I write about food. And other things. Books inc Consider the Fork, First Bite. Founder of @TastEdFeed: taste education. Next: a cookbook. THE SECRET OF COOKING
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Do you wish you cooked more but don't know where to start? I wrote THE SECRET OF COOKING for anyone who needs ideas for how to cook when you are tired/stressed/alone/have terrible knife skills/all of the above. Here are the covers! (@wwnorton & @4thEstateBooks)
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My mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, died peacefully this morning. I was holding her hand, for which I am so grateful. This is her wooden spoon, one of my most-loved kitchen objects, and a photo of her as a teenager. And her edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Xxx
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This is depressing. A new ‘wellness’ aisle in Sainsbury’s, Cambridge. Contents: sugary biscuits, protein bars, organic cola drinks, slimming shakes. The madness of our food culture all in one aisle.
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Recipes pretend to be a factual form of writing but they are actually one of the lovelier kinds of fiction, with a happy ending on every page. This was what I was thinking this morning while editing my cookbook.
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If your resolution was to cook more this year but you are also feeling tired because it's so cold and grey, may I suggest this? It's the Paneer Jalfrezi with potatoes from The Secret of Cooking. So easy, it's almost as if someone else has cooked it for you. Photo by Matt Russell.
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I love baking. But this is offensive on so many levels. The lack of flour and eggs in the shops being one. The fact that so many people have lost their work and can’t afford hobby baking being another. The patronising tone being a third.
Keep the family entertained this weekend by trying some home baking.
#StayHomeSaveLives
ALT Photo of a pie with stay home written in pastry on it. Text next to pie reads do some baking.
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Comfort food shd really be called trauma food. It’s what you cook to remind yourself you’re alive when you are not quite sure this is true. I wrote about comfort cooking feat. @GrabYourSpoon @EmilyRNunn, @RyanRileyy & Faraj Alnasser theguardian.com/food/2022/ma…
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‘You turning on food parcels does not give you karmic license to take another avenue of support away’. @BootstrapCook addresses Boris Johnson directly on the outrage that is child hunger in the U.K.
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Such great news! Mohit Bakaya, the director of @BBCRadio4 has written to say that @BBCFoodProg has 'been awarded the bid' and 'it will continue as the Food Programme'. Thank you SO much to everyone who signed the letter and expressed love and support for this great institution.
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One more thing on ultra-processed food. The French consume more sugar & calories per capita than UK, + they eat twice as much animal fat and cheese yet obesity rates are roughly 7% in France vs. 25% in the UK. UPF consumption is around 14% of total diet in France vs 51% in UK.
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Reminded again of the power of recipes to revive memories. When visiting my mother (who has dementia) this week, the thing that most engaged her was hearing my niece describe making pies for Thanksgiving (apple and pumpkin). She gestured with her hands, as if rolling pastry.
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Everyone should read this whole thread from @BootstrapCook on the replacement of £30 healthy food vouchers for people on low incomes with shockingly meagre food parcels and what it says about wider attitudes to food poverty in Britain and beyond.
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This was the most personal piece I've ever written - about the comforts that cooking can offer during sad times. So it means a lot that it's been shortlisted for a @Fortnums award (announced tonight) with another piece I wrote for @ftweekend (on nutmeg) theguardian.com/food/2022/ma…
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Copper spoons make sweet foods taste sweeter and bitter ones more bitter. Gold spoons make everything taste slightly better (and not just because they are so expensive). Things I learned today from material scientist @zoelaughlin
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'To the ancient Romans, the apple was a more luxurious fruit than the fig'. I wrote about our changing ideas of luxury in food and why @Alexatala is right to question our fixation on expensive imported foods over pleasures that are closer to home. wsj.com/articles/true-luxury… via @WSJ
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For anyone who eats food - ie all of us - this pair are among the greatest heroes in Britain. Week after week, they beat the drum for good & delicious food for everyone. They also have the loveliest voices in radio. RT if you agree that life would be poorer without @BBCFoodProg
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Has anyone else noticed that supermarkets often have weirdly different prices for the same ingredient depending on context? Spotted in a nearby Tesco: Walnuts for £2.50 for ‘snacking’ or £4.05 for baking for only 50 grams more. Are bakers thought to be richer than snackers?
