book. She cooks. I watch and ask questions, scribbling down notes or taking video. Today she’s made lamb meatballs in a slightly soupy cumin-spiked tomato sauce. At the last minute, she added fresh mint to the pot, dolloped in thick, tangy Greek yogurt, and cracked in a few eggs to poach. When the meatballs were ready, she filled two bowls, passing one to me and keeping the other. I take my first bite and experience a sensation familiar to anyone who has eaten her food: eye-widening, expletive-inducing pleasure. The meatballs are stunning, a dish I thought I knew taken to a new level of deliciousness. Yet she sighs. ‘Horrible,’ she says. ‘These meatballs are horrible.’
Spending time in April’s kitchen is not typically a melancholy experience. Just the opposite, actually. When she starts cooking, all of her stress – from a broken exhaust hood at the Breslin, the requisite food celebrities stopping in for lunch at the John Dory Oyster Bar, interviews with the media, which she dreads – evaporates, like wine in a hot pan.
As she preps, she looks as though there’s nothing she’d rather be doing than peeling shallots or chopping carrots. She practically ogles young onions and spring garlic. She inhales deeply over a pan of sizzling chicken livers, taking in one of her favourite aromas. Browning the lamb meatballs, she’s utterly transfixed. ‘Oh, that lovely colour!’ she says. ‘It makes me go all funny in the knickers.’ There’s always a song stuck in her head, and while she works, she’ll sing whatever it is in her Brummie brogue: a peek into the oven to check on a roasting lamb’s head, the flesh shrinking from its mandible, prompted snippets of the Lady Gaga song that goes, ‘Show me your teeth.’ Whether she’s turning an artichoke or filleting anchovies, it’s clear she’s having fun.
Yet as the meatball episode demonstrates, April battles her own demons in the kitchen. She sets stratospherically high standards, standards so high that even she can’t meet them. Her success and torment have a paradoxical relationship: her food is so good because she rarely thinks her food is good enough. When she is happy with the results of her labour, she often denies responsibility, assigning the deliciousness of, say, her roasted carrots to the carrots themselves for being so perfect and sweet. (It’s a great tragedy, by the way, that a vegetable savant like April has become best known for burgers and offal. I’ve never eaten more lovingly prepared vegetables than those from her kitchen.) And she barely eats what she cooks, instead assembling bites and plates for anyone nearby.
April does not impose her will from the kitchen; her lack of egotism leads her to empathise with the people who eat her food. When she composes dishes, she aims to re-create the little moments that bring her joy. Once, just before she whizzed stock and vegetables for a soup, I watched her fish out a slotted-spoonful of carrot chunks, then return them to the pot after blending. ‘This way,’ she said, ‘it’s like a little prize when you bite into one later.’ ‘Isn’t it lovely,’ she told me, ‘when you’re eating fried rice and you hit some egg? I’ll search and search until I find another piece, for another hit of that fatty flavour. Of course, you don’t want too much egg – you want to have to dig around for it.’ She cooks like someone who loves to eat.
Watching her reminds me why I love cooking itself, not just the food it produces, and inspires me to spend more time in my own kitchen. The essence of her food is simplicity. The luxe ingredients and ostentatious embellishments that define so much ambitious, ‘big-city’ food are conspicuously absent. Instead, it’s unrelenting fastidiousness that defines April’s food. A few fussy aspects of preparation – obsessively trimming tomatoes of any pale flesh, making sure each sliver of sautéing garlic turns golden brown, chilling radishes for salad – lead to totally unfussy food. Her marinated peppers and Caesar salad, veal shank and chicken liver toasts are not deconstructed or creatively reimagined dishes. They’re exactly what they promise to be, but they taste better than you ever imagined possible.
Like most cookbook readers, I’m not a culinary school grad. Before working with April, I had never made aioli, let alone welcomed a lamb’s head into my oven. Yet now I’ve served friends almost perfect clones of her cumin-spiked lentil purée, her bright-green pea soup punctuated with little chunks of ham and blobs of crème fraîche, and her veal kidneys tossed in garlic butter. Even my regular everyday cooking has improved since I succumbed to her infectious perfectionism, her attention to the little things. I splurge on salt-packed anchovies, as she does, because they make my food just taste that little bit better that pushes a dish from good to great. I use lemon to add brightness, not necessarily acidity, just as she does. I cut my carrots into oblique chunks so when they’re simmered, the edges will be soft but the centre will retain its soft crunch and I won’t miss out on the joy of chomping on one now and then.
One day, I decided to follow April’s recipe for devilled eggs, and I brought them to the Spotted Pig for her to taste. I was terrified, anticipating a meatball moment. Instead, the famously finicky chef pronounced them ‘quite good’. She complimented me as if it were my recipe, as if I were responsible for how bracingly cold and vinegary they were. And, in some way, I suppose I was.
JJ Goode
When I was a girl, I wanted to be a policewoman. But then, when I was sixteen, I handed in my application too late. It’s funny how a small thing like that can change everything.
I grew up in Birmingham, in a neighbourhood called Druid’s Heath, which sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings. It was not that interesting, I’m afraid. It was a fine place to be a kid. Everything there seems to be made of concrete. It’s also full of housing estates and massive high-rise flats. Quite a few of my family members have lived in housing estates at one point or another, when they were struggling to afford rent. The buildings were all scary and cold and quite grim.
As a teenager, I got hooked on programmes like Cagney & Lacey, CHiPS, and other cop shows. I know this sounds a bit nerdy, but I wanted to walk the beat, to work as part of a team. I liked rules and structure and repetition, the idea of doing something again and again until I was good at it. I even fantasised about wearing the uniform, although at the time, policewomen weren’t allowed to wear trousers: imagine chasing some villain while wearing a skirt.
I’ll tell you, I wasn’t the brightest bulb in the cupboard. I struggled through my work at senior school. I was always serious, and I never missed a day of studies. (I have the attendance awards to prove it.) Still, I preferred to put back pints with my mates at my local pub, staggering home late at night, my eyes squinty like two pissholes in the snow. And, like a prat, I missed my opportunity with the police academy and couldn’t apply again for two years. I had to do something in the meantime. My mom sat me down. She suggested I consider becoming a florist. Just then, one of my sisters walked in wearing her cooking school uniform. I thought, I could wear that uniform. Why not have a go at cooking?
Back then, cooking wasn’t a way to get your face on the telly. It was a job. To me, making stock, chopping carrots, braising meat, and the like were all just tasks to try to master. My food icons weren’t celebrity chefs. Instead, there was my granddad, who always cooked a proper fry-up for breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausage, and bread crisped in the fat left in the pan. At school, I ate mountains of boiled potatoes, a knob of butter melