In-depth cookery book reviews.
Meze: Snacks, Small Plates and Street Food from the Middle East is my first introduction to the work of Sally Butcher who has had a very successful career in food as a writer of many cookbooks such as Persia in Peckham, Veggiestan and Snackistan and also as the owner and chef of the iconic Peckham-based ... Read more »
The Botanical Kitchen is the debut cookbook of Elly McCausland, successful food blogger and Guild of Food Writers Food Blog award winner. The Botanical Kitchen is her first book and won the Jane Grigson Trust Award 2019. With these credentials, I was eager to dive into the book. The book opens with an introduction on ... Read more »
Romania was a complete mystery to me. The closest I’d come was giving a desperately homesick, mosquito-bitten Romanian waitress in a remote Greek village a bottle of my repellent spray. She responded with heartfelt thanks and an equally heartfelt description of the beauty, warmth and vibrancy of her homeland. The poignant depth of her desire ... Read more »
Regula Ysewijn has had a fascination with British food since she was a young child, which may not sound that unusual until you learn that she was born and grew up in Belgium. Baking is a particular passion of hers, which informed both her first book Pride and Pudding, and her latest title, Oats in ... Read more »
‘No Sushi’ is part autobiography, part cookbook, written by chef restaurateur and winner of Masterfchef 2012, Andrew Kojima. The title is a reference to the (gradually eroding) British perception of Japanese food being all about sushi, the topic of a conversation Koj had with his Japanese father shortly before he died. It’s also the name ... Read more »
Recently, I reviewed Tim Anderson’s Vegan Japaneasy. Now I want to tell you about his previous title, Japaneasy. Stylistically – in voice and in approach – both cookbooks are stamped with the humour, personality, skill and enthusiasm of their author, so I’ll avoid duplicating my own equally enthusiastic approval of all four traits (warning: probably ... Read more »
The second best thing about Tim Anderson’s Vegan Japaneasy cookbook is that it makes me laugh. On almost every page a tongue in cheek note, an off the wall comment or a daft joke catches my eye. Tim doesn’t dilute his personality or his tastes in this book. He talks with love about hunks of ... Read more »
Bazaar is Sabrina Ghayour’s fourth book and her first foray into a cookbook with a purely vegetarian set of recipes. I was intrigued to see how a confirmed omnivore would tackle the subject, particularly as I aim to cook vegan or vegetarian 2-3 days a week, so a new source of ideas from a non-vegetarian is ... Read more »
Nigel Slater is one of those authors I can hear talking whenever I read his recipes. More importantly, he is also one of those authors I trust, and any time I pick up a Nigel Slater recipe I’m confident that I’ll get to the end without being bemused by incomprehensible instructions or missing ingredients, and ... Read more »
Mandalay: Recipes and Tales from a Burmese Kitchen by MiMi Aye is the Burmese cookbook the UK has been waiting for. We interview its author to find out more about how it came to be and what it means to her. ... Read more »
The Place of Onions, in old Lille. After last night’s rainstorm the intense sticky heat has broken and today is cool, breezy, fresh… I love it! A drop of… [more]
We went to Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire at The Void this morning, an amazing VR experience where we got to be Rebel Alliance members going undercover as… [more]