, gastro-geek and cook. And a brand new British food hero, too

Ingredients

Serves 2–3
For the potatoes

• 600g mashing potatoes, peeled and halved
• 250ml whole milk
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 sprig thyme
• 2 garlic cloves, lightly crushed
• 1 shallot, halved
• 10 peppercorns
• 75g cold butter, cubed (or more for extra richness)
• Salt

For the liver

• 400–500g calf’s liver, sliced about 1cm thick
• 8 rashers streaky bacon, cut into strips
• 1tbsp olive oil
• 6–8 fresh sage leaves
• 2tbsp butter (plus extra knobs for finishing)
• 1 shallot, finely sliced
• 60ml white wine, or Marsala for a richer sauce
• 100ml chicken stock (or Bisto granules, as Sandra would do)
• 1tbsp wholegrain mustard
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• Lemon zest and juice, to finish

Method

1. To make the creamy herb mashed potatoes, place the peeled, halved potatoes in a pot of cold, lightly salted water. Bring to the boil and simmer until tender.
2. Meanwhile, heat the milk in a small saucepan with the bay leaf, thyme, garlic cloves, shallot and peppercorns. Bring just to the boil, then remove from the heat, cover and allow flavours to infuse.
3. Drain the cooked potatoes and pass them through a sieve or ricer for a silky texture. Strain the infused milk and gradually beat it into the potatoes until smooth. Stir in the cubed cold butter until fully incorporated. Keep warm until serving.

4. Preheat a large frying pan over high heat. Season the liver slices with salt and pepper, and dip in flour.
5. Cook the bacon until crisp and set aside.
6. Add the olive oil and sear the liver for 1½ minutes on the first side until golden.
7. Flip the liver and, a few seconds later, add the sage leaves. Cook the second side for no longer than 1½ minutes to maintain a pink, tender centre.
8. Reduce the heat slightly, add a knob of butter and baste the liver for the final 20 seconds. Remove the liver to a warm plate, add the cooked bacon and pour over the pan juices.

9. Return the pan to medium heat and add the finely sliced shallot with a little more butter. Cook gently for 1–2 minutes until softened.
10. Increase the heat, deglaze the pan with white wine, and reduce slightly. Add the chicken stock and reduce again to a sauce consistency.
11. Whisk in a few extra knobs of butter and the tablespoon of wholegrain mustard. Taste and adjust seasoning — the bacon adds saltiness, so balance with a squeeze of lemon juice or a dash of white-wine vinegar if desired.
12. To serve, spoon the mash onto warm plates. Carve the liver into slices and arrange on top, then scatter the crispy bacon and sage. Spoon the mustard sauce around and over the liver. Finish with a light zesting of lemon and a touch of juice.

This article originally appeared in the October 22 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here

'Pasta alla carbonara is from Rome,’ growls Andreas Viestad in his delightful 2023 book, Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal, ‘and it should contain guanciale, eggs, pasta and pecorino. If you’re lacking any of this,’ he goes on, ‘it is not pasta alla carbonara. If you’ve added something, it is not pasta alla carbonara either.’ Viestad may be a Norwegian by birth, but when it comes to this particular plate of pasta, he’s Roman to his very core.

Because this is one regional Italian classic that manages to both soothe and inflame. Made properly, it’s comfort food clad in Brioni blouson, a magical emulsion of egg yolk, pasta water and pecorino clinging concupiscently to each glossy strand of pasta. Any excess of Lucullan lavishness is tamed and tempered by crisp, salty nuggets of cured pig jowl and a healthy blast of black pepper. You don’t want too much of it either, as carbonara is as rich as Crassus and should always leave you begging for just one bite more.

Carbonara also tops a list, published by the Accademia Italiana della Cucina, of the most commonly falsified Italian recipes. You’ll find heretics who add garlic, infidels who insist on onions and, worst of all, cretinos who think that cream adds to its lustre. Basta! Purists will also insist (as they always do) on guanciale and guanciale alone, arguing that only this particularly hardworking part of the pig’s head has the depth of flavour, and sweetness of fat, to give the dish its unique savour. Some see it as an insight into the cook’s very character. ‘If your boyfriend makes carbonara with pancetta or bacon, break up,’ goes a typically Italian piece of romantic advice. But as Rachel Roddy argues in Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, pancetta is fine. Some Romans, she whispers, even prefer it.

This is a recipe that is at once straightforward and a touch intimidating. Timing is key, as carbonara waits for no man. The freshly drained pasta must be poured into the pan in which you fried the pork, the pan taken away from the heat. Then the egg and cheese mixture is added, together with some reserved cooking water. Too much of that, however, and you’ll end up with a thin sauce that doesn’t stick to your pasta. An excess of heat and the mixture will congeal into porky scrambled eggs. Practice, as ever, makes perfect.

There are endless different tales as to how the dish came about. There always are.

Some say it was named after the charcoal burners (carbone is the Italian for charcoal and coal) who ate the dish when working the forests around Rome; others insist it was a firm favourite with coal sellers and that the pepper is a reminder of the coal dust that fell from clothes to plate as they ate. One particularly romantic yarn contends carbonara was created in tribute to the Carbonari, a secret society of freedom fighters determined to overthrow Napoleon, when he pronounced himself King of Italy. But that seems a little less credible, as the Carbonari were based in Naples, a city with little time for Roman ways.

Much of the confusion comes from there being no record of the recipe until after the Second World War. Although similar dishes were widely cooked (pasta alla gricia, cacio e pepe and so on), one of the more plausible theories claims that it was an American-Italian hybrid — US soldiers in post-war Rome would give their rations of powdered egg, bacon and cheese to local chefs, who then created this sort of egg and bacon atop spaghetti. Food was painfully scarce in those post-war days, unless you were an American GI, so this theory is less outlandish than it may initially seem.

The Americans certainly took the recipe home with them to the US, where cooks were less than fussy about any so-called ‘authenticity’. And, to be honest, there’s nothing wrong with adding whatever you want to your sauce. Even, dare I say it, a dash of cream. Just don’t, for Jupiter’s sake, call it carbonara.

Spaghetti alla carbonara

This comes from Rachel Roddy’s Five Quarters, a modern Roman classic and a book I turn to again and again — not only for the depth of research, but the quality of the writing, too. It’s as much fun to read as it is to cook from and each page is scented with the very essence of the Eternal City.

Ingredients

Serves 4

150g guanciale, pancetta or bacon


450g spaghetti


A little olive oil


2 whole eggs and 2 extra yolks


80g grated pecorino or Parmesan—or a mixture of both


Salt and freshly ground pepper

Method

• Bring a large pan of water to a rolling boil. Cut the guanciale into short, thick strips. In a large pan over a moderate heat, cook the guanciale in a little olive oil until the fat has rendered and the pieces are golden and crisp. Remove from the heat.

• Add salt to the boiling water, stir, then add the spaghetti, fanning it out and using a wooden spoon to gently press and submerge the strands. Cover the pan until the water comes back to the boil, then remove the lid and continue cooking until it is al dente (check the cooking time on the packet and start tasting at least two minutes earlier).

• While the pasta is cooking, in a largish bowl whisk together the eggs, egg yolks, grated cheese, a pinch of salt and plenty of black pepper. Heat up the meat pan again and, once hot, use a slotted spoon to remove three-quarters of the guanciale pieces onto a small plate, leaving the last quarter and the fat in the pan.

• Drain the pasta, reserving a cupful of the cooking water. Add the pasta to the frying pan, stirring so that each strand is coated with fat. Turn off the heat, then add the egg and cheese mixture, and a little cooking water. Using a wooden spoon or fork, mix everything together vigorously so that each strand is coated with a creamy sauce. Add just a little more cooking water if the sauce is too stiff. Serve immediately, dividing the rest of the crisp guanciale between the plates.

This article first appeared in the October 8, 2025 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here

The savoury equivalent to our blueberry scones, these delicious bacon scones are irresistible when just out of the oven.

I like to add a little Isle of Mull Cheddar on top of the scones to go along with the crispy bacon and chives. If you can’t find Isle of Mull Cheddar, any mature Cheddar or strong cheese will do.

Ingredients

• 5 rashers streaky bacon
• 400g self-raising flour
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 150g butter, cut into cubes
• 2 eggs
• 150g Isle of Mull Cheddar, grated
• 175ml milk
• 1 tbsp English mustard

To garnish:

• 50g Isle of Mull Cheddar, finely grated
• A small bunch of chives, finely chopped

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 230°C/210°C fan
2. Put the bacon rashers on a lined baking tray and put into the oven for 10 to 15 minutes, until dark and crispy. Set aside to cool, leaving the oven on, and then chop four of the rashers into little pieces
3. Put the flour into a mixing bowl with the baking powder and sea salt, then add the butter cubes. Rub the ingredients together with your fingertips until you have a breadcrumb consistency, making sure there are no large chunks of butter left
4. In another bowl beat one of the eggs, then add it to the flour mixture along with 100g of the grated Cheddar, the chopped bacon, milk and English mustard. Loosely mix together with a spoon
5. Tip the dough out onto a floured surface, then shape it into a rough circle with your hands, folding it over a few times so it begins to hold together. Remember: you are not looking for a smooth, kneaded dough here — the less interference, the better! Pat the dough down until it’s around 4cm high and pretty even
6. With an 8cm cookie cutter, cut out six scones and place them onto your lined baking tray
7. In a small bowl, beat the remaining egg and brush it over the top of each scone. Scatter over the remaining 50g of grated cheese, then bake the scones for 20 minutes
8. Set the scones aside to cool for 10 minutes. Finely chop the remaining crispy bacon rasher and, while the scones are cooling, pile some finely grated Cheddar, bacon and chopped chives over the tops

'Café Cùil Cook Book; is out November 4 (Kitchen Press, £25). Visit the Kitchen Press website to pre-order.

I’ve always been fascinated by any form of preserving. To take something living and prevent it from dying — stopping time, rot. I’m in love with its ancientness and importance.

No other form of cookery embodies the symbiotic relationship we once had with nature and the seasons. Preserving was a beautifully resourceful craft, born out of necessity, out of humble respect and out of a temporal understanding of our environment and what it took to survive within it. I don’t make this chutney to survive (things have changed), but I can take part of the summer deep into winter, in a glass jar.

Ingredients

• 500g runner beans, stringy veins removed, and cut into 1cm pieces
• 1kg Bramley apples, peeled, quartered, cored and roughly chopped
• 500g ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 2 onions, roughly chopped
• 150g sultana
• 2 tsp coriander seeds, bashed
• 1 tsp caraway seeds, bashed
• 2 cardamon pods, bashed
• 350g light brown soft sugar
• 500ml cider vinegar
• 1 tsp fine sea salt

Method

Put all the ingredients into a preserving pan over a medium heat. Slowly bring the mixture up to the simmer, stirring regularly until the sugar has dissolved.

Reduce the heat and simmer the chutney for 1½–2 hours, stirring every so often to stop it sticking to the base of the pan. The chutney will thicken as it cooks; you’ll know it’s ready when you can draw a wooden spoon across the bottom of the pan and it leaves a path behind it for a few seconds before the chutney collapses back down. Be extra-careful it doesn’t catch and burn at this point. Remove the chutney from the heat and spoon very carefully into sterilised jars. Seal with the lids and allow to cool.

Store in a cool, dark cupboard for several months before eating — although you can eat it earlier, if you like.

It's better than any other pleasure in life, a mouthful so wondrous, so suffused with giddy, radiant joy that it surpasses any love felt for mere humans, be they friend, child or paramour. In fact, for just two blessed bites of this seraphic sensation, you would happily hurl yourself to your doom.

Yet this is neither nectar nor Manna, ambrosia nor forbidden fruit. Rather, a minced onion salad with purslane and cucumber. Better still, add a few leaves of basil and a tangle of rocket, according to Renaissance man Agnolo Bronzino, ‘and there is no contract that one would not arrange’.

OK, so the painter and poet, eulogising In Praise of the Onion sometime during the mid 16th century, has his tongue firmly in cheek. Not only, he argues, is the onion a microcosm of the world, with all its many layers, but it acted as divine inspiration for Dante (circle after circle) and Petrarch’s bittersweet verse. But the poem, with much bawdy innuendo beneath that delicately papery skin, contains the first reference to panzanella (albeit proto), the Tuscan bread-and-tomato dish that straddles the salad diaspora like a juice-soaked Colossus.

As is the case with so many Tuscan dishes, panzanella is a dish of humble beginnings. Leftover stale bread would be soaked in water, squeezed dry and served in a deep dish (pane e zella, or bread and bowl) with olive oil, onions and salt. Tomatoes were very much a newcomer to the feast, scarlet arrivistes whose presence was first recorded sometime at the dawn of the 20th century. This is not to say they didn’t play an earlier role, rather that the culinary traditions of the cucina povera were overwhelmingly oral.

Anyway, purists (and this being a regional Italian dish, there are many) insist that the bread must be filone, the classic Italian sourdough — although they tend to disagree as to how long the bread, which is always torn by hand, should be soaked. Some say as little as 15 minutes, others argue for a full 48 hours. I tend to go for about an hour, so the bread still has some texture.

The onions and vinegar should be added to the tomatoes at the start, together with basil, cucumber, oil and salt. Any other embellishments — from peppers and oregano to anchovies, hard-boiled eggs and tuna — are strictly for out-of-towners and base foreigners like me. Simplicity is the key, they say. This is not the place for baroque excess.

But authenticity be damned. I have more interest in a sun-soaked gallimaufry, with panzanella as the soft-textured star of a long, languorous lunch. If you want to make it with ciabatta, throw in a spring onion or a fistful of olives or even — and whisper this one round Siena and San Gimignano — torn mozzarella, then be my guest. It’s your lunch and, as long as the bread is dense, decent and dryish, and has had enough time to mingle and get to know all those other flavours, you’ll be fine.

One non-negotiable, however, is the ripest, sweetest tomatoes you can find, the headily fragrant types that are teetering on the edge of collapse. This is not the place for the smoothly Botoxed blandness of the average red supermarket billiard ball. Where is, save the compost bin? No, this is about juice, and lashings of it, in a dish that contains the very essence of late summer. Pappy, in the best possible way, with a sly bite and an abundance of September plenty.

Panzanella

The late, great Antonio Carluccio is — together with Anna Del Conte, Angela Hartnett, Rachel Roddy and Giorgio Locatelli — one of those writers I turn to on all things Italian. I first met him, many moons ago, at his Neal Street Restaurant in Covent Garden, WC2, where he taught me how to make a risotto, Marlboro Red in one hand, a glass of Barolo in the other. It was a lesson I never forgot.

His recipe for panzanella is based on his mother’s. ‘It looked like chicken feed,’ he writes in Antonio Carluccio — The Collection, ‘but it tasted delicious and I still make it in the same way today.’ Feel free to swap the celery for a chopped cucumber, throw in a few anchovies or add a chopped chilli. I also like a good glug of red-wine vinegar, added with the soaked bread, at the start.

Ingredients

Serves 4

4 large slices of country bread, crusts removed


4 large ripe tomatoes (about 800g)


The tender centre of 1 celery head, plus leaves, coarsely chopped


10 basil leaves, chopped


10 pitted olives, green or black


1 bunch spring onions, chopped


1 yellow pepper, de-seeded and cut into fine strips


1 garlic clove, puréed (optional)


6tbspn extra-virgin olive oil


Salt and pepper

Method

1 Preheat the oven to 160˚C fan/180˚C/gas mark 4 and bake the bread for about 20 minutes, until golden. Break the cooked bread into small pieces about the size of a large sugar lump.

2 Put the tomatoes into a bowl of water that has just come to the boil and leave for 30 seconds. Pull off the skin, then chop the flesh coarsely, collecting all the juices. If your tomatoes are not very juicy, you’ll need some help with soaking the bread; try adding some tomato juice from a carton or can.

3 Mix the tomato pieces and juices together with all the other ingredients, including the bread. Leave to infuse for a few hours [or just one], so that the bread can absorb all the flavours and soften. Stir occasionally. Add salt and pepper to taste and serve cold.

This article first appeared in the September 10 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Ingredients

For the tart crust

• 135g plain flour
• 40g cocoa powder
• 80g ground almonds
• 80g icing sugar
• A pinch of sea salt
• 150g unsalted butter, melted
• 1tspn vanilla-bean paste

For the caramel

• 130g light-brown sugar
• 130ml double cream
• 75g unsalted butter
• 4tbspn tahini
• A pinch of sea salt
• 150g mascarpone

To serve

• 12 fresh figs, quartered
• A handful chopped pistachios
• A drizzle of runny honey

Method

Preheat your oven to 160˚C fan/180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4 and prepare a loose-bottomed tart tin by adding a disc of parchment paper to the base.

To make the crust, add the flour, cocoa powder and ground almonds to a large bowl and whisk together with the icing sugar and sea salt. Pour over the melted butter and vanilla-bean paste and mix to a damp, sandy crumb.

Tip the mixture into the tart tin and press it firmly over the base and up the sides using a flat-bottomed glass or the back of a spoon until even. Chill for 30 minutes and then bake for about 18 minutes. Let it cool completely in the tin.

Make the filling by adding the light-brown sugar, double cream and butter in a saucepan over a medium heat and melting everything together. Allow it to bubble gently for a few minutes to thicken, then remove from the heat. Cool for a few minutes, then stir through the tahini and salt — it should be warm, but not hot.

Cool for 10 minutes, then whisk in the mascarpone. Pour into the cooled tart shell and chill for about two hours or until softly set.

Once chilled, arrange the figs over the top, scatter with the chopped pistachios and drizzle with the honey.

This tart is best eaten on the day you make it, but you can make the shell and caramel in advance to assemble on the day.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.

Is the soufflé on the brink of extinction? It’s certainly been on the endangered list since I started cooking, over 20 years ago. You’ll occasionally spot one, or if you’re lucky a small group of them (known as a troupeau de soufflés), living off the kindness of a few diners.

This image, by food photographer Andrew Montgomery, shows one of the rarest and most beautiful soufflés ever documented. Please pledge your support today.

Ingredients

Serves four

• 50g unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing
• 1 tbsp polenta
• 2 corns on the cob
• 1 onion, thinly sliced
• 1 garlic clove, sliced
• 1 tsp chopped rosemary leaves
• 100ml vegetable stock
• 100g smoked cheddar
• Pink of smoked paprika
• 4 eggs, separated
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Heat the oven to 210°C/190°C fan/415°F/gas mark 6–7.

Grease a 15cm (6in) soufflé dish generously with butter, then sprinkle in the polenta and rotate the dish to ensure it is evenly coated.

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil. Strip the husks and the silks away from the cobs and cut away the hard stems. Drop the cobs into the water and cook for 4–8 minutes, or until the kernels come away with ease.

Lift the cobs from the water and allow them to cool. Using a sharp knife, slice away the tender kernels from the cobs.

Place a smaller pan over a medium heat and add the butter. When it’s hot, add the onion, garlic and rosemary and season with some salt and pepper. Cook the mixture, stirring regularly, for about 6–8 minutes, until the onion is beginning to soften. Then, add three quarters of the corn kernels and all of the vegetable stock and bring to the simmer. Cook for 3–4 minutes, then remove from the heat.

Tip the sweetcorn mixture into the jug of a blender and whiz until you have a smooth, thick purée. Spoon the purée into a large mixing bowl.

While it’s still warm, stir in all but a scattering of cheese, along with the remaining corn kernels, the smoked paprika and the egg yolks.

Use a clean whisk to beat the egg whites in a bowl into soft, pillowy peaks — they should just hold their shape. Take a metal spoon and gently stir the whipped whites into the enriched corn purée, trying to keep things as light and airy as possible.

Spoon the mixture into the prepared soufflé dish, then run a knife around the edge (this helps the soufflé to rise up above the rim of the dish to create a ‘top hat’ effect). Scatter over the reserved cheese and bake for 25–30 minutes, until the top is golden and risen and the soufflé has a slight wobble. Serve immediately.

Some would argue an unbaked cheesecake isn’t a cheesecake at all. I don’t really know what that means or who those people are. I make both, and they’re equally tasty in their different ways. This particular version hasn’t got eggs in, so doesn’t get baked, but it’s nonetheless rich. What’s more, it’s fairly quick to make, less fuss.

I love the addition of fennel seed and lemon zest here — two flavours that work alongside blackcurrants beautifully. I also like to scatter over fresh lemon thyme before serving the cake; it’s pretty easy to get hold of in the summer.

Ingredients

For the base:

• 150g (5½oz) digestive biscuits
• 85g (3oz) unsalted butter
• 1 tbsp runny honey
• 50g (1¾oz) jumbo oats, toasted in a dry pan
• Pinch of fine sea salt

For the filling:

• 300ml (10½FL oz) double cream
• 250g (9oz) full-fat cream cheese
• Finely grated zest of 1 large lemon and the juice of half
• 1 tsp fennel seeds, crushed
• 125g (4½oz) unrefined caster sugar
• 1 tsp agar flakes
• 200g (7oz) blackcurrants
• 3–4 lemon thyme sprigs, leaves picked

Method

1. For the base, put the biscuits in a food processor, whiz to fine crumbs, then set aside. Melt the butter and honey together in a pan, then add the crushed digestives, toasted oats, and the salt and mix well
2. Press the mixture into the base of a 22cm (8½in) springform tin and chill for 1 hour to set
3. Meanwhile, make the filling. Pour the cream into a bowl and add the cream cheese, lemon zest, lemon juice, crushed fennel seeds and 50g (1¾oz) of the sugar. Using an electric whisk, whisk until the mixture is thick and forms stiff peaks when you lift the beaters
4. Spread the creamy mixture over the set biscuit base and return to the fridge
5. Place a smallish pan on the hob. Add 3 tablespoons of water and sprinkle over the agar flakes. Warm over a medium heat, until the liquid comes up to a gentle simmer. Use a fork to stir the flakes into the water for 2–3 minutes; this will encourage them to dissolve fully
6. Tip the blackcurrants into the pan along with the remaining sugar and half the lemon thyme leaves. Cook gently, stirring often, for about 5 minutes, until the berries are soft but mostly still hold their shape
7. Remove from the heat and leave to cool to room temperature. Spoon the blackcurrants along with their sweet juices over the top of the lemony fennel-y creamy cheese and gently even it all out (you might not need all the juice if there’s a lot). Place the cheesecake in the fridge for at least 3–4 hours, or until the topping has set completely
8. Remove from the tin, scatter over the remaining thyme leaves and serve

This recipe originally appeared in 'Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower — how to cook with vegetables and other plants'. You can follow Gill Meller on Instagram, here.

According to The World's 50 Best, The Connaught Bar — part of the hotel of the same name — 'is not a venue, it’s an icon of the bar industry.' And they should know. After all, it's appeared in their list of best bars multiple times, including in the coveted top spot.

While the exact origins of the martini are debated, its earliest form is the Martinez, which appeared in the 1860s in California. The first recipe resembling the modern dry martini was recorded in 1895, but it wasn’t until the 1910s and 20s that it found a foothold in Britain, as American-style cocktails began to sweep through London’s hotel bars.

The Connaught's martinis are served table-side, from a grand trolley, by a waiter who runs you through the various ways you can personalise your drinks. The unique tinctures number lavender, coriander, tonka and even cardamon, among their ranks. Go for Tanqueray no.10 if your preference is for gin and Belvedere if it's for vodka. Eitherway your glass should be ice, ice cold.

You'll find our round-up of the best martinis in London, here, and our handy video for making tips and the recipes, below.

The Connaught Bar martini

Ingredients

• 75ml Tanqueray No10 Gin or Belvedere Vodka
• 15ml dry vermouth mix
• 3 drops bitter

Method

Stir vermouth and spirit over ice and strain into a martini glass coated with bitters of your choice. Garnish with lemon zest or olives.

Belvedere 10's signature martini

Ingredients

• 60ml Belvedere 10
• 15ml dry vermouth
• 1 small pinch sea salt
• 1 drop high quality olive oil
• Lemon zest

Method

Add the first three ingredients to a mixing glass, over cubed ice. Stir for 15-20seconds to chill and dilute.

Strain into a chilled martini glass (I like to swirl more cubed ice around the glass).

Express the oils of a piece of lemon zest across the top of the glass and finish with your drop of olive oil.

James Bond's Vesper martini

Plenty have tried to meddle with the martini — with differing results — including James Bond author and former British Naval intelligence officer, Ian Fleming.

Bond is a prolific martini drinker who has perhaps done more for a single drink than any other man — living or made up.

In one book, Bond drinks his martini with a twist; in another, he orders it dirty; and in Casino Royale he orders what we now call a Vesper martini — a mainstay on bar menus around the world, including The Dorchester hotel's.

Ingredients

• 60ml gin
• 20ml vodka
• 5ml Lillet Blanc (Kina Lillet is no longer in production)
• Lemon peel

Method

Pour the liquid ingredients into a cocktail shaker, over cubed ice. Shake very until until everything is ice-cold and then serve in your glass of choice with a large slice of lemon peel.

If you like to eat seasonally and appreciate the amazing difference it makes to flavour, then do hunt down some lovely, ripe, heritage tomatoes for this recipe.

They’re in season now and at their best in August and September — so this recipe will see you through the whole summer — when they’ve been given time under a warm sun to sweeten on the vine.

I use a jumble of tomatoes here — in all shapes, colours and sizes. Organic eggs and good sourdough or country bread are also important in this big-hearted summer salad.

Ingredients

For the salad

• 6 eggs, at room temperature
• About 1kg ripe tomatoes of different sizes and colours, thickly sliced
• 2tbsp capers
• 1 red chilli, deseeded and very thinly sliced (optional)
• 1 red onion, thinly sliced
• 1 handful of tarragon, leaves picked and chopped
• 1 small handful or basil, thinly ribboned
• 200g day-old sourdough or country bread, torn into bite-sized pieces

For the dressing

• 4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tbsp sunflower oil
• 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 2 tsp Dijon mustard
• 2 tsp unrefined caster sugar
• 1 garlic clove, very finely grated, or crushed to a paste
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Start by whisking or shaking together all the ingredients for the dressing, until thoroughly combined. Set aside.

Bring a pan of water to the boil and add the eggs. Bring back to the simmer and cook for 61⁄2 minutes, then drain and cool in cold water to stop them cooking. Peel the eggs and set aside.

Place the tomato slices in a large bowl with the capers, chilli, red onion, tarragon, basil and bread. Pour over half the dressing and carefully tumble everything together. Allow to stand for 20 minutes, then tumble it all again, being careful not to break up the tomatoes too much.

Transfer the salad onto a large platter. Halve the eggs and arrange these in and around the tomatoes. Trickle over the remaining dressing and season everything with a little more salt and pepper before serving.

This recipe originally appeared in 'Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower — how to cook with vegetables and other plants'. You can follow Gill Meller on Instagram, here

As strawberries hit peak season, it's tempting to just pop open the punnet and dive in as soon as you get them. They're irresistible.

But as good as they are just as nature intended, they're ripe (pun fully intended) for deployment in all sorts of other ways. Drizzle them with salt, pepper and balsamic vinegar, for example, and they're a wonderful accompaniment to fresh toasted sourdough with ricotta, pine nuts and a little extra virgin olive oil.

For something even fancier, though, this recipe for Eton mess blondies is hard to beat.

Ingredients

For the blondies

• 150g fresh strawberries
• 1tbspn cornflour 200g unsalted butter, melted
• 150g caster sugar
• 150g light brown sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1tspn vanilla extract
• 275g plain flour
• ½tspn baking powder
• 200g white-chocolate chips

For the meringue topping

• 2 egg whites

• ½ tspn lemon juice

• 100g caster sugar

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 140˚C fan/160˚C/320˚F/gas mark 3 and line a 20cm (8in) square brownie tin with parchment paper.

2. Remove the stalks from the strawberries and chop them into small pieces. Toss them with the cornflour to soak up the excess moisture and set aside.

3. Whisk together the melted butter, caster sugar and light brown sugar until smooth. Add the eggs and vanilla, again beating until smooth, then gently fold through the flour and baking powder until just combined. Gently stir in the white chocolate chips and chopped strawberries, then spread the batter into the prepared tin.

4. For the meringue, whisk the egg whites with lemon juice until soft peaks form. Gradually add the caster sugar, whisking until the meringue is glossy and holds stiff peaks. Carefully spread it over the blondie batter in an even layer.

5. Bake for 35–40 minutes, until the meringue is crisp and lightly golden and the blondies are set, but still slightly wobbly. Allow to cool completely in the tin before slicing. Serve with extra strawberries on the side and a dollop of whipped cream.

Fresh elderflower and strawberries is another lovely, quintessential companionship, but there’s only a small window in which to get these two seasonal delights together. The elderflowers will disappear long before the strawberries. Happily, while the elder’s in bloom, you can pick the flowers and bottle the essence by way of a cordial so that you can enjoy this fragrant combination throughout summer, or for as long as the strawberries last.

Ingredients

For the pastry

• 400ml double cream
• Juice and finely-grated zest of one lemon
• 3 tbsp elderflower cordial
• 300-400 grams (10-14 oz) of ripe strawberries, hulled and sliced
• 1 tbsp unrefined caster sugar
• A few elderflower heads to decorate (if available)

For the meringue

• 4 egg whites
• 200g (7 oz) unrefined caster sugar

Method

1. Before beginning, set the the oven to 120°C/100°C fan/235°F/gas mark 1.
2. First, make the meringue. Place the egg whites in a large, clean bowl. Whisk with a hand-held electric whisk until they form and hold soft peaks. (You can do this in a stand mixer with a whisk attachment, if you prefer.)
3. Keeping the whisk running, add 1 large spoonful of sugar at a time, until all the sugar is incorporated. Continue to whisk for a further 6–8 minutes, until the meringue is thick, pale, smooth and glossy.
4. Lightly grease a sheet of baking parchment and lay it on a large (at least 30 x 30cm/12 x 12in) baking sheet. Spoon the meringue onto the parchment, trying to make a large disc with slightly peaked edges – it doesn’t have to be perfect.
5. Bake the meringue in the oven for 25–30 minutes, then turn down the heat to 110°C/90°C fan/225°F/gas mark 1⁄2 and bake for a further 2 hours, until the meringue has formed a crisp shell.
6. Remove from the oven and allow to cool. (If you’re not using the meringue straight away, store it in an airtight container for up to 1 week.)
7. When you’re ready to serve the meringue, pour the cream into a large bowl and add half the lemon juice and half the zest and two tablespoons of the cordial. Whisk until the cream is thick enough to just hold soft peaks.
8. Place the strawberry slices in a bowl with the remaining lemon juice and the remaining cordial. Gently turn them to coat.
9. Spoon the cream onto the meringue, top with strawberries and sprinkle over the sugar. Serve with a scattering of the remaining lemon zest and some elderflower petals, if they’re in season.

This recipe originally appeared in 'Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower — how to cook with vegetables and other plants'. You can follow Gill Meller on Instagram, here

In 2002, a brilliant organisation called The Prince’s Trust gave me a start-up grant. The money helped me set up a kitchen where I baked tarts, just like this one, to sell at the local farmers’ market. I loved the market and all the producers who came along every weekend; I made friends there.

The upside of a slow day was getting to eat my own tarts for supper, breakfast and maybe lunch too.

Ingredients

For the pastry

• 300g plain flour
• 150g unsalted butter, cubed and chilled
• Pinch of fine sea salt
• About 150ml chilled water

For the filling

• 1 good handful each of broad beans in the pod, peas in the pod and sugar snap peas
• 12 asparagus spears
• 1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 6 spring onions, trimmed and slice into 1cm pieces
• 1 little gem lettuce, halved and ribboned
• 1/2 small handful of tarragon, leaves picked and roughly chopped
• 1/2 small handful of flat-leaf parsley, leaves picked and roughly-chopped
• 1 handful of lovage, leaves picked and roughly-chopped
• 150g soft goat's cheese
• 2 eggs, plus 2 yolks
• 100ml whole milk
• 300ml double cream
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

1. First, make the pastry. Pulse the flour, butter and salt in a food processor to the consistency of breadcrumbs. With the motor running, steadily add the chilled water, stopping as soon as the dough comes together. Remove the dough, knead it a couple of times, then wrap it in parchment and chill it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Remove the pastry from the fridge and allow it to come up to room temperature before rolling
2. Heat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/350°F/gas mark 4
3. Roll out the dough to about 3mm (1⁄8in) thick. Line your tart case (I used a rectangular one, about 15 x 25cm/6 x 10in, and about 3–4cm/11⁄4–11⁄2in deep) with the pastry, leaving an overhang. Prick the base, then line it with baking parchment and baking beans. Bake ‘blind’ for 20 minutes, then remove the beans and paper, and return the case to the oven for 10–12 minutes, until just golden. Remove from the oven and trim the overhang. Set aside
4. To make the filling, pod the beans and peas (you can leave any very small fresh pods whole – they can go in the tart like that, if you like) and snap away the woody stems from the asparagus spears
5. Set a large frying pan over a medium heat and add the olive oil, followed by the asparagus. Season with salt and pepper and cook for 2 minutes, then add the spring onions, lettuce, peas and broad beans (whole or not). Continue to cook for a few minutes until the lettuce has wilted down. You’ll need to toss the vegetables around the pan to help them on their way
6. Add the chopped tarragon, parsley and lovage leaves to the pan. Season the mixture again with plenty of salt and pepper, then spoon into the prepared tart case. Dot the goat’s cheese over the top
7. Combine the whole eggs, egg yolks, milk and cream in a jug, season and mix well, then pour the mixture over the tart filling
8. Carefully place the tart in the oven to bake for 30–35 minutes, until it has a mottled golden top and is slightly raised. Allow to rest for at least 20–30 minutes before serving

This recipe originally appeared in 'Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower — how to cook with vegetables and other plants'. You can follow Gill Meller on Instagram, here

I’m such a sucker for almond butter and wanted to incorporate that nutty flavour into my cookie recipe. These are so quick to make, which makes them ideal if you want an easy afternoon pick-me-up or to surprise a friend. I love making the cookies for pudding when I’m hosting, served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

If you want to do this, you can make the cookie dough in advance and bake them to serve. You could also use the No-churn Raspberry Ice Cream recipe (on page 162 Stay for Supper) and just leave out the berries.

Makes 10-12 cookies

Ingredients

• 100g unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 150g plain flour
• 50g caster sugar
• 50g light brown soft sugar
• 1 tspn sea salt, plus extra for sprinkling
• 2 tbsp smooth almond butter
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1 medium egg
• 100g dark chocolate with at least 70% cocoa solids, roughly chopped (you want some bigger and some smaller pieces)

Method

Combine all the ingredients except for the chocolate in a bowl and mix until smooth. Using either a food processor or a hand- held electric mixer will speed up this process, so I’d recommend using one.

Mix through the chocolate, then tip out the dough onto a large sheet of baking parchment and roll it into a thick sausage shape, roughly 5cm (2 inches) in diameter, twisting the baking paper at the ends to secure the dough. Refrigerate the cookie dough for about 2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 175°C and line two baking sheets with baking parchment. Roll the cookie dough into 10–12 balls and lay them out on the prepared baking sheets, spreading them well apart. Chill in the refrigerator for at least an hour.

Bake in the oven for 10–15 minutes until golden brown. Sprinkle the cookies with sea salt as soon as you remove them from the oven. Leave them to cool on the baking sheets for 5 minutes, then transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely — but if you can’t resist, feel free to eat them while they are still warm!

Stay for Supper by Xanthe Ross is out now (Quadrille, £25).

It started with a cat — fat, orange and indolent — by the name of Garfield. The star of an eponymous American cartoon strip in the 1970s and 1980s, I remember little of him, save a limitless appetite for something called lasagne. I had no idea what the dish was or even how it was actually pronounced. The drawings didn’t offer much to go on, simply a baking tray filled with something brown, divided into lots of squares, but if Garfield liked it, then so would I.

As I hounded my mother for a taste of this mysterious dish, las-ag-nn became an obsession. When I finally got to try it, at my aunt and uncle’s house in Dorset, I was both delighted and underwhelmed. For far from being some fragrantly exotic melange, it was just upwardly mobile spaghetti Bolognese. Albeit monolithic, multi-layered and quite, quite magnificent. This was love at first bite.

I’m not alone in my adoration. It’s a bona fide comfort classic, a once humble dish that now bestrides the world like a béchamel-topped Colossus. Named after the variety of pasta used to make it, lasagne al forno soothes, satisfies, delivers and delights. Although, be warned, it’s a recipe that seems to use not only every pot in the house, but every implement, too. My advice is to wash as you go, because this is not so much a dish as an epically joyous construction. You want a thick, silken béchamel that oozes into that ragù sauce, all slow-cooked succour. As the latter blip-blips gently away, I gaze into its limpid brown depths, lost in meaty reverie.

It’s not all about the meat, however. You can make it with mushrooms, truffles or pesto, as they do in Liguria in north-west Italy, where it’s known as mandilli de sae al pesto in Genoese, or ‘silk handkerchiefs’, thanks to the gossamer thinness of the pasta.

Talking of pasta, although the late Italian cookery writer Marcella Hazan may not have approved, good quality shop-bought is fine. By all means, get jiggy with the pasta machine, but it’s certainly not essential. I finish my lasagne with a layer of béchamel and a lusty grating of Parmesan, as in the recipe below, a classic I return to again and again. Nigella Lawson adds mozzarella, too — a rather inspired flourish.

If anything remains, simply reheat a fat portion in a hot oven — the edges will get gloriously crisp and crusted.

But this is lasagne — and the chances of any left-overs are very slim indeed.

Ingredients

Serves 6

For the ragú:

• 2tbspn olive oil
• 125g rindless streaky bacon (or pancetta), chopped
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 3 medium carrots, peeled and finely chopped
• 2 celery ribs, peeled and chopped
• 500g best-quality beef, minced
• 200g chicken livers, picked over and finely chopped
• 400g can of chopped tomatoes
• 1tbspn tomato purée
• 2 glasses red wine (about 300ml)
• Salt and black pepper
• 2tbspn fresh basil, chopped
• 2tbspn flat-leaf parsley, chopped

For the bechamel:

• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 2 cloves
• 1 bay leaf
• 8 black peppercorns
• 1tspn salt
• 500ml milk
• 50g butter
• 50g flour
• 150ml double cream
• 9 sheets dried egg lasagne
• Large knob of butter
• Freshly grated nutmeg
• 2tspn Parmesan cheese, freshly grated

Method

1. To make the ragù, heat the oil in a spacious, heavy-bottomed pan and gently fry the bacon. Add the onion and let it brown slightly before adding the garlic, carrots and celery. Cook, stirring all the time, until the vegetables are beginning to soften, then add the beef.

2. Stir until the meat is evenly browned and then add the livers. When they have started to firm up, add the tomatoes, tomato purée and wine.

3. Season with salt and pepper and add the herbs. Simmer very gently for about one hour, stirring occasionally (use a heat-diffuser pad if you have one), until the sauce is richly flavoured and almost all of the liquid has been absorbed.

4. Meanwhile, make the béchamel. Place the onion, cloves, bay leaf, peppercorns, salt and milk in a pan. Bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes, then remove the pan from the heat, cover and leave for 15 minutes.

5. Melt the butter in a separate pan and stir in the flour to make a roux. Strain the milk into the roux and whisk thoroughly. Simmer for 10 minutes, then add the cream. Put it to one side.

6. Cook the lasagne, in boiling salted water with a splash of olive oil, until it is tender, taking care the sheets don’t stick together. Drain, then dry them on a tea towel.

7. Choose a fairly deep, wide earthenware or porcelain dish and butter it well. Assemble the dish by making layers, first with pasta, then ragù and then béchamel, continuing in this style until everything is used up, but finishing with a thick layer of béchamel. Dust the top with nutmeg, then cover it with a generous coating of Parmesan.

8. Pre-heat the oven to 190˚C/375˚F/gas mark 5 and bake on the top shelf for 45 minutes, until bubbling and blistered.

Traditionally eaten on Good Friday to commemorate the Crucifixion, hot cross buns, the spiced-sweet bread that’s dotted with currants and devilishly good with lashings of butter, are now a mainstay on the British culinary calendar.

The first Good Friday batch is widely attributed to Thomas Rocliffe, a 14th-century monk who baked the goods, known as Alban Buns back then, to distribute among the poor. However, crossed buns are known to have been eaten by the Saxons long before, in honour of Eostre, the goddess of the dawn and fertility, in a celebration that took place in April (and where the word ‘Easter’ is thought to originate). Christian tradition grabbed hold of the Pagan festival and turned it into a celebration of Christ. The cross became a representation of the Crucifixion, and a symbol of the intersection between Earth and Heaven.

At some point, it came to be believed that hot cross buns baked on Good Friday would not decay, and were kept as a symbol of good luck. They were hung from kitchen ceilings like bun-ting (pun very much intended), and left there until a new batch was baked the following year. You may laugh at such superstition, but in April 2000, Bill Foster, a baker from Devon, spent £155 on a hot cross bun that had been stashed in the rafters of a house in 1829, and where it sat for 170 years.

While we don’t recommend eating buns quite so far beyond their best-by date, we hate to think of any going to waste, so we asked some exceptional bakers to share their favourite ways of repurposing leftover hot cross buns — and we included some of our own tips and tricks, too.

Who? Anna Higham, baker and owner of Quince Bakery

What? A tantalising trifle

Once a trainee architect, the celebrated pastry chef and River Cafe alumni now prefers croissants to construction. On the menu today is an Easter-twist on the classic trifle.

‘I soak raisins in sweetened black tea and then add some gelatin to make a jelly. I set that in the bottom of a trifle bowl, then layer with toasted hot cross buns. Pour over some custard (you can add a tipple of choice here, too) and allow the buns to soak it up.

Top it with whipped cream, a little mixed spice, some sugar and more raisins’.

Who? Ian Pickstock, Head of Deli Products and Development at Popham’s Bakery

What? A trans-seasonal celebration

Cross your buns and your seasons with a hot cross summer pudding.

First, line a lightly oiled, 1 pint pudding basin with cling film, then line the bottom and sides with slices of stale hot cross buns, packing them tight to ensure no gaps. Again, you can add a dash of something boozy at this stage, ‘maybe some Vin Santo or a Pedro Ximinez sherry to match those lovely dried fruit flavours in the buns.’

Take a glut of seasonal berries, gently cooking them down with a little sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice.

Let the compote cool, then fill up the bun basin and top with more hot cross bun slices. Gather the cling film over the top, and cover with a plate weighed down with some tins, leaving it in the fridge overnight.

When it’s ready to present, turn the pudding out onto a plate and serve with an ‘unctuous Jersey cream.’

Who? Michael Engler, Daylesford Organic’s executive baker

What? Bun and butter pudding

‘While switching out the usual brioche or white bread for slices of hot cross bun is a treat unto itself, adding bitter dark chocolate and apricot jam into the layers before baking takes it to another level’.

The best apricot jam for the task? It would have to be Daylesford’s!

Who? Yotam Ottolenghi

What? Hot cross bun ice cream

If you can’t get to Ottolenghi’s ROVI restaurant for a hot cross bun and confit orange sandwich this week, you do not need to worry about missing out entirely, because we have the ice cream recipe right here.

First, whisk together six egg yolks and 130g of light brown muscovado sugar in a bowl. Put 450ml of whole milk, 250g of double cream, and two hot cross buns (toasted and chopped into 1cm pieces) in a saucepan on a medium heat, warming through for about four minutes until bubbles start to form.

Slowly pour half of the hot milk into the egg yolk mixture, whisking constantly until smooth. Then, pour the contents of the bowl into the saucepan on a medium-low heat for 8-10 minutes, stirring constantly until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Remove from the heat, set aside to cool, and refrigerate for two hours or overnight.

Once cool, pour the mixture through a fine sieve, pressing the solids down to release as much mixture as possible before discarding them. Whisk in 200g creme fraiche and churn in an ice-cream maker.

Transfer to a container and freeze. Serve in a freshly toasted hot cross bun and celebrate the ‘combination of greedy dreams’.

Who? Amie Elizabeth White, Editor’s PA and Editorial Assistant at Country Life magazine

What? Bun granola

This is the only time of year I make my own granola — and hot cross buns are the reason I do it. I dice them up and combine in a bowl with oats, various nuts and seeds, chopped dried fruits (subject to the fruitiness of the buns), olive oil, a splash of lemon juice and a little honey.

Once everything is mixed and coated, lay it evenly on a greaseproof paper-lined baking tray, being careful not to squash it down too much — it should look rustic.

Bake at 180C for 30 minutes (though I quite like to over bake), stirring halfway through.

It is perfect for breakfast and even better on top of caramelised pears and Madagascan vanilla cream for pudding.

What? A hot cross bun breakfast bap

If you prefer savoury over sweet, try sandwiching a fried egg, bacon and tomatoes in a well-toasted hot cross bun, splashing everything with hot sauce. Alternatively, top each half with marmite and cheddar, and grill until the cheese bubbles.

Once a favourite of Madame de Pompadour — member of the French court and mistress of Louis XV — asparagus has long since lost its ‘royal' status, but not for me.

I'm excited to see the asparagus season has begun, an optimistic sign that summer really is just around the corner — and the kitchen garden will soon be brimming with a wealth of new culinary offerings.

Although asparagus it will always be delicious simply steamed and served with hollandaise, I wanted to share these recipes with you to show what a useful ingredient it can be, too.

Top tip: you can also eat it raw, as part of salad.

Grilled asparagus with chilli and lemon, burrata and pistachio pesto

Toss thick asparagus spears with olive oil, sea salt and a pinch of chilli flakes and grill on high heat until charred and tender.

Process a handful of pistachios with some basil, grated Parmesan, olive oil, garlic and lemon juice to make a vibrant pesto.

Arrange the asparagus on a plate, drizzle with a squeeze of lemon, and spoon over the pesto. Tear creamy burrata over the top, scatter with crushed pistachios and finish with a drizzle of olive oil, black pepper and micro herbs.

Serve immediately with warm sour-dough to mop up the delicious juices.

Asparagus pizza

Combine 200g white spelt flour, half a teaspoon dry yeast, a pinch of salt and 150ml warm water in a bowl. Mix to a dough and allow to rise in a warm place for half an hour before kneading and shaping into mini pizza bases.

Toss asparagus spears in olive oil and crushed garlic, and arrange them on rolled-out, olive-oiled pizza bases. Add Parmesan shavings and seasoning. You can also add Parma ham, more burrata, lemon, and other green vegetables.

Bake in a hot oven for 8-10 minutes.

To serve, drizzle with truffle oil and scatter with a handful of fresh chervil.

There are a couple of stages that help this omelette stand out. The first is the cooking of the potatoes. Give them enough time in the pan to collapse in the hot olive oil before you spoon them into the eggs, which is the second stage. Stir in the soft potatoes and let them rest there, to soak up the eggs. You shouldn’t be able to tell where the egg begins and the potato ends. The two should — almost — become one. If you can’t find smoked garlic, use normal garlic cloves instead.

Ingredients

• 6 eggs
• 300ml extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 onion, thinly sliced
• 500g new potatoes, cut into 2-3cm slices
• 4 smoked garlic cloves, thinly sliced
• 1 tsp thyme leaves
• 1 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley
• 75g Cheddar cheese, grated
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Crack the eggs into a mixing bowl, but don’t whisk them up. Set aside.

Place a large frying pan over a low–medium heat and add the olive oil. When it’s warm, add the onion and cook, stirring regularly, for 6–8 minutes, until softened but not browned. Stir in the potato slices and cook, turning occasionally, for 15–20 minutes, or until the potatoes are just beginning to break up. Add the smoked garlic, thyme and parsley and cook for a further 1 minute or so, then use a slotted spoon to lift the potato and onion mixture out of the pan into the bowl with the eggs. Remove the pan from the heat, but reserve the cooking oil.

Add the cheese and plenty of salt and pepper and stir well to break up the eggs. Leave the mixture to sit for 15–20 minutes.

To cook, heat a medium-sized non-stick pan over a medium heat. Add
a dash of the reserved cooking oil and wipe it around the pan with some kitchen paper to coat (you can jar any remaining cooking oil for another time). Spoon in the potato and egg mixture and give the pan a little shake to even everything out. Cook for 3 minutes, then turn up the heat and cook for a further 1 minute or so, until the omelette is beginning to firm up on the underside.

Place a flat plate over the top of the pan and carefully flip the pan, inverting the omelette onto the plate. Return the pan to the heat and gently slide the omelette back into the pan and cook for a further 3 minutes on a medium heat and 1 minute or so on a high heat, until cooked through and golden.

Slide the omelette onto a plate and allow it to rest for at least 5 minutes before serving with a dressed green salad.

This recipe originally appeared in 'Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower — how to cook with vegetables and other plants'. You can follow Gill Meller on Instagram, here.

Endlessly versatile and comfortingly familiar, potatoes are at the heart of so many favourite dishes — which perhaps explains how we each get through more than 130kg of them every year.

The humble Maris Piper turns to mash very well — and is widely available — but if you want to up the ante, do as chef Gordon Ramsay does, and get your hands on some Yukon Gold potatoes.

Cottage pie

Ingredients

1kg short ribs, bone in

1 onion, diced

2 carrots, diced

2 celery stalks, diced

3 cloves garlic, grated

2 tbspn tomato purée

1 tbspn plain flour

200ml red wine

500ml beef stock

2 sprigs thyme

2 bay leaves

1 tbspn Worcestershire sauce

For the mushroom layer

250g wild mushrooms, chopped

2 cloves garlic, grated

3 sprigs thyme

50ml double cream

For the Parmesan mash

1.5kg potatoes, such as Maris Piper

150ml double cream

100g unsalted butter

75g grated Parmesan

1 tspn Dijon mustard

100g Gruyère cheese

Fresh thyme to decorate

Method

Preheat your oven to 160˚C fan/180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4.

Heat a splash of olive oil in a large casserole dish with a lid. Brown the short ribs on all sides and set aside. To the same dish add the diced onion, carrots and celery. Cook until softened, then stir in the garlic and tomato paste and cook for another couple of minutes. Sprinkle over the flour, mix it in, then deglaze the dish with the red wine, scraping up any browned bits, and simmer to reduce the wine by half.

Return the beef to the pan, add the beef stock, thyme, bay leaves, Worcestershire sauce and season well. Cover the dish and place it in your oven to braise for 2½ –3 hours or until the beef is tender and falling off the bone. Remove the beef from the dish, shred it finely, and discard any bones. Return the shredded meat to the dish and stir it back into the thickened sauce.

Fry the mushrooms in a splash of olive oil over a medium heat for about five minutes, so they release their liquid, then stir in the garlic and thyme. Season well and stir in the cream. Set aside.

Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. Drain and pass through a potato ricer or mash until smooth. Warm the cream and butter in a small saucepan, then mix into the mashed potato and stir through the Parmesan and Dijon mustard, and season to taste.

Preheat your oven to 200˚C fan/220˚C/425˚F/gas mark 7.

Spoon the beef mixture into a large baking dish and level it. Add the wild-mushroom layer on top of the beef, followed by the mashed potatoes, smoothing the surface with a spatula or use a fork to create ridges. Sprinkle the top with the Gruyère and bake for 25–30 minutes or until the top is golden and bubbling.

Remove the pie from the oven and decorate with thyme sprigs. Serve hot with steamed greens on the side.

There are varying degrees of extreme heat. The melting point of pure gold is, for example, a fairly brow-beading 1,064˚C. And the centre of the sun, properly sizzling, is nearly 15 times that. But both seem positively glacial when compared with the ideal temperature of French onion soup.

For this is a dish that must be borne to the table on an asbestos salver, hot as a heatwave in Hades, its lava-like liquid — all buried beneath a bubbling morass of molten cheese — seething like an incandescent phoenix. The first sip should blister the tongue and ravage the roof of the mouth. This pain is all part of the pleasure — there’s nothing more depressing than tepid onion soup.

Because this dish is no mere Gallic broth, rather pure bonhomie in a bowl, a boozy, beefy, allium-scented masterpiece that cries out for the chill depths of winter. It does not, however, suffer fools gladly. Not so much in the eating (a spoon is the only weapon you’ll require), as the cooking. ‘The amount of onions — enormous — is the key to a good onion soup,’ note Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham in their retro-scented masterpiece The Prawn Cocktail Years. This is a recipe that demands time and attention, too. ‘Patience is all,’ they continue. ‘A beady eye is also needed or the onions soon scorch as they flop down into the bottom of the pan.’

It’s that slow transformation, from cold, hard onion to a soft mess of golden brown (texture like sun), that lies at the heart of this soup. Ignore any fool who tells you that caramelisation can be done in 20 minutes. Utter rot. For me, it takes an hour at the very least. First, a gentle sweat of thinly sliced alliums in butter, over the most flickering of flames, in a covered, heavy-bottomed pot.

Then the lid is removed, the heat slightly increased and the alchemy begins, for 45 minutes, if not longer. Stir regularly and stay vigilant. As to the variety of onions, the usual Spanish will do, but if you can get hold of those pink Roscoff onions from Brittany (you can find them at www.natoora.com and Waitrose, too), so much the better. They are as silken as they are sweet.

Some recipes call for chicken stock, which makes for a decent dish. Yet it does rather miss the point — this soup is all about bullish, swaggering bovine heft and, if onions are its soul, then beef is its heart. Stock cubes have no place here — use the best fresh stuff you can find. Better still, make it yourself. Booze is key, too, and I like a mixture of white wine and sherry. Cider is also traditional — and excellent — whereas a glug of Cognac or even Calvados (added right at the end) is positively medicinal.

The bread, preferably a sliced, proper baguette, should be a little stale and toasted before being rubbed with garlic and floated atop the soup. This gives the bread a little more buoyancy, meaning it will hold up better when weighed down with cheese. Gruyère is the classic choice, although Comté and good Cheddar will do. Blue cheese, on the other hand, most certainly will not.

Serve in individual ovenproof bowls. Or simply bang it on the table in the Le Creuset pot, to be shared among the ravenous masses. Whatever you do, remember that the surface must be smothered in a thick blanket of blistered, burnished cheese. Even a glimmer of broth is a sure-fire admission of defeat.

French Onion Soup

I’ve adapted this from a recipe in The New York Times, which was first published in 1954. Rather serendipitously, it popped into my inbox as I was starting to write the column. I like its classic simplicity.

Ingredients

Serves 4

60g unsalted butter
3 to 4 large red or yellow onions (about 1.5kg), peeled and thinly sliced
¾tspn sea salt, plus more to taste
1½ litres beef stock
200ml dry white wine
Good glug of dry sherry
1tbspn plain flour
½tspn black pepper, plus more to taste
8 slices of baguette or sourdough, about a day old, toasted
1 clove of garlic, peeled
200g grated Gruyère cheese

Method

1 Melt butter in a heavy-bottomed pot (Le Creuset is ideal) over a low heat. Add onions and half a teaspoon of salt, stir and cover, letting onions soften for 10 minutes.

2 Remove lid and let onions caramelise until golden brown over a medium heat, stirring regularly. Adjust heat if onions are browning too quickly. The caramelisation process may take 45–60 minutes, sometimes more.

3 Meanwhile, warm beef stock in a saucepan over a low heat. Once onions are caramelised, add wine and sherry to the pot and allow mixture to come to the boil. Stir in flour and let thicken for a minute or two.

4 Slowly add warm stock, a quarter teaspoon of salt and the pepper to the onion mixture and simmer uncovered for 15 minutes. Add more salt and pepper to taste.

5 Toast the bread slices and rub them with garlic.

6 Heat the grill and arrange individual ovenproof casseroles on a baking sheet. Ladle soup into casseroles and cover top with bread slices. Sprinkle each casserole generously with Gruyère. Or you can use the pot in which the soup is cooked and serve it at the table. Grill under a high heat for a minute or two, watching carefully, until cheese bubbles and browns. Serve immediately.

Celeriac, with its knobbly charm, is a versatile root that’s perfect for mashing, roasting or adding depth of flavour to soups and casseroles.

Celeriac-crusted cod with chorizo butter and romanesco sauce

Ingredients

For the romanesco sauce

2 roasted red peppers, jarred or freshly roasted, skins removed

50g almonds and/or hazelnuts, toasted

1 clove garlic, grated

1 tspn smoked paprika

1 tbspn red wine vinegar

A good splash of olive oil,

½ lemon, juice of (plus see below)

For the fish

4 cod fillets

1 celeriac, peeled and coarsely grated

50g panko breadcrumbs

2 tbspn parsley, chopped

1 lemon, zest of (plus see below)

2 tbspn olive oil

For the chorizo butter

100g chorizo, finely diced

50g butter

1 clove garlic, grated

Fresh rosemary and thyme

½ lemon, juice of

Method

Preheat your oven to 180˚C fan/200˚C/400˚F/gas mark 6.

Either in a pestle and mortar or a processor, combine the red peppers, almonds, garlic, smoked paprika, red wine vinegar, olive oil and lemon juice with some seasoning until you have a coarse paste. Set aside.

Make the celeriac crust by mixing together in a bowl the grated celeriac, breadcrumbs, parsley, lemon zest and olive oil, and season well.

Take a baking dish and spread the romanesco sauce over the base. Place the cod fillets on top and then spoon onto each a generous layer of the celeriac crust, pressing gently down to keep it in place.

Bake the cod in the preheated oven for 20–25 minutes, by which time the crust should be golden and the fish opaque and flakey.

When the cod is in the oven, cook the diced chorizo in a small pan until it releases its oils and becomes crispy. Add the butter, garlic and herbs, stirring until the butter melts and turns slightly golden. Stir in the lemon juice and keep warm.

To serve, place a cod fillet on each plate with the romanesco sauce and a drizzle of the chorizo butter. Serve with steamed greens and rice or roasted or mashed potatoes.

Fresh and bold horseradish is typically made into a hot-flavoured sauce and served alongside roast beef or fish, such as salmon or trout. But it can also be used as an ingredient in its own right to add an unmistakable kick to things.

The root vegetable (it looks a bit like a parsnip) is a member of the mustard family and the leaves can tower up to 1.5m high above ground.

Horseradish-crusted salmon with celeriac mash

Serves: 4

Ingredients

4 salmon fillets

3 tbspn freshly grated horseradish (wear gloves)

2 tbspn Dijon mustard

50g breadcrumbs

1 lemon, zest of

A small handful fresh parsley, chopped

A splash of olive oil

For the celeriac

1 celeriac, peeled and roughly chopped

200ml milk

100ml vegetable stock

25g butter

Herb and salad leaves to serve

Method

Preheat your oven to 180˚C fan/200˚C/400˚F/gas mark 6 and arrange the salmon fillets on a baking tray.

Use a medium-sized bowl to combine the horseradish, Dijon mustard, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, parsley, olive oil and some seasoning. Top each salmon fillet with the horseradish mixture and press it gently down. Bake for about 15 minutes or until the salmon is cooked through and the breadcrumbs are golden.

Simmer the celeriac, milk and stock in a saucepan until softened. Drain, reserving some of the cooking liquid, and then blend with the butter and some seasoning. Use some of the reserved cooking liquid if needed.

To serve, spoon the celeriac mash onto plates and top with the crusted salmon fillets. Add some lightly dressed leaves to finish.

Brussels sprouts are perhaps uniquely divisive in the world of food, thanks to a chemical make-up which makes some people — known as ‘super-tasters’ — experience their taste as exceptionally bitter.

So long as you're not among their number, though, this is a tasty and enormously nutritious addition to any meal. Even spaghetti carbonara.

'Nutty, earthy and surprisingly versatile, it’s finally time to celebrate the Brussels sprout,' writes our Kitchen Garden Cook Melanie Johnson as she shared this recipe.

We've got to admit, we were sceptical at first — but it's been tested and vetted, and is really quite something.

Recipe: Brussels sprout and bacon carbonara

Ingredients

• 300g spaghetti
• 150g bacon, diced
• 300g Brussels sprouts, halved
• 1 clove garlic, grated
• 3 egg yolks
• 50g Parmesan, grated
• Extra grated Parmesan and fresh parsley to serve

Method

Cook the spaghetti as per the packet instructions in a large pot of salted, boiling water until al dente. Reserve 200ml (a small cup) of the starchy pasta water.

Heat a splash of olive oil in a large frying pan. Add the bacon and Brussels sprouts and cook until the baconis crispy and the Brussels sprouts are lightly charred. Add the grated garlic and cook for a further minute.

In a small bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, Parmesan and seasoning — go heavy on the pepper — and set aside.

Add the drained, cooked spaghetti to the frying pan, tossing to combine, then remove from the heat.

Gradually pour the egg-yolk mixture over the spaghetti and continuously stir to prevent the eggs from scrambling. Add the reserved pasta water, a little at a time, to create a creamy sauce.

Divide the carbonara between plates and finish with extra Parmesan and fresh parsley. Serve immediately.

Credit: Melanie Johnson

Kalettes, the deliciously earthy alternative to sprouts that will even liven up a curry

Melanie Johnson shares a beautiful winter dish, combining the earthy flavours of kalettes with coconut curry prawns.

Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

Do Brussels sprouts come from Brussels in Belgium?

As healthy as they are divisive, Martin Fone takes a look at the humble Brussels sprout. Why do we eat

Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

Brussels sprouts: Fresh and nutty, sweet and savoury all at once — and a recipe to convert even non-believers

Whoever does the PR for the Brussels sprout deserves a medal, says Debora Robertson, who tries a hearty, delicious recipe.

Credit: Alamy

The Christmas foods that you can share with your dog — and the ones to avoid at all costs

It's natural to want to be able to give your dog a treat at Christmas, but you need to be

Credit: Jacky Parker / Getty

Alan Titchmarsh: 'Only God’s earth — in the garden and the countryside — is capable of coming up with the goods with reliability equal to that of St Nicholas'

Alan Titchmarsh's Christmas column looks at all the plants of the festive season.

Here at Country Life, we don't shy away from publishing ideas or opinions proffered by our contributors, and we're quite prepared to get the odd missive from a reader who may not agree with the sentiment being shared.

It's not often, however, that the article in question is a recipe.

That's right: while barely an eyebrow has been raised by Carla Carlisle's latest take on the election across The Pond, or Agromenes weighing in on the intersection between politics and farming, a cake recipe from our kitchen garden cook Melanie Johnson caused a stir — at least in one corner of South Yorkshire.

'My husband declared that parsnip cake with maple cream-cheese frosting was "grounds for divorce"!' writes Ann Warburton in the letters page of the print magazine on November 13th.

Not to poke the bull yet further, but Mr Warburton's attitude does seem a little off the mark. If carrot cake 'is a thing', as people say today, then why not parsnip cake? Indeed, let's call it 'the new carrot cake' and have done. On top of everything else, this seems like the best way ever to tick off one of your five a day. Enjoy.

Recipe: Spiced parsnip cake with maple cream-cheese frosting

Ingredients

For the sponge

• 200g light muscovado sugar
• 175g melted butter
• 3 large eggs
• 250g parsnips, peeled and grated
• 100g sultanas
• 75g walnuts, chopped
• 1 orange, zest of
• 200g self-raising flour
• 1tspn ground cinnamon
• ½tspn ground ginger
• ¼tspn ground nutmeg
• 1tspn baking powder
• ½tspn bicarbonate of soda

For the frosting

• 100g unsalted butter, softened
• 200g full-fat cream cheese, softened
• 300g icing sugar, sifted
• 3tbspn pure maple syrup
• 1tspn vanilla-bean paste

Method

Preheat the oven to 160˚C fan/180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4. Grease and line two 20cm (8in) round cake tins with baking parchment.

In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar, melted butter and eggs until smooth and well combined. Stir in the grated parsnips, sultanas, chopped walnuts and orange zest. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda. Gradually fold the dry ingredients into the cake mix until fully incorporated.

Divide the batter evenly between the prepared tins and smooth the tops with a spatula. Bake for 25–30 minutes or until the cakes are golden and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Allow the sponges to cool in the tins for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

In a large bowl, beat the softened butter and cream cheese together until smooth and creamy. Gradually add and mix in the sifted icing sugar. Once all the icing sugar is incorporated, stir in the maple syrup and vanilla until the frosting is light and fluffy.

To assemble the cake, place one sponge layer on a serving plate and spread a generous amount of frosting over. Place the second layer on top and spread the remaining frosting evenly over the top and sides of the cake. You could decorate with a sprinkle of chopped walnuts and/or a drizzle of maple syrup.

'Hugely versatile and delicious, cauliflower can be the star of the show or simply a side act,' says our kitchen garden cook Melanie Johnson.

We'll leave it up to you to decide whether the soup or the sourdough is the star of the show in this pair of recipes!

How to make Melanie Johnson's cauliflower soup with three-cheese tear-and-share sourdough bread

Ingredients (serves four)

For the soup

• 50g butter (plus more for frying)
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 cauliflower
• 500ml milk
• 300ml chicken stock
• 30ml double cream
• 50g chopped, roasted hazelnuts
• 4 spring onions, green part only, chopped

For the sourdough

• 1 loaf of sourdough bread – our favourite sourdough bread recipe is here, though you can of course use one bought from a bakery
• 100g grated Cheddar
• 100g grated Gruyère
• 50g grated Parmesan
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2 sprigs rosemary, roughly chopped
• 1 sourdough loaf
• 50ml olive oil

Method

For the soup

Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the chopped onion and sweat it until soft and translucent.

Slice four, flat mini steaks from the cauliflower and set them aside. Roughly chop the remainder and gently fry with the softened onions before adding the milk.

Bring to a near boil and then pour in the stock. Continue cooking until the soup mixture is heated throughout, by which time, the cauliflower should be tender.

Remove from the heat and purée using either a blender or a stick blender before passing the soup through a fine-mesh sieve into a clean saucepan. Set aside until ready to serve.

For the bread

Preheat the oven to 180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4.

In a large bowl, combine the cheeses, crushed garlic and rosemary and mix well.

Cut a grid into the top of the loaf of bread, taking care not to slice all the way through, so it remains in one piece.

Spoon the cheese mixture into the openings, then drizzle the cheesy loaf with olive oil and wrap it loosely in foil. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes, or until the cheese has melted through.

Finally, fry the little cauliflower steaks in butter until lightly browned, remove and sprinkle with seasoning.

To serve

Heat the soup until piping hot and spoon into bowls, stirring in the cream to create a marbled effect. Top each bowl with a cauliflower steak, scattering them with the roasted hazelnuts and chopped spring onions.

Finally, unwrap the warm, cheesy sourdough and enjoy.

Credit: Melanie Johnson

Celeriac soup with rosemary, walnuts and bacon plus Parmesan scones

Melanie Johnson’s warming celeriac soup is delicious.

Credit: Melanie Johnson

Chicken, spring-onion and mozzarella meatballs with pesto courgetti salad

Melanie Johnson adds some zing with this season’s new spring onions.

Credit: Melanie Johnson

How to make Toad in the hole, the ultimate British comfort food

Try Melanie Johnson's recipe for toad in the hole – the ultimate British comfort food – with a twist thanks to

Credit: Peach and strawberry galette - Melanie Johnson

Recipe: Peach and strawberry galette with home-made peach sorbet

Melanie Johnson's kitchen garden doesn’t provide an abundance of peaches, but enough to make this simple, flavoursome galette – with

Credit: Melanie Johnson

Creamy chicken Swiss-chard rolls with walnut pesto and pomegranate seeds

Our kitchen garden cook Melanie Johnson makes the most of delicious green, leafy vegetables and makes yummy Swiss-chard rolls.

As summer turns to autumn,, the knotty brambles that wrap around our fields, woodland and lanes are ‘heaving’ with blackberries, wrote Sylvia Plath, ‘big as the ball of my thumb’ and ‘fat with blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers’.

For Seamus Heaney, they are ‘a glossy purple clot’ ripened by the season that is drawing to a close. ‘Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it,’ he wrote in Blackberry Picking (1966).

Putting on a show from bright green to crimson and the darkest of blacks, the blackberry transforms our hedgerows in a final hurrah as summer segues into autumn. What is perhaps most striking about this fruit is its abundance: an invitation to gorge oneself to the point that lips and hands are stained purple.

But you needn't merely eat them: they can play a part in drinking too, as this recipe shows.

Recipe: Phyllis Browne’s boozy blackberry cordial

Got a glut of blackberries? This cordial recipe borrowed from Victorian cookery writer Phyllis Browne is simple to make and — if you can part with it — makes a lovely gift.

Do heed her advice, though: resist the urge to jump straight in and whip up a batch with the first blackcurrants of the season. Instead, sit on your hands until the fruit is at its ripest.

Ingredients

• 1 pint (570ml) blackberry juice
• 12oz (350g) caster sugar
• ½ tspn each of whole or crushed cloves, nutmeg, allspice and cinnamon
• Small bottle of French brandy

Method

Wash your freshly picked blackberries thoroughly, crush them and then strain off the juice.

Boil the ingredients until you get a thick syrup and then add enough French brandy to double the volume.

Stir, bottle and seal. Voila!

Credit: Alamy

How to grow blackberries that are 'consistently plump, reliably sweet and almost laughably juicy'

Blackberries are a gardener's dream, says expert fruit grower Mark Diacono. And while they grow plentifully in the wild, there

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How to grow your own botanicals and impress at cocktail hour

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From apples to strawberries, here's when the fruits in your garden will be ready to pick.

'There is something rather bewildering about plums,’ writes Christopher Stocks in the excellent Forgotten Fruits. Although, initially, I wasn’t exactly sure why.

They don’t stink of death and fetid drains, like the durian. Nor, unlike the kiwano melon, do they have the texture of cucumber and taste of banana. There’s certainly nothing perplexing about their flavour, which moves from the mouth-puckeringly sour to the lusciously and lasciviously sweet. Nor their colour, deep black to virgin white, with every shade in between.

No, as Mr Stocks explains, it’s simply a matter of nomenclature: ‘Apples are always called apples, although they come in many different forms. A plum, by contrast, can certainly be a plum, but it can also be a damson, a bullace, a greengage or a Mirabelle.’ Their ancestry may be ‘complex’, their history ‘convoluted’, but the ‘real nightmare lies in the names of this fruit’.

He’s not wrong. Plums have been cultivated for more than 2,000 years in Europe and Asia and probably came to Britain with the Romans — although possibly before, as plum stones have been discovered during the archaeological excavation of Maiden Castle, an Iron Age hill fort in Dorset. The best known are Prunus domestica, or the large ‘European’ plum, which are the blessed hybrids of the sloe (P. spinosa, not considered a plum) and the cherry plum (P. cerasifera). That first union happened naturally, somewhere around the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, in the Russian republic of Adygea.

There is not only the ‘Victoria’ plum, but the small and super-sour bullace; the ‘Mirabelle’, mostly used for jams and brandy; and the damson, which comes from Damascus and arrived in Europe with the Crusaders. The greengage, with its heaven-scented flesh, is another member of the same family and a plum that connoisseurs rate as best of the lot.

But it’s the ‘Victoria’ plum, named after the eponymous queen, that’s the most ubiquitous of all.

With its suitably regal purple skin and mellow yellow flesh, the fruit played a bittersweet role in my childhood. There was the greedy anticipation of picking those plump orbs off the trees in the cool orchard behind the pool. We devoured them by the fistful, together with delicately ephemeral greengages, spitting their rough stones high into the air. Yet there was danger, too, and the painful memory of bare feet, rotting fruit and feasting wasps — or, worse still, biting into the plum only to find one was sharing a mouthful with an indignant stinger. You couldn’t use Wasp-Eze on a tongue.

I always thought the ‘Victoria’ plum a thoroughly decent fruit, made all the sweeter by the story of her birth — found, by chance, sometime during the mid 19th century, in a cottage garden in the Sussex village of Alderton. Once discovered, a cutting was sold to a Brixton nurseryman called Denyer, who, in 1840, formally introduced her to the world. ‘Victoria’ swiftly became plum regina — but that romantic tale is simply not true. Mainly because there is not, and never has been, a village called Alderton in Sussex.

It is, however, a common Sussex surname, so the fruit may have been named after the person who first found it. Another explanation is that she was picked in Walderton, a genuine Sussex village, and lost that first letter somewhere along the way. Most worrying of all is that this British classic may, in fact, be French — a royal dauphin that had been around for years and was simply ‘an old variety with a new name’. Whatever the truth, she still rules triumphant.

Not all were enamoured by her flavour. ‘The Victoria plum is a very Victorian plum,’ thundered Shand, ‘plump, pompous, portentous and pretentious.’ Oh dear. Even Jane Grigson, who was rather more measured in her views, thought that ‘the apotheosis of a long reign is flood of bland, boring plums'.

OK, so she may not have the transcendental allure of ‘Coe’s Golden Drop’ or ‘Bryanston Gage’, but give the poor girl a break. What both Shand and Grigson do not acknowledge is that the ‘Victoria’ was primarily a cooking plum and one that not only retains her colour with heat, but develops a deeper flavour, too. When it came to jam, plum was the cheapest and most popular flavour of them all.

Recipe: Roast plums with cobnuts and clotted cream

This comes from Hix Oyster & Chop House by Mark Hix. If you can’t find cobnuts, substitute hazelnuts instead.

Ingredients

• 12–18 ‘Victoria’ or other plums, depending on size
• 6tbspn caster sugar
• 2tbspn plain flour
• 40g hard butter, chopped into small pieces
• ½tbspn brown sugar
• 4tbspn oats
• 24–30 cobnuts, shelled and roughly chopped
• Clotted cream or thick Jersey cream

Method

Preheat the oven to 200˚C/400˚F/ gas mark 6. First, make the topping: put the flour and butter into a bowl and rub together with your fingers to a breadcrumb-like consistency. Stir in the brown sugar, then mix in the oats and cobnuts. Spread out on a baking tray.

Halve the plums, place cut-side up on another baking tray and sprinkle with the caster sugar.

Place both of the trays in the oven and bake for 15–20 minutes until the plums are lightly coloured and softened and the topping is golden; you may need to take the topping out before the plums.

Leave the plums to cool slightly, then transfer them to individual serving bowls and spoon over the cooking juices. Scatter over the cobnut topping and finish with a generous dollop of cream.

Plums to grow, plums to show, and plums to pop in your gin

Mark Diacono picks his favourite plums — and their close relatives, damsons, mirabelles, bullaces and gages.

What you need to know about training fruit trees, from fans and spirals to arches, palmettes and beyond

Trained fruit trees are beautiful as well as bounteous. Mark Diacono explains what you need to know if you wish

‘With its crunchy bulb and feathery fronds, fennel is a summer highlight in both the kitchen and the garden,’ says our kitchen garden cook, Melanie Johnson.

Mix that with a classic roast chicken and you have a memorable dish that's ideal with chunky chips (try our guide to making Heston Blumenthal's chips).

Here's how to do it.

Recipe: Creamy fennel and lemon roasted spatchcock chicken

Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken, spatchcocked
• 4 cloves garlic, grated
• 50g butter
• 3 sprigs lemon thyme
• 1 sprig rosemary
• 4 lemons, juice of one and three cut into wedges
• 2 fennel bulbs, tough outer leaves removed, thinly sliced
• 50ml olive oil
• 1 glass dry white wine
• 300ml chicken stock
• 200ml double cream
• Chive flowers to serve (optional)
• Delicious served with chips — try Heston Blumenthal's chip recipe

Method

Preheat your oven to 180˚C fan/200˚C/400˚F/gas mark 6

Either ask your butcher to spatchcock the chicken for you or do it yourself: use kitchen scissors to cut the backbone down either side and then remove it. Discard the backbone and turn the chicken so that it is breast side up and gently flatten with the palms of your hands. Season the chicken all over with salt and pepper.

Mix together the garlic, butter, herbs and juice from one of the lemons and then rub it all over the chicken, including under the skin.

To a large roasting tray, add the thinly sliced fennel and the remaining lemon wedges. Drizzle over olive oil, pour in the glass of white wine and chicken stock. Place the chicken on top and roast for about 45–55 minutes, basting halfway through. The chicken should be golden with crisped skin.

Remove the roasting tray from the oven and arrange the chicken, fennel and lemon on a serving plate and cover with foil. Pour the cream into the pan juices, mixing it through, and serve in a jug as it is, or pass through a sieve before serving.

Serve hot, dotted with chive flowers, and enjoy with fat chips to help mop up the delicious sauce.

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Credit: Melanie Johnson

Roast spatchcocked chicken with cavolo nero and pearl-barley risotto

The Italian cousin of kale is the perfect accompaniment to delicious roast chicken.

Spatchcock chicken with garlic and Parmesan cauliflower steaks

Cauliflower is so delicious and filling no one will notice you aren't serving potatoes.

‘The fleeting season for home grown cherries should be cherished,’ says our kitchen garden cook, Melanie Johnson.

They'll brighten up everything from chia seed puddings and overnight oats to salads (and are particularly good in combination with hazelnuts and feta).

This cake, through, is a real crowd-pleaser that you can bake and keep for several days... though you're made of sterner stuff than we are if you can resist demolishing the lot in one sitting.

Recipe: Cherry-and-pistachio yoghurt cake

Ingredients

• 225g unsalted butter, softened
• 275g golden caster sugar
• 4 free-range eggs
• 1tspn vanilla
• 50g Greek yoghurt
• 275g self-raising flour
• 150g pistachio paste (available online or use almond butter)
• 400g cherries, halved and pitted

For the glaze

• 250g icing sugar
• 6 cherries, squashed to release their juice and pretty pink colour
• A splash of milk if needed
• Cherries and pistachios to decorate

Method

Preheat your oven to 160˚C fan/180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4 and line a 2lb loaf tin.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Mix in the eggs one at a time, beating between each addition, then add the vanilla and yoghurt. Fold through the flour until just combined.

Pour half the mixture into the loaf tin, then spoon over the pistachio paste in an even layer, followed by two-thirds of the cherries. Pour the rest of the mixture over and bake for 45 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

Once baked, cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then move to a wire rack to cool completely.

To make the glaze, add the icing sugar to a bowl and the squeezed cherry juice. Mix well, adding a splash of milk if needed to make a thick, but pourable glaze. Pour the glaze all over the cake and, before it sets, scatter over the remaining cherries and a handful of chopped pistachios.

Slice and serve. This cake will keep for up to five days in an airtight container.

Growing your own cherries: A simple guide to what you need to know

Mark Diacono shares his advice on how to grow your own cherries — including the varieties that you'll never see in

Tart and often overlooked, bristly little gooseberries deserve a place on your summer table, says Melanie Johnson, our kitchen garden cook.

Using them in a sorbet is a surprisingly simple — and delicious — way to enjoy these seasonal fruits.

Add 900g of gooseberries to a saucepan with five tablespoonfuls of elderflower cordial and 400g of granulated sugar, then pour over 500ml of cold water and bring to a simmer, cooking until the gooseberries are bursting.

Remove the gooseberries with a slotted spoon to a blender and boil the remaining liquid until it has become syrupy and sticky between your fingers. Add the sugar syrup to the blender and process until smooth. Pour the mixture into a freezer-safe dish and freeze until firm. Blend again to break up the crystals, return to the container and freeze again, after which it will be ready to serve.

And if you're looking for something special to go alongside that sorbet? The gooseberry tart recipe below is ideal.

Recipe: Gooseberry and ginger custard tart with gooseberry and elderflower sorbet

Ingredients

• 1 sheet all-butter puff pastry or a 500g block
• 1tbspn icing sugar
• 1tbspn ground ginger
• 400g gooseberries
• 200ml double cream
• 300ml whole milk
• 1tspn vanilla-bean paste
• 175g caster sugar
• 5 egg yolks
• 2tbspn plain flour
• 1tbspn cornflour
• 3tbspn preserved ginger syrup (from a jar)

Method

Preheat your oven to 180˚C fan/200˚C/400˚F/gas mark 6 and make sure an oven tray is already in there heating up — this recipe requires heat from underneath, because no one likes a soggy bottom. Add a disc of baking parchment to the bottom of a 25cm (8in) loose-bottomed tart tin.

Roll out the puff pastry to the thickness of a pound coin and cut to a circle that will fit into your tart tin with a decent overhang. Sprinkle over the icing sugar and ginger, rubbing it in slightly with your fingertips to spread it out evenly. Place in the prepared tin.

Top and tail the gooseberries and scatter them in the tart tin. Set aside.