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It’s arrived! Thank you so much to @4thEstateBooks for the first actual, physical copy of my cookbook THE SECRET OF COOKING. Having spent most of my life reading cookbooks at the kitchen table it feels astonishing to see one with my name on it.
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You might already know this but… you don’t have to peel ginger! I spent years searching for the least annoying way to peel it. I tried teaspoons, peelers, small paring knives. And then I found it didn’t have to be peeled at all (just rinse it). Saves so much time.
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‘All crumpets should be toasted on both sides, the smooth side first, the holey side last, as this produces a suitable concavity for the butter’. Dorothy Hartley on crumpets, 1954
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I've wanted to write a cookbook ever since I was 8, sitting at the kitchen table. So it's hard to express what this means. THE SECRET OF COOKING won the General Cookbok award at @GuildFoodWriter awards last night. Thank you so much to the judges & to all of you who have read it x
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16 million apples have gone to waste in the U.K. so far this year due to EU fruit pickers choosing to work elsewhere in the light of Brexit. If you think how many people those apples could have fed, it’s heart-breaking.
thetimes.co.uk/article/878e0…
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Around a third of all households in the US and U.K. have one person living in them so why are almost all recipes still for four or six or eight? Bravo to @ObserverUK and @allanjenkins21 for celebrating meals for one.
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So honoured to win the food writing award at #gfwawards2023 @GuildFoodWriter for my essay in @guardian about cooking through grief. With thanks to the judges and my editors and so many thanks to the people I interviewed: @faraj_alnasser @GrabYourSpoon @RyanRileyy Emily Nunn.
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I know about lentils, and tins of tomatoes, and pasta. But what were the things that you felt you needed to stock up on most urgently when you realised we might be in this for a while? I'm asking for a piece I'm writing. Thank you!
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Like half the people I know, I've been spending more time in the kitchen since the pandemic. Some days, it feels like the only place where things make any kind of sense. So I feel incredibly lucky to be writing my first cookbook, to be published by @4thEstateBooks and @wwnorton
.@4thEstateBooks at HarperCollins commissions Bee Wilson (@KitchenBee)'s first cookbook, The Secrets of Cooking: Simple Ideas for Getting Back to Delicious
bookbrunch.co.uk/page/articl… (£)
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The ‘Wellness’ aisle in Sainsbury’s. When I spotted this in January I felt it was all the crazy contradictions of our food culture crammed into one aisle. It hasn’t improved. Protein chocolate dippers, artificially sweetened slimming shakes, craft cola. How is this ‘wellness’?
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I am not the first to have noticed this but if you step away from the supermarkets and into independent food shops there are still plentifully stocked shelves. Brothers International supermarket on Mill road, Cambridge has herbs galore, yoghurt and cheeses, masses of dried beans.
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Sugar can feel like love. For low-income parents, 'these small treats reinforce feelings they can provide joy for their kids'. This is important, from @simransethi, on new research looking at the often-overlooked emotions of feeding children on low incomes.
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How to celebrate food, even when you only have 10 minutes and you are by yourself by @NigelSlater (the Edouard de Pomiane for our times). This looks like the breakfast of dreams.
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‘It’s like ice cream in a fruit’. My ten year old has fallen in love with Alphonso mangoes.
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Last summer I wrote this @gdnlongread piece about clean eating and why it attracted such an immense following. Today it’s up for a @GuildFoodWriter award. Proud. theguardian.com/lifeandstyle…
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Ever since I was a child at the kitchen table, I dreamed of writing a cookbook. So it feels surreal that THE SECRET OF COOKING is published in the U.K. today @4thEstateBooks books. I’m so grateful to photographer Matt Russell & all the others who actually made it happen.
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So thrilled to win Food Writer of the year at #FANDMAWARDS tonight. Huge thanks to the judges and to my editors, @meropemills at @guardian and Al Gilmore and @HarrietFL at @ftweekend. And to @Fortnums for marmalade, which I’m going to have on my morning toast.
Hurrah for @KitchenBee, #FANDMAWARDS Food Writer of The Year 2023!
Congratulations! ✨🏆✨I bit.ly/3TWPXfU @FTMag
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Today’s #berrywashing (or perhaps it should be #grainwashing) is this pack of Cheerios + Ancient Grains. So named because of tiny quantities of kamut and spelt. Yet it contains more sugar than it does either kamut or spelt. Why is it not called Cheerios +Sugar?
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A non-stick pan is a life lesson in decay & disappointment because no matter how promisingly it starts off, it will always loses its non-stick properties over time (not to mention the health risks of PTFE). By contrast, cast iron starts off unpromising but gets better each time.
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It's not about willpower; it's about joy. Thank you,@sheiladillon & @RichTheWard for this Food Prog on First Bite bbc.in/1ocJk8B
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Forgive the puppy photo but this is Murray. He smells like dried liver & feels like velvet. 1st ever dog.
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It is such sad news to hear that journalist Dawn Foster has died aged just 34. Her memoir - here - about the scars that abuse in childhood can leave on a person's eating habits, is one of the most harrowing and profound things I have ever read about food. foodmemorybank.wordpress.com…
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If you tell a child he or she has to leave a clean plate no matter what, you teach them to mistrust their own cues for hunger and fullness. Much of the research of the late Leann Birch was about helping children to trust their own internal cues about food. From@NytObits
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I am trying not to get over-excited but… @NigelSlater described my book as ‘life-affirming’! You would have to see how well-thumbed (& food splattered) my copies of Nigel’s books are to know how much this means.
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“There’s real skill in being able to give people both a set of instructions and the freedom to do whatever they want.” Happy to see this tribute from @bootstrapcook to @JamieOliver, someone who has been given too much flak and not enough credit. gu.com/p/9kmy9/stw
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I just noticed I wrote a recipe with an instruction to arrange plums smugly in a dish (I was going for 'snugly').
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I’m so proud and slightly amazed to have become a fellow of @RSLiterature this afternoon. I signed with George Eliot’s pen (the other choices included Dickens and Byron).
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It's so sad that in January, this month of diets, so many blame themselves for eating unhealthily when as this paper shows, 89% of the 'food' sold by the world's top 20 food companies counts as unhealthy. The system is rigged against us. We need a new economic food model
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It’s been 30years since I read The Iliad (Rieu, Penguin Classics) and other than vague memories of sacrificial meats, I’d forgotten how many details were about hunger/appetite & how grief kills the desire to eat. My sister @EmilyRCWilson’s translation makes it all so vivid & real
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Can’t say how thrilled and grateful I am to see this from one of my all-time food heroes. Thank you, @Nigella_Lawson 🙏💙
I thought it might be helpful to give you a link to #CookbookCorner in case you haven’t bought all your Christmas presents yet! There are so many great titles, but I have to nominate @KitchenBee’s Secret of Cooking as my Cookbook of the Year nigella.com/cookbook-corner
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Does any steam in the world smell better than the one rising from grated tomatoes, butter and garlic as it simmers? The only rival I can think of is the citrussy fug that fills the kitchen when making marmalade. What’s your favourite kitchen steam?
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Now, more than ever, I’m finding it crazy that newspapers think that food is part of a category called ‘lifestyle’, along with fashion and cars. Food isn’t lifestyle; it’s life.
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Consumers may blame themselves for overindulging in ultra-processed foods, but what if it is in the nature of these products to be overeaten? I wrote about ultra-processed food for @gdnlongread theguardian.com/food/2020/fe…
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‘The papery golden skin of ONIONS should not be thrown away. They are good natural colouring for soups and stews. Both should always be made golden and delectable by cooking the skins in it’. Dorothy Hartley 1954
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First actual finished copy of UK edition of new book! (The Way We Eat Now). Due out in March. Thank you, @4thEstateBooks
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Bonus of getting older is having a child old enough to make me @Nigella_Lawson lemon & almond cake for breakfast.
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“The fastest growing ingredient in global diets is not sugar, as I’d always presumed, but refined vegetable oils such as soybean oil, which have added more calories to what we eat over the past fifty years than any other food group, by a wide margin…” gu.com/p/bxmd9/stw
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The calorie is a very simple way to measure nutrition. The problem is that food itself is never simple and nor are eaters. Excellent long read on why it's time to move beyond our calorie-fixation. 1843magazine.com/features/de…
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'If you've ever felt conflicted about what to eat...' (That about sums up my mood much of the time). Thank you so much, @DanBarber, for these kind words about THE WAY WE EAT NOW @BasicBooks @4thEstateBooks
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Thank you, @NigelSlater, for reminding me how soothing buttery rice can be. Especially when the butter is mint butter and there is asparagus in the rice. Adapted from his joyous new book Greenfeast, but with frozen peas instead of broad beans.
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How did this become our idea of ‘healthy eating’? There are now more than 4000 varieties of snack bar for sale in the U.S. allowing for all the flavour combinations. Yet many of them are really just a glorified overpriced cookie. #thewayweeatnow #protein
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Traditionally, in the days before fridges, the way to serve ice cold melon in France was to put it in a bucket down a well before dinner. I wrote about the temperature of food for @WSJ, which is so often the forgotten ingredient in a meal. wsj.com/articles/for-summer-…
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There aren’t many upsides to dementia but one small thing is the thrill of the new that comes with forgetting. My mother asked me to peel her an apple. By the time I had done it she had forgotten she’d asked for it and received it as an unexpected but welcome bonus. 🍏
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How did the ancient Babylonians eat nearly 4000 years ago? Twenty five different recipes for stews and broths have survived on stone tablets. For a long time, most scholars believed the recipes were medical texts because 'people don't expect ancient texts to be food recipes'.
My favorite part is how decades ago a woman said "These might be recipes" and the male researchers didn't believe her.
buff.ly/2NTm6Et
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There were many moments during the writing of The Way We Eat Now when I doubted if I could finish it because the subject - modern food- felt so vast. So it means a lot to discover it has been nominated for a @Fortnums food and drink award. 🙏 @4thEstateBooks
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I’ve been dreaming of going to @Ballymaloe for twenty years. The person who first told me about it died 16 years ago. And finally I went. And it was all even better than I imagined, from the banks of wild garlic to the dessert trolley to the brown bread at breakfast.
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I can't believe it's 20 years since the publication of How to Eat by @Nigella_Lawson. Remains my most-used cookbook of all time, a constant companion and source of pleasure and wise food thoughts
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Just got the first early copy of my new book THE WAY WE EAT NOW. Due out in March. Thank you, @4thEstateBooks!
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My daughter’s guinea pig Ringo died in the heatwave. She outlived her sister Starr by several years and looked peaceful at the end. We are missing her when we peel vegetables and realise there is no one left to eat up the carrot tops and celery butts.
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Note to self: next time you think you urgently need to buy more cumin seeds, what you really need to do is take a second look behind the cinnamon jar.
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Does it really matter if a dish is ‘authentic’, so long as it tastes good? I wrote this for @WSJ wsj.com/articles/the-misguid…
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“Each bowl of soup, plate of pasta and every mushroom on toast is faithfully logged. ” @NigelSlater on his daily ritual of writing down everything that he eats and what this teaches him about how his eating habits slowly change. gu.com/p/be5jt/stw
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'It's the people who aren't represented in the media who are having to make these terrible decisions' (e.g. skipping meals to feed their children).The amazing @BootstrapCook once again describing the horrific food inequalities in the U.K., even worse now than 10 yrs or 2 yrs ago.
Jack Monroe: A basic food shop has nearly doubled since 2012.. benefits & wages haven't doubled in that time.. so people are having to make decisions about missing meals in order to feed their children.. it's shocking to talk about this in 1 of the richest economies in the world
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The paper test. How cooks measured the heat of an oven in the days before thermostats were standard. Put a piece of paper on an oven shelf. If it was dark brown after four minutes, the oven was hot enough for bread. If light yellow, it was right for sponge cake. C. Ives 1934
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I had a conversation today with a Sicilian friend (who learned to cook from his father). He asked if I knew about the note 'QB' in Italian cookbooks. It means 'Quanto Basta' or just enough. Just enough seasoning. Just enough heat. It's like saying: 'cook it just right'.
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The @BBCFoodProg is deservedly award winning. The voices of @SheilaDillon and @DanSaladinoUK keep us company when we cook and open our eyes to the wrongs and rights of food. Please, BBC, promise us that this great institution will continue.
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If anyone would have liked to sign this letter, just reply 'Yes' here and I'll create a new expanded list of signatures to send on to the BBC.
The @BBCFoodProg is deservedly award winning. The voices of @SheilaDillon and @DanSaladinoUK keep us company when we cook and open our eyes to the wrongs and rights of food. Please, BBC, promise us that this great institution will continue.
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This was one of my happiest small discoveries for THE SECRET OF COOKING: you can make the texture of an ordinary quick omelette tenderer by whisking the eggs with a dab of Dijon mustard. In the book, I call it Amulet Eggs (amulet is an old word for omelette). Photo Matt Russell
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‘I admire those who know what they will be eating the following day. They are the sort who remember to soak the beans overnight’. @NigelSlater Real Fast Food, 1992. What a masterpiece this book is. So ahead of its time.
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When we lament the decline in cooking, generally what we have in mind is the cooking of mothers. Yet the great untold hopeful story about modern food is the rise in domestic cooking by men. For American Mother’s Day, I wrote this for WSJ wsj.com/articles/feeding-a-f…
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I love eating every kind of vegetable fritter, including these courgette ones. But I don't always enjoy standing at the hob, frying them. So I was delighted when I suddenly realised I could 'fry' them in the oven on a single tray, like roast potatoes. Photo Matt Russell
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I’ve just signed this. 10 per cent of British children have suffered ‘food insecurity’ over the past six months. ‘Food insecurity’ is a euphemism for hunger. Pandemic or not, no child should have to experience food poverty. Bravo @MarcusRashford for organising this.
Remember when I said I was going to need your help...
For the millions who do not have the platform to be heard.
Let's stand as a 'United' Kingdom to #endchildfoodpoverty
Sign the petition today: petition.parliament.uk/petit…
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“Food should be about joy, it’s the flowers of life.” - Bill Granger. It felt so sad to write about him in the past tense for @guardian theguardian.com/food/2023/de…
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I know it's traditional to complain about post-Christmas bloat but for me this is a magical time for food - when we stop treating eating as an annoying interruption for once. I wrote this for @WSJ wsj.com/articles/a-season-to… via @WSJ
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'She is the home cook, the anti-expert, the person who cooks for pleasure rather than ego'. It's good to read an article about @Nigella_Lawson that rightly takes her seriously as a food writer and bringer of joy. nyti.ms/2Ej3wks
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My sister @EmilyRCWilson and I used to play in the gardens of @SomervilleOx as children while our mother Katherine Duncan-Jones went to check her pigeon-hole for post. It felt bittersweet to return to the gardens (so full of spring) & sit on this bench, put there in her memory.
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Jack Fruit curry from Mrs Balbir Singh’s Indian Cookery, 1961. A reminder that jackfruit is not a modern invention or ‘trend’ but a venerable ingredient with a history.
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I’ve been reading cookbooks all my life and always dreamed of writing one. Finally, I did and am so proud and happy that THE SECRET OF COOKING @4thEstateBooks has been shortlisted for Debut cookbook of the year at the @Fortnums Food and Drink Awards. Thank you to the judges.
Celebrating the finest food and drink writing including the very best new voices, the @Fortnums Food and Drink Awards 2024 Shortlists are here. Tuck in: bit.ly/49tg0kL
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When he was four, I taught my son to use chopsticks. Now, fifteen years later, he’s been showing me round Nanjing and telling me which dishes to order. Proud.
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‘A recipe is more like a never-ending kitchen conversation between writer and cook than a one-way lecture’. I wrote about recipe marginalia for @WSJ and the way that lockdown cooking forced us to become freer about improvising. wsj.com/articles/talking-bac…
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I feel so happy and lucky to have won a @Fortnums award for my @gdnlongread on clean eating not least because editor @ClareLongrigg had to persuade me at first that there was something new to say on the subject.
Congratulations to fabulous talented @kitchenbee winner of @Fortnums Food Writer award for her brilliant @gdnlongread on the clean eating obsession theguardian.com/lifeandstyle…
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Question: do you keep your knives sharp? If not, why not? (Research for my cookbook). Asking around, almost no one I know seems to use a knife sharpener and/or steel very regularly, even keen cooks. Yet it makes such a difference, so I'm wondering what holds us back.
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The BBC taught me and millions of others how to cook and also opened our minds to cuisines and ingredients we might never otherwise have known about. It was true public service television, bringing both pleasure and knowledge. #licensefee
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This, by Claudia Roden, is one of my all time favourite cookbooks. It’s dramatised all this week on Radio 4, starting today at 10.45
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Unbearably sad to hear the news of Bill Granger. His books have brought me such joy, especially this one (BILL’s BASICS), from which we must have cooked half the recipes, from fish cakes to cookies. Thinking of his family and all who loved him 💙
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On the subject of Thanksgiving food, this is my new favourite use for leftover mashed potatoes. @Nigella_Lawson potato waffles. We had them with fried eggs & sriracha
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