Heat the double cream, milk and vanilla in a saucepan until almost boiling. In a separate bowl, whisk together the sugar, egg yolks, plain flour and cornflour. Pour the hot cream over, whisking continuously, and then return to a clean saucepan. Place over a medium heat and keep stirring until thickened. Lower the heat if you feel it’s sticking at the bottom of the pan. Stir through the ginger syrup and then pour over the gooseberries in the tart tin.

Bake the tart for 30–40 minutes or until golden brown on top.

Finally, serve the tart with the elderflower sorbet (as above) or ice cream of your choice.

Credit: Getty

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The gooseberry might be the least sexy of all fruit, resembling a fat green blob wearing a three-day growth of

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Mark Diacono explains everything you need to know about gooseberries, the fruit 'that's really two fruits in one'.

'I’ve never been a huge fan of chamomile tea, but it’s one of my favourite baking flavours, particularly as vanilla is so ubiquitous,' says Claire Ptak, the baker and owner of Violet Cakes, who came to fame as the creator of the wedding cake for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

The fusion of British and American influences didn't stop there in Claire's career: she has recently put together an afternoon tea menu for Henry’s Townhouse, the Jane Austen-inspired townhouse hotel in Marylebone, London. It's only being served up for a few days, from June 18-20.

The menu is described as 'British Elegance meets Californian Flair', and features morsels such as summer pudding buttercream cakes, savoury feta chive scone sandwiches with comté & chutney and donut glazed madeleines, all washed down with Hambledon English sparkling wine.

If you can't get down to London to enjoy it yourself — or if the £125 per person price is out of your price bracket — then we've got some help here, as Claire has kindly shared her scone recipe to give you a chance to make your own afternoon tea at home.

Chamomile is the key ingredient in these scones, which Claire featured in her recent book, Apricot, Chamomile and Honey Scones, Love is a Pink Cake.

'I especially love it paired with apricots — they harmonise to be greater than the sum of their parts. Add clotted cream and a perfectly buttery scone and it’s difficult to do better.'

You can book a spot at Claire Ptak's afternoon tea via email to henrys@thecollinscollection.co.uk or by calling 01451 850 577.

Recipe: Apricot, Chamomile and Honey Scones

Ingredients

Makes six large scones

For the compote:

• 1kg (2lb 3oz) firm, ripe apricots, halved and stones removed
• 1⁄2 vanilla pod
• 1 tbsp dried chamomile flowers (or 2–3 teabags, opened, depending on size)
• 150g (3⁄4 cup) caster sugar

For the scones:

• 280g (2 cups) plain flour 1 tbsp baking powder
• 2 tbsp caster sugar
• 1⁄2 tsp fine sea salt
• 115g (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1cm (1⁄2in) cubes
• 100g (scant 1⁄2 cup) double cream 100g (scant 1⁄2 cup) whole milk

For the egg wash:

• 1 egg white, beaten 2 tbsp milk
• 2 tbsp caster sugar

To serve:

• Clotted cream to serve (or use whipped cream or mascarpone)
• Honey, for drizzling

Method

First make the compote — put all the ingredients into a large bowl and toss together well. Macerate for 1 hour to dissolve the sugar and draw the juices out of the fruit.

Tip into a heavy-based saucepan and cook over a low heat for 15 minutes, or until the apricots have broken down a bit. Allow to cool and then transfer to a container to chill in the fridge. This will keep for about 2 weeks in the fridge.

Preheat the oven to 170°C fan/190°C/ 375°F/gas mark 5 and line a baking tray with baking paper.

In a food processor, combine the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt, then add the cold butter, blitzing until it resembles a coarse meal texture. (You can also do this by hand with a pastry cutter.)

Drizzle in the cream and milk, mixing until the dough just comes together (be careful not to overmix). Turn out onto a lightly floured surface, pat into a cube shape and leave to rest for 10 minutes.

Once rested, roll to a thickness of 2cm (3⁄4in), then cut into 6cm (21⁄2in) rounds and place on a tray. Chill for 20 minutes in the freezer, then remove and transfer to your lined baking tray. Whisk together the egg wash ingredients and brush this over the chilled scones. Bake for 15–20 minutes until springy and golden at the edges.

Allow the scones to cool slightly before filling with compote and a dollop of the cream. Add a drizzle of honey and serve immediately.

Credit: Melanie Johnson for Country Life

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How to make honey- and thyme-roasted apricots with almond pannacotta bundt and toasted almonds

Credit: Alamy

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Tarragon is one of those spring herbs that impresses with its taste and versatility. For example, in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, it's used to flavour a popular fizzy drink known as Tarkhun. I've never tried it, but I'm sure it's wonderful. In Slovenia, it's used to make a traditional nut roll sweet cake while, closer to home, in France, it is one of the four fines herbes of fine cooking and is one of the main ingredients of Béarnaise sauce.

It's long been known that it makes a roast chicken all the better, and Melanie Johnson suggests tucking tarragon leaves under the skin while cooking, as well as combining the herb with a rice, spring onion, lemon and olive oil for the stuffing.

However, her recipe for creamy prawns with asparagus, tarragon and spinach gnocchi caught our eye. It's below.

Recipe: Creamy tarragon prawns and asparagus with spinach gnocchi

Ingredients: serves 4

For the spinach gnocchi (ignore if using shop-bought)

• 3 large baking potatoes
• 2 egg yolks
• 240g plain flour
• 50g spinach, chopped

For the rest

• 50ml olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, grated
• 125ml dry white wine
• 300ml vegetable stock
• 100g mascarpone
• 200g asparagus spears, cut into bite-size pieces
• A small bunch fresh tarragon, chopped
• 300g large cooked prawns
• 1 lemon, zest of, and squeeze
• Parmesan to grate over

Method

Preheat your oven to 180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4.

Rub oil over the potatoes and bake for an hour or until cooked through. Scoop out the flesh into a bowl. Mix in the egg yolks and then sprinkle over the flour—you may find you need slightly more or less—add the chopped spinach and mix to form a dough. Roll it out into long sausages and cut into bite-size pieces. You can use them immediately or chill, covered, until you need them.

When ready to cook, bring a large pan of salted water to a boil and add the gnocchi. As soon as they reach the surface, remove with a slotted spoon and add to a large frying pan heated with a splash of olive oil and fry until golden.

Heat a splash of olive oil in a heavy-based pan and add the grated garlic and tarragon. Fry for a couple of minutes and then pour in the white wine. Simmer to reduce by half and then add the stock and mascarpone. Heat at a gentle simmer to melt the mascarpone and thicken the sauce, then add the asparagus pieces and prawns. They will only need a few minutes to cook and heat through.

Add the gnocchi to the pan and mix them through. Zest and squeeze over the lemon, add Parmesan shavings and serve with a green salad on the side.

Credit: Melanie Johnson for Country Life

A perfect summer lunch recipe for the long weekend: Spicy udon noodles with tofu and watercress

Melanie Johnson shares a dish which makes the most of cress's peppery punch.

Credit: Melanie Johnson/Country Life Picture Library

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'Cultivated in cool, clear streams, watercress tastes like the essence of spring,' writes our kitchen garden cook Melanie Johnson.

Salads are the obvious place to use cress, but soup is surprisingly quick and easy too. Simply process two ripe avocados, one bunch of watercress, two spring onions and one clove of garlic with 750ml of vegetable stock and 100ml of coconut yoghurt. Season, add the juice of one lime, and it's ready to go — and brightened up with extra watercress, chopped chives and edible flowers.

For a fancier summery lunch, the recipe below offers even more.

Recipe: Spicy udon noodles with miso-glazed tofu and watercress

Ingredients

Serves 4

• Miso-glazed tofu
• 2tbspn white miso
• 1tbspn soy sauce
• 1tbspn mirin
• 1tbspn maple syrup (or honey)
• 300g firm tofu, cut into cubes
• Spicy sauce
• 3tbspn soy sauce
• 2tbspn sesame oil
• 2tbspn rice vinegar
• 2 cloves garlic, grated
• 1 red chilli, finely diced
• 1tbspn freshly grated ginger
• 2tbspn maple syrup
• 150g shiitake mushrooms, sliced
• 100g mangetouts
• 2 baby courgettes, thinly sliced
• A handful pointed cabbage, shredded
• 200g udon noodles, cooked as per packet instructions
• 80g watercress

To serve

• Toasted sesame seeds
• Spring onions, sliced
• Fresh coriander

Method

Whisk together the white miso, soy sauce, mirin and maple syrup and pour over the tofu pieces. Leave to marinate for an hour and then fry in a neutral oil until golden all over. Set aside.

Make the spicy sauce by simply whisking together the soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, garlic, chilli, ginger and maple syrup. Set aside.

To the same pan, add a splash of neutral oil if needed (sesame can be overpowering if used too heavily in a dish), then fry the shiitake mushroom slices until they’ve released their liquid, followed by the mangetouts, courgettes, and shredded cabbage. Stir-fry until they’re slightly tender, but retaining a bite and their vibrance, and then add the cooked udon noodles.

Pour the spicy sauce over the noodles and mix everything together to coat them evenly.

Return the tofu to the pan, gently warming everything, and stir through the watercress to slightly wilt it.

To serve, sprinkle the noodles with toasted sesame seeds, sliced spring onions and fresh coriander.

Credit: Melanie Johnson

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Well, here I am again, banging on about pudding. Just like last month. Is the man going mad, I hear you cry? Have we not had enough of his suet-soaked ramblings? How much steak and kidney can one man take?

But worry not, dear reader, as this time, it’s all sweet. And not only steamed puddings, but syllabubs and flummeries, trifles and crumbles, custards, creams and fools. Not forgetting spotted dicks, roly polys, fruit pies and tipsy squires. For the British pudding cabinet is lavishly stocked, our greatest gift to world gastronomy. Well, that and Scampi Fries.

‘Blessed be he who invented pudding,’ sighed French traveller M. Misson during the last spoonful of the 17th century, ‘for it is a manna that hits the palates of all sorts of people.’ Better still, he goes on, his senses soaring on a heady sugar high, pudding is ‘a manna better than that of the wilderness, because the people are never weary of it’.

It’s a rare Frenchman who revels in English food, but he’s not alone. Although my tastes are resolutely savoury, I have nothing but rapt adoration and the greatest of respect for this sugary art form. Because sweet puddings are all about pleasure, not guilt. They play no part in dreary diets, faddish fasts or puritanical regimes, nor make up any of your five a day. Nope, a pudding is single minded in its dedication to your own exultation.

"No one can fault a true English pudding"

I’ll spare you the usual history (this is a treat, after all), save to say that sugar, once a ruinously expensive import, became relatively affordable sometime in the 15th century when the Portuguese, in Brazil, managed to industrialise the process and dramatically bring down prices. Despite the fact that slavery, unfortunately and inevitably, would long sully its sweet allure, a quick glance through Mary Norwak’s English Puddings (a stone-cold classic) shows quite how vast the national repertoire was and still is.

The names alone are good enough to devour: whim wham and spotted dog, cherry whirl and tipsy cake. And there’s one for every mood and whim, from the elegant delicacy of a lemon posset, minimalist in its simplicity, to the baroque magnificence of a proper trifle, heavy on the custard and booze. There’s the nursery-tinged nostalgia of apple snow, treacle tart and bread-and-butter pudding, the comfort of rhubarb crumble and Cambridge burnt cream (take that, crème brûlée, you French interloper) and the tart allure of a gooseberry fool.

Yet, despite the depth and breadth of British pudding culture, one vexing question remains. What do we actually call that last course? ‘Dessert,’ according to Norwak, is ‘an inept refinement,’ and in my view too American, too corporate, too, well, over-sanitised. ‘Afters’ she sees as ‘workmanlike schoolboy slang’.

As for ‘sweet’? Ugh. Trite and twee and makes the teeth ache just thinking about it. A ‘niminy-piminy shortening of the sweet course’, in the great lady’s view. As she so rightly argued, the French have their patisserie, the Italians their fruit and ice, the Germans and Austrians dumplings and strudels. ‘But no one can fault a true English pudding.’

Amen to that. So pudding it was, pudding it is and pudding it always will be.

How to make a perfect teamed treacle sponge pudding

Despite this month’s column being about sweet puddings in their every guise, the treacle sponge really is a steamed superhero, the sort of great British pudding that can melt the heart of even the most strident of sugar avoiders. Few sights can be quite as majestic—a great monolith of light, but substantial, sponge soaked in torrents of treacle. And really don’t stint on the treacle. A judicious splodge of custard makes things better still. The recipe comes from Delia, because, when it comes to the classics, nobody does it better.

Ingredients

Serves 6–8

• Two-pint (1.2-litre) pudding basin, well buttered
• 3tbspn golden syrup
• 6oz (175g) self-raising flour
• 1 rounded tspn baking powder
• 6oz (175g) butter, softened
• 3 large eggs
• 6oz (175g) soft light-brown sugar
• 1tbpsn black treacle
• 3 extra tbspn of golden syrup
• Custard or crème fraîche

Method

First of all, butter the basin, then measure three tablespoons of golden syrup into it.

Then take a large mixing bowl, sift the flour and baking powder into it, add the softened butter, eggs, sugar and black treacle. Next, using an electric hand whisk (or a large fork and lots of elbow grease), beat the mixture for about two minutes until it’s thoroughly blended.

Now spoon the mixture into the basin and level the top using the back of the tablespoon.

Place a sheet of foil over greaseproof paper, make a pleat in the centre and place this, foil-side uppermost, on top of the pudding.

Pull it down the sides and tie the string, taking the string over the top and tying it on the other side to make yourself a handle for lifting. Trim off the excess paper all the way around.

Now steam the pudding for two hours, checking the water level halfway through. To serve, loosen the pudding all around using a palette knife, invert it onto a warmed plate and pour an extra three tablespoons of syrup (warmed, if you like) over the top before taking it to the table.

Serve with custard or some well-chilled crème fraîche.

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Spring has officially sprung (this time we mean it), so what better way to celebrate than with some asparagus? This 'verdant harbinger of spring is back on the menu' says Melanie Johnson, and goes with just about everything, whether it be an asparagus and prosciutto pizza bianca, or asparagus, crab and smoked-salmon crumpets. Our favourite, however, is the brown butter, asparagus and prawn pappardelle with chorizo crumble. Check out the recipe below

Recipe: Brown butter, asparagus and prawn pappardelle with chorizo crumble

Ingredients: serves 4

• 40g butter
• 2 cloves garlic, grated
• 250g asparagus, cut into thirds
• 125ml white wine
• 200g cooked prawns
• 250g pappardelle pasta cooked as per packet instructions, saving about 125ml of the starchy pasta water
• A handful freshly chopped herbs, such as basil, parsley or dill
• 2 egg yolks
• 25g grated Parmesan
• 25g butter
• 100g breadcrumbs
• 50g chorizo, finely chopped

Method

Heat the butter in a large frying pan. Once foaming and deliciously nutty and speckled, add the grated garlic and asparagus. Cook for a few minutes to partially soften the asparagus, then pour over the white wine. Simmer for a few minutes to reduce by half, then stir through the prawns to warm them. Add the cooked pasta and fresh herbs, then toss everything together. Remove from the heat.

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and Parmesan. Pour them over the pasta with enough of the saved starchy pasta water to create a creamy sauce. Mix well. You can gently warm it if needed.

To make the crumble, simply take a small pan and fry the butter, breadcrumbs and chorizo until golden and the chorizo has released its oils — this step adds a flavour punch you don’t want to miss.

Serve the pasta with extra Parmesan and the chorizo crumble scattered all over the top.

Credit: Melanie Johnson/Future Publishing

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How to make braised beef short rib with celeriac-and-Parmesan mash

Our kitchen garden cook Melanie Johnson turns her hand to a superb meal made even better with seasonal celeriac mash.

Pudding Lane. Best known as the flashpoint for the Great Fire of London, but also one of those thoroughfares that beguile with the easy allure of their name. Imagine a stroll, sometime at the start of the 17th century, on a spring morning so crisp you could snap it in half and spread it with butter. Where, on your wander down towards the Thames, your nose is caressed by scents both sweet and savoury, from the blessed pudding makers who line your route. Certainly a seductive vision, but one without even a glimmer of truth.

Because ‘Pudding’ was another name for offal and the Lane used by Eastcheap butchers to transport their stinking carts of rotten innards—and meat scraps even the most dishonest pie man dare not use—down to the dirty, reeking dung ships that lurked on the dirty reeking shore. The stench, especially in summer, would have been unbearable. So much for the gentle charm of Pudding Lane.

Anyway, the word pudding derives from the Latin botellus, meaning sausage, via the old French boudin. In their original form, the concoctions were simply animal stomachs or innards stuffed with spiced meat, offal and oatmeal, then boiled until done. Like haggis, black pudding flavoured with blood or suet-flecked white. It was the invention of the pudding cloth, at about the start of the 17th century, that made large, boiled puddings possible, the cloth lined with a soft suet crust. The high melting point of that hard fat, found around the kidneys and loin of a cow, made the exterior the edible equivalent of Turner’s Study of Clouds. Cumulus light and breezily pretty.

And what a dish the savoury pudding is, mellow and beguiling, all voluptuous Titian curves. Simple, but never dull, comforting rather than stodgy, I find them impossible to resist, especially in their most famous form, steak and kidney, where rich liquor soaks deep into those snowy-white walls, and the whole thing can be eaten with a spoon. Accompanied, of course, by a bracing blob of English mustard. Yet these days, these puddings, like jellied consommé, are a rarity rather than a regular occurrence, only to be found in the likes of Rules or Piccadilly’s splendid new Devonshire.

It’s a crying shame, as, only a century or two back, they (together with suet dumplings) were an adored English staple, each county having their own speciality — Kentish chicken, Rutland rabbit, Northamptonshire Farmhouse, Essex Sea (beef and oysters), and Sussex pork and onion. Not forgetting the delightfully monikered Bedfordshire Clanger (meat at one end, jam at the other, so an entire lunch in one pudding), John Bull (beef and mushroom) and the Buckingham Bacon Badger. Grouse, pigeon and even pike were popular fillings.

Plain suet pudding, too, a Sunday-lunch farmhouse favourite, steamed, cut into cakes and put under the roast, to soak up all those juices. Quite why the savoury pudding has fallen out of favour, I don’t know. But comfort me with suet and I’m a very happy man.

Recipe: Steak and kidney pudding

Gary Rhodes was a great champion of British food. This recipe comes from New British Classics, which is itself a modern classic.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

• 1–2tbspn beef dripping or cooking oil
• 450g chuck steak, cut into 2.5cm cubes
• 225g ox or lamb’s kidneys, cut into 2.5cm dice
• 2 carrots, cut into rough dice 1cm thick
• 2 onions, cut into rough dice 1cm thick
• 2 celery sticks, cut into rough dice 1cm thick
• 175g button mushrooms, quartered
• 300ml stout (optional)
• 600ml veal or beef stock
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 quantity suet pastry (make enough to line a 1.2 litre (2pt) pudding bowl)
• Salt and pepper

Method

Heat a frying pan with the dripping or oil and, in stages, fry the beef and kidneys, colouring well.

In a separate large saucepan, the carrots, onions, celery and mushrooms can all be fried in a touch of oil. Cook for a few minutes before adding the stout, if using. Bring to the boil and reduce by two-thirds. Add the stock and bring to the simmer. Add the bay leaf.

The beef and kidneys can now be added and brought to a gentle simmer. Cover and cook for 1–1½ hours until just becoming tender. It will finish its cooking during the steaming of the pudding. Adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper and leave to cool.

As the meat is cooking and cooling, the suet pastry can be made (I recommend following the recipe included in Rhodes’s book) and the pudding basin lined.

Once cool, the stewed beef and vegetables can be drained in a colander, reserving the cooking liquor. Remove the bay leaf, spoon the meat and vegetables into the pastry-lined basin and add just enough sauce to barely cover. This can now be topped with folded, buttered foil, wrapping it around as you would parchment paper, and twisting to hold. Stand in a steamer filled with hot water. This will now take about 1½ hours to cook the suet pastry and re-heat and finish the steak.

While the pudding is steaming, the remaining steak and kidney gravy can be brought to the simmer and strained through a sieve. This now gives you a gravy to pour over the turned-out pudding.

Remove the foil and turn the pudding out. Pour the sauce over and serve.

Credit: The Beaumont

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Why make celeriac mash instead of simply mashing potato? The answer is flavour, says Melanie Johnson.

‘Often overlooked, earthy celeriac has subtle celery notes, but works well with strong flavours,’ she explains.

You can get fancier, should you wish — such as a celeriac 'potato salad' equivalent: 'Slice a peeled celeriac into matchsticks, squeeze over a lemon, cover with water and set aside. Then whisk together four tablespoonfuls of mayonnaise, two tablespoons of Greek yoghurt, one tablespoon of Dijon mustard and some seasoning. Finally, drain the celeriac and toss it in the dressing with an apple, also cut into matchsticks.'

With this beef recipe, however, celeriac mash is spot on. Here's how to bring it all together.

Recipe: Beef short rib with celeriac-and-Parmesan mash

Ingredients

Serves 4

• A splash of olive oil
• 8 beef short ribs on the bone
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 2 celery stalks, chopped
• 6 cloves garlic, smashed but unpeeled
• 1 red chilli, halved
• 1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes
• 100g brown sugar
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 2 star anise
• 500ml red wine
• 750ml beef stock

For the mash

• 2 celeriacs
• 75g butter
• 100ml milk
• 40g Parmesan, grated

Method

Heat a heavy-based casserole dish and add a splash of olive oil. Brown the beef all over for a few minutes and then simply add in all the remaining ingredients. Stir them together, pop on a lid and cook in the oven for 2–2½ hours, stirring halfway through.

Make the mash by peeling the celeriacs and cutting them into even-sized pieces. Steam or boil until soft and then add to a processor with the butter, milk and Parmesan. Process until smooth. Taste for seasoning and set aside until ready to serve.

Remove the ribs from the casserole dish, cover to keep them warm, and then strain the liquid into a saucepan to reduce and thicken, discarding the herbs and vegetables. Simply simmer until it is the desired thickness.

Spoon the celeriac-and-Parmesan mash onto plates, add the short ribs and pour over the sauce. Serve with steamed cavolo nero.

Credit: Melanie Johnson

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Colour and sweetness have returned to the kitchen garden with forced rhubarb, that dark-dwelling cousin of the summer rhubarb. It's craved by chefs due to its superior taste, with it not being as sharp as that grown in the summer. Grown in total darkness, and harvested by candlelight, forced rhubarb in Yorkshire gained a Protected Designation of Origin all the way back in 2010, and must be grown within a nine-mile radius known as the 'rhubarb triangle'. You didn't think rhubarb was so interesting, did you?

Well it's also extremely versatile and can make great desserts. Try this rhubarb and marmalade meringue roulade.

Recipe: Rhubarb and marmalade meringue roulade

Ingredients

For the filling

• 200g rhubarb
• 3tbspn marmalade

For the meringue

• 6 large egg whites
• 275g caster sugar
• 50g flaked almonds
• 400ml double cream Icing sugar

Method

Preheat your oven to 180°C fan/200°C/400°F/gas mark 6 and line a Swiss-roll tin of about 20cm by 30cm (8in by 12in) with baking paper.

Cut the rhubarb into bitesized pieces and toss with the warmed marmalade. Pour into a roasting dish, cover with foil and roast for 20 minutes. Cool in the dish until ready to use.

Whisk the egg whites in a clean, large bowl (any grease will prevent them stiffening) until thick and glossy. Towards the end, add the sugar, a spoonful at time, and then spread in an even layer in the prepared Swiss-roll tin. Sprinkle over the flaked almonds.

Bake for 10 minutes and then lower the temperature to 140°C fan/160°C/320°F/ gas mark 3 and bake for a further 25 minutes. Remove the tin from the oven and turn out the meringue onto a clean piece of baking paper. Cool for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, spoon the whipped cream over the meringue, followed by the rhubarb and marmalade, and then gently roll up from the short end.

Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve. The roulade tastes best eaten within a few hours of assembling, but also freezes well—simply wrap in clingfilm and freeze for up to a month and defrost overnight in a refrigerator.

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I scream, you scream, we all scream for....rosemary. Is how the old saying would go, if anyone had any sense. After all, rosemary is 'woody, yet fresh and citrusy, which adds a deliciously complex flavour to recipes', according to Country Life recipe expert Melanie Johnson. It is one of the great herbs, that improves almost everything it touches. From the simple to the complex, rosemary works with it all. Take this rosemary-and-lemon chicken recipe, for example:

'Add skin-on chicken pieces to a roasting tray and pour over a generous splash of olive oil and squeeze over the juice off two lemons, adding them to the tray. Arrange a red onion, cut into wedges, and four rosemary sprigs on and around the chicken pieces, season generously, and add a handful of green olives. Roast for 30 minutes or until the chicken pieces are cooked through and the skin crisped. Meanwhile, process butter beans to a smooth purée with a little chicken stock, garlic and seasoning. Spoon the butterbean purée onto serving plates and arrange chicken pieces, olives and the tray juices over it.'

Heaven. For something more complex, and in keeping with the age-old phrase mentioned at the beginning of this article, here's Melanie's recipe for rosemary ice cream with a chocolate brownie.

Recipe: Rosemary ice cream with a chocolate brownie

Ingredients

For the ice cream

• 250ml whole milk
• 250ml double cream
• 2 sprigs rosemary
• 5 egg yolks
• 100g caster sugar

For the chocolate brownie

• 175g unsalted butter
• 200g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
• 250g caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1tspn vanilla-bean paste
• A pinch of sea salt
• 115g plain flour

Method

Make the ice cream by adding the milk and cream to asaucepan with the rosemary. Bring to a simmer and then leave to infuse for 30 minutes.

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together and pour over the infused milk and cream. Whisk together and return to a clean saucepan to heat until thickened and it coats the back of a spoon. Pass through a sieve into a shallow dish and then freeze.

Once almost frozen, remove and process in a blender to break up the crystals and then refreeze. If it still looks crystallised, process again and refreeze, by which time it should be creamy.

Preheat your oven to 160°Cfan/180°C/350°F/gas mark 4 and parchment line a 20cm by 20cm (8in by 8in) brownie or skillet pan.

Melt the butter and chocolate together in a bain marie.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the caster sugar, eggs and vanilla until pale. Pour over the melted butter and chocolate, mixing until smooth, and then fold through the salt and flour.

Pour into the prepared tin and then bake for 25–30 minutes or until just cooked, but still wobbly in the centre.

Remove from the oven and serve warm with a scoop of rosemary ice cream, adding rosemary leaves to decorate.

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One of the most versatile and popular root vegetables, onions 'usually play the supporting role, but, this week, they take the lead.'

That lead is a phenomenal and warming creamy onion soup with caramelised-onion toast that will make your friends on the Continent say ooh la la. But it's also worth updating some of the classic onion sides.

Why not try baked onion bhajis? Thinly slice four large onions. Add to a large bowl, toss with seasoning and leave to sit for 30 minutes. Squeeze the onions to release their liquid, then sprinkle over two tablespoons of grated ginger, two tablespoons of lemon juice, half a teaspoon each of chilli flakes and ground turmeric, one teaspoon of garam masala and 150g chickpea (gram) f lour. Mix well and add more lemon juice if the paste is too dry. Form balls in your hands — but take care not to firmly pack them—then place on oven trays lined with baking parchment or oiled foil. Bake at 180˚C for 40–45 minutes. Serve with chutney on the side.

Now, for that soup...

Recipe: Creamy onion soup with caramelised-onion toast

Ingredients

• 1kg brown onions, halved with skins on. Peel and thinly slice one for the toasts
• 2 garlic bulbs, sliced across
• 2 sprigs rosemary 3 sprigs thyme
• 3tbspn soft brown sugar, plus one more
• 300ml beef stock, hot 300ml whole milk, warmed
• 75ml double cream, warmed
• 4 slices buttered toast with crusts removed
• 50g grated cheese, Cheddar or Gruyère

Method

Preheat your oven to 180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4and prepare a roasting tray with a sheet of foil to cover it.

Halve the onions without peeling them and add them to the roasting tray cut side up. Add the peeled and thinly sliced onion to the tray, together with the halved garlic bulbs, then drizzle olive oil onto the cut side of the onions and garlic and sprinkle over the brown sugar. Add the rosemary and thyme sprigs, season everything and cover the whole tray wwith foil. Roast for 45–50 minutes.

Once roasted, remove the foil, discard the herbs and pop the onions (saving the sliced one) and garlic cloves out of their skins and into a blender, together with the warmed beef stock, milk and cream. Taste for seasoning and adjust accordingly. Take the thinly sliced onion and add it to a frying pan with a splash of olive oil and the extra spoonful of sugar. Cook for a few minutes to really caramelise, then set aside.

Top the buttered toast with the caramelised onion and grate over the cheese. Grill for a couple of minutes to melt the cheese.

Serve the hot soup with the cheese toast floating in the centre and finish with a few herbs.

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The vegetable is one of the finest of the early season. ‘Dress it up, dress it down: purple-sprouting broccoli is robust enough to stand up to strong flavours, yet retain its delicate taste,' says Melanie.

One example is her dish of purple-sprouting broccoli with anchovies and chilli: simply trim some purple-sprouting broccoli, cook in the pan with olive and a few salty anchovies until they’ve lost their shape, then grate over two cloves of garlic and add some chilli flakes, with a little lemon juice and parmesan to serve.

Equally this broccoli is an ideal punchy accompaniment to a flavoursome main course such as this one:

Recipe: Slow-roasted shoulder of lamb with purple-sprouting broccoli and pistachio-and-feta gremolata

Ingredients

For the lamb

• 1½kg shoulder of lamb, bone in
• 30ml olive oil
• 5 cloves garlic, sliced
• 2 sprigs rosemary
• 400g purple-sprouting broccoli

For the balsamic glaze

• 5tbspn balsamic vinegar
• 3tbspn soft brown sugar
• 2tbspn olive oil

For the pistachio gremolata

• A large handful fresh flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
• 50g pistachios, shelled and chopped
• 2tbspn olive oil
• 1 lemon, zest of and 2tbspn juice
• 150g feta to crumble

Method

Preheat your oven to 160˚C fan/180˚C/320˚F/gas mark 4.

Place the lamb in a roasting tray and rub all over with olive oil. Make small incisions into the skin and insert garlic slices and rosemary sprigs into them. Season generously. Cover tightly with foil and roast for three hours.

Make the glaze by simply placing the ingredients in a small saucepan and reducing by half.

After three hours, carefully remove the lamb from the oven and take off the foil. Brush the glaze all over the lamb and then increase the heat of the oven to 180˚C fan/200˚C/400˚F/gas mark 6. Arrange the purple-sprouting broccoli around the lamb and return to the oven for a final 20 minutes, by which time the lamb should be falling off the bone.

To make the gremolata, simply combine all of the ingredients.

When the lamb is cooked, remove from the oven and cover loosely with foil to rest for 15–20 minutes before slicing.

Arrange the sliced lamb and purple-sprouting broccoli on a serving dish. Spoon over the gremolata and, finally, crumble over the feta.

Jerusalem artichokes are in the height of their season at the moment, and Melanie Johnson's recipe below makes the most of them.

If making a chowder is too much of an undertaking, however, these sweet nutty delights can be enjoyed in even simpler ways, such as artichoke crisps. Simply soak Jerusalem artichokes in cold water for 20 minutes to loosen any dirt, scrub and dry then slice with a mandolin on the thinnest setting.

Toss in enough olive oil to coat, season well, spread them out on the baking trays and cook in a moderately hot oven for 20 minutes or until crisped up.

The soup is more involved as you'll see in the recipe below, but it's a real showstopper for a dinner party to beat the January gloom.

Recipe: Jerusalem-artichoke chowder with mussels and chive oil

Ingredients

For the chive oil (optional)

• 50g chives
• 250ml olive oil

For the chowder

• 100g lardons
• 1 sprig rosemary
• 2 sprigs thyme
• 2 shallots, diced
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 large carrot, chopped
• 2 celery stalks
• 600g Jerusalem artichokes, scrubbed clean but no need to peel
• 100ml white wine
• 500ml vegetable stock
• 200ml single cream

For the mussels

• 500g mussels, fresh or use vacuum packed for ease (available from supermarkets)
• 100ml white wine, if using fresh mussels
• Extra herbs to garnish, plus soda bread with butter to serve

Method

Make the chive oil by simply blending the chives and oil together and then passing through muslin. Pour into a glass bottle and use within a month. This will also work for salad dressings, drizzled over risotto or, as in this recipe, for a soup. For a more intense chive flavour, you can wait a couple of days before passing through muslin.

In a large sauté pan, fry off the lardons with the rosemary and thyme until crispy, then scoop out the lardons onto a plate and reserve for the end.

Leave the herbs in the pan and add a splash of olive oil, if needed, and the diced shallot. Cook to soften and then add the garlic, chopped carrot, celery and Jerusalem artichokes. Stir everything around, cooking until slightly charred on the edges, and then pour over the white wine—cooking until almost entirely reduced—and, finally, pour in the stock. Simmer gently to cook everything until softened and then remove the herb stalks and process until you have a smooth and velvety velouté. Return the lardons to the chowder. At this stage, you can refrigerate the chowder until ready to serve, which makes it perfect for dinner parties.

If using vacuum-packed mussels (a very easy option), simply follow the packet instructions, which usually involves microwaving them for a couple of minutes. If using fresh mussels, wash them under cold water to clean, remove any beards and tap those that are open so they close. Take a large lidded pot, add the white wine and mussels to it and heat until steaming. Set a timer for 3–4 minutes and then remove the lid to reveal cooked and opened mussels. Whether vacuum packed or fresh, pour the mussels and their cooking liquid into the chowder.

Divide the chowder between bowls and serve, drizzled with chive oil, if you’ve made it, and extra herbs and soda bread.

Chestnuts are a versatile and delicious ingredient, as Melanie Johnson demonstrates brilliantly with her impressive chestnut-and-mushroom ravioli with beurre noisette and sage (below) or roasted pumpkin with whipped feta and chestnuts side dish.

For the latter, roast olive oil-coated, even-sized pieces of pumpkin in a hot oven until caramelised. Arrange on a serving plate and spoon over whipped feta made by processing the cheese with a dollop of Greek yoghurt, a splash of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon and fresh herbs. Finish with a scattering of toasted, chopped chestnuts.

Recipe: Chestnut-and-mushroom ravioli with beurre noisette and sage

Ingredients

Serves 4

For the pasta

• 400g of 00 flour (pizza/pasta-grade)
• 4 eggs
• 2tbspn olive oil

For the filling

• 2 cloves garlic, diced
• 1 shallot, diced
• 300g mushrooms, diced
• 300g chestnuts, roasted and peeled
• 100g ricotta
• 50g Parmesan, grated
• 1 sprig rosemary, leaves chopped
• 2 sprigs thyme, leaves chopped

To finish

• 100g butter
• Fresh sage leaves
• Parmesan, to shave over

Method

Put the flour on a clean work surface and make a well in the centre for the eggs and olive oil. Using a fork, gently whisk them, gradually incorporating the surrounding flour. Knead the dough lightly until smooth, wrap with clingfilm and rest for 30 minutes.

To make the filling, heat a splash of olive oil in a large frying pan. Fry the garlic and shallot until soft and then add the chopped mushrooms. Cook until the mushrooms have released their moisture. Add the mushroom mixture, chestnuts, ricotta, Parmesan and herbs to a processor and process until smooth.

Roll out the dough into sheets and place teaspoons of the filling on half, leaving space in between to make the ravioli. Brush a wet finger around the edges of the filling, before placing a second sheet of pasta carefully on top, trying to not get any air trapped. With a cutter press out the ravioli. Toss the ravioli in flour or semolina so they don’t stick to one another and store in freezer bags until ready to cook.

To cook the ravioli, drop them into boiling salted water and simmer for two to four minutes until the pasta is done, then drain.

To make the beurre noisette, melt the butter in a pan over a medium heat and keep heating until it browns. Add a few sage leaves and then spoon the browned butter over the ravioli. Top with shavings of Parmesan and serve for a deliciously autumnal dinner-party starter or kitchen supper.

How to make three-cheese sourdough bread and a perfect winter-warmer soup to go with it

We'll leave it up to you to decide whether the soup or the sourdough is the star of the show

Credit: Melanie Johnson for Country Life

How to make a sumptuous scallops dish that uses turnip as its secret weapon

Our kitchen garden cook Melanie Johnson shares her recipe for seared scallops with creamy turnip purée and salsa verde.

Credit: Melanie Johnson for Country Life

How to make an easy apple-and-cinnamon tray bake

In Britain we eat 10 million turkeys every Christmas, but only 200,000 geese. A turkey will feed more mouths – that’s why Scrooge bought the Cratchit family one – but so long as you’re not feeding a small army of relatives then goose is deliciously different (a 10lb/4.5kg goose will feed five or six). It's also far more romantic, evoking the good life, cottage gardens, bucolic farmyards, Thomas Hardy.

The most important thing to remember when cooking a goose, according to goose farmer Ollie White, is to place it on a rack so that the fat runs away and the skin becomes crispy. And of course all that fat which runs off is perfect for cooking the spuds.

Mark Hix's roast goose recipe takes a slightly different approach: 'For me, the obvious thing to do, as with a turkey, is to remove the legs before cooking and slow cook them separately, almost like a confit,' he says. 'You can then concentrate on cooking the breasts just slightly pink and roasting them skin-side down, so all the skin and fat renders down.' You can read the full recipe here.

Buy British if you can. The Brecon Buff is a good meat bird, hardy, medium-sized and with attractive buff colouring and pink legs and beak – it’s also one of few breeds to originate in Britain, having been developed in the 1930s by Rhys Llewellyn of Swansea. The ubiquitous white Embden goose comes from northern Germany and the chubby white Roman from Germany and Poland.

Christmas is hardly the time to worry about healthy eating, but the fact remains that goose has benefits on that score. As a grass-fed meat, explains Ollie While, ‘it creates a more even ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 in the meat, which is what you want – a grain-based diet is heavy in Omega 6. ‘There’s a plethora of benefits in eating a grass-fed animal – it’s a great way of getting vitamins A and E, plus CLAs [conjugated linoleic acids], which have cancer-fighting properties.’

If you’re serving goose, you’ll need some interesting trivia with which to amaze your guests – and this one is a cracker. The phrase ‘your goose is cooked’ has absolutely nothing to do with geese: it derives from the 15^th century martyr Jan Hus. Poor Jan – whose theology was a critical precursor to Protestantism – was burned at the stake, hence the phrase.

If you like goose so much you decide to raise your own, then good on you. They’ll live for 20 years, are less messy and cleverer than ducks, healthier than chickens, make excellent burglar alarms and fine lawnmowers – a pair of geese will happily keep a quarter of an acre of grass trimmed, so long as its reasonably short when they find it.

Most breeds won’t lay many eggs – perhaps 40 each spring – but those that you do get will be twice the size of hens’ ones and even more nutritious.

Their reputation for having a go at people is a little unfair – if you buy them as chicks and rear them by hand and they’ll be ‘a joy and a delight’ says Rare Breeds Survival Trust field officer Ruth Dalton. See www.waterfowl.org.uk and www.poultrykeeper.com for more advice.

Perfect roast goose recipe from Mark Hix

Cooking the perfect Christmas goose, with delicious gravy, is a fantastic way to celebrate Christmas. Mark Hix explains how it's

Credit: Rhug Estate

Talking turkey: Six steps to a perfect Christmas roast

We've spoken to two top chefs to get tips on how to make a beautiful, moist Christmas turkey

Credit: Jason Goodwin

The turkey stuffing recipe guaranteed to spice up Christmas

Jason Goodwin offers up a recipe for turkey stuffing which will infuse your bird with a touch of Istanbul.

This article was first published in 2000.

Kalettes, or kale sprouts, are a cross between kale and Brussels sprouts. The nutritious greens can be eaten raw or cooked, and in this delicious recipe they are combined with coconut curry prawns.

'Kalettes combine the nuttiness of a Brussels sprout with the earthiness of kale, making them a perfect addition to winter dishes,' says Melanie.

You can make a simple dish of crispy tahini-and-garlic kalettes by whipping up a marinade — two tablespoons of tahini, one clove of grated garlic and two tablespoons of olive oil, with a splash of water to loosen if needed. Trim the kalette bases, rub with the marinade, sprinkle over sea salt and sesame seeds, then bake at 150˚C for 30 minutes until crispy.

They're great as a snack or to use as a textural garnish to other dishes, but for something more exotic this recipe will be ideal.

Recipe: Coconut curry prawns with kalettes

Ingredients

• A splash of mild olive oil
• 2tspn garam masala
• 1tspn turmeric
• ½tspn ground coriander
• 5cm (2½in) ginger, grated
• 1 red onion, diced
• 1 clove garlic, grated
• 1 red chilli, diced
• 1 can tomatoes
• 300ml vegetable stock
• 1tbspn tamarind
• 1 can coconut milk
• 150g kalettes (or Brussels-sprout tops)
• 165g raw prawns
• Basmati rice
• 2 limes

Method

Heat a splash of olive oil in a large, heavy-based pan to a medium heat. Fry the garam masala, turmeric, coriander and ginger for a few minutes, in order to release the flavours. Add the onion, garlic and chilli and cook until the onion has just softened. Pour in the tomatoes and vegetable stock and simmer until reduced by one-third. Add the tamarind and process in a blender.

Return the tomato mixture to the pan and heat. Pour in the coconut milk and heat to a simmer, before adding the kalettes and prawns for only a few minutes to cook through. Taste for seasoning and adjust.

Spoon the curry over white basmati rice and add a squeeze of lime to each dish before serving.

The great culinary mystery of why don't we eat more rabbit (especially when you take a look at this recipe)

It’s madness that we no longer enjoy rabbit as we once did, laments Tom Parker Bowles. Whether seasoned with thyme

Credit: Melanie Johnson for Country Life

How to make a sumptuous scallops dish that uses turnip as its secret weapon

Our kitchen garden cook Melanie Johnson shares her recipe for seared scallops with creamy turnip purée and salsa verde.

How to make three-cheese sourdough bread and a perfect winter-warmer soup to go with it

We'll leave it up to you to decide whether the soup or the sourdough is the star of the show

Challah bread, toasted, lightly buttered with a smoked salmon, caper and ground-pepper topping and a squirt of lemon juice (my maternal grandmother). Thin wholemeal bread with its crusts cut off, toasted, imperceptibly buttered, cut into strips (or toast soldiers) and served with a boiled egg (my paternal grandmother). Thin wholemeal bread with its crusts cut off, toasted, imperceptibly buttered and spread with Gentleman’s Relish (my grandfather). A baguette, sliced lengthways, toasted until dark brown and smeared with crushed garlic (my French nanny). Sliced pan, soaked in melted butter, generously sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and grilled to create a slightly rough sweet outer and soft doughy centre (my mother). Crusty, thick slices of white bloomer covered with what can only be described as slabs of salted butter on which lavish quantities of coarse-cut Oxford marmalade have been heaped (my father).

I grew up in a family of toast lovers. Each had their favourite recipe and each prepared it in their own unique way. My mother, for example, would recite every step out loud as she worked: ‘Three tablespoons of granulated sugar, two teaspoons ground cinnamon, a pinch of salt…’ She was quick and confident and could produce a plate of comforting, cut-up cinnamon toast (always triangles, never squares) faster than it took to boil the kettle for tea.

My father, on the other hand, challenged Nigel Slater’s claim that it is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. He cut the bread too thick. He cut the bread too thin. He dropped the bread. He dropped the bread knife. He debated whether to make it on the Aga (‘could taste a little smoky for you’) or under the gas grill (‘could taste a little bland for you’). He checked it every few seconds and then, at the crucial moment, forgot about it completely, so that it caught fire. He tried to scrape it, burnt his fingers, reluctantly confined the flaming slices to the compost bin — where they would continue to emit plumes of black, acrid smoke — swore and started again.

Unsurprisingly, my earliest memories of food are toast related. If I had to choose a last meal, it would be buttered toast, consumed in bed (never mind the butter on the pillows or the crumbs in the sheets) and served with a pot of Darjeeling. I associate it with security, contentment, solace, succour and, as I can always find room for one more slice — how right Tonia George was when she commented that ‘toast has never been a friend of restraint’ — satiety.

It is the food I turn to when I am happy and when I am sad, when I am only vaguely peckish and when I am completely famished. It is also what I eat when I feel poorly, because toasting bread breaks down the starch, making it easy to digest.

Toast is convenient and humble: as equally at home in the most luxurious of mansions as it is in the poorest of cottages. It is, in short, the food of everyman, everywoman and (in this house) everydog.

For such an essentially simple and uncomplicated food, toast has a long and curiously fascinating history. The first reliable evidence of a baker managing to get their bread to rise (no leavened bread, no toast) comes from Egypt, about 4000BC, and presumably it wasn’t long afterwards that someone hit on the brilliant idea of holding the result over a fire to preserve it. We owe its name, however, to the Romans, who called it tostum, from torrere: to scorch or burn.

Passing over the Ancients’ recipes for tomàquet and crème fraiche crostini and ignoring the Dark Ages and the invention of pain perdu (lost, that is stale, bread), also called French toast (which isn’t toast at all), the next significant event occurred when medieval gourmands revived the Roman practice of putting burnt toast into bad wine in order to improve its taste and texture. Instead of burning the toast, they added spices to it and used the result to flavour beer and other drinks.

This custom lasted for several centuries. In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, published in 1602, Falstaff says: ‘Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in’t.’ Indeed, the symbolic dunking of toast in a drink is where the expression ‘to toast someone’ is believed to have originated.

The making of toast has always involved a fair amount of ritual. Early toasting forks have been found in both Egyptian and Roman archaeological sites, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that new and ingenious ways of toasting bread were developed. The first of these was a coal-powered range cooker with a built-in toast plate — a heavy iron rack that sat over the fire grate. Widely used from the 1850s onwards, it must have branded a sort of chequerboard pattern on the toast.

The first electric toaster was invented in 1893, but, as the iron wiring tended to melt, it wasn’t a great success. In 1905, Albert Marsh created nichrome, the filament wire needed to toast bread safely and, in 1906, the first patent for an electric toaster was filed. Since then, we have seen the invention of pop-up toasters, toasters that can make six slices at once, toasters with conveyor belts, toasters with timers, toasters with sensors and even touch-screen toasters. All these various devices are designed to prevent something deeply unpleasant: soggy toast.

The way my father fussed when toasting is by no means unusual. Regardless of the method employed, it takes an exceptionally calm and collected person not to keep checking and rechecking the toast as it is being made. I doubt that even James Bond was able to resist interrupting what scientists call the ‘Maillard reaction’, the process of non-enzymatic browning, caramelisation and pyrolysis that causes the surface of the bread to become crisp and dry, at the same time as leaving the inside warm and moist.

Purists say that if freshly prepared toast is placed onto a plate, the steam in the centre is unable to escape, causing the whole piece to become soft and inedible. We are talking here about ‘rackers’: people who would rather have stiff, cold (impossible to butter) toast over moist, hot (oh, so easy to butter) toast. Of course, everyone has their own preferences — colour, temperature, thickness, with or without crust — but I’ll eat croissants for breakfast before I ever countenance the use of a toast rack.

Toast may be an unassuming foodstuff, but it engenders remarkably strong emotions. For my own part, it makes me nostalgic. I don’t think it is any coincidence that toast features strongly in children’s literature. When Lewis Carroll’s Alice tries the little bottle labelled ‘drink me’, she discovers ‘it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast’. In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, ‘the smell of that buttered toast simply spoke to Toad, and with no uncertain voice… it talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries’. Describing Mary Poppins, Pamela Lyndon Travers said that a ‘faint flavour of toast always hung about her so deliciously’. The point is, we are raised to perceive toast in a certain way.

You may recall the furore a few years ago when a journalist attacked ‘young people ordering smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread’, arguing that they should be saving to buy a house instead. The young fought back, pointing out that even if they forwent this simple pleasure, it would take them several hundred years to buy even a modest flat.

Toast, with its infinite variety and tastes, or home ownership with its responsibilities and bills? I know which I would choose. Toast is, after all, the best thing since sliced bread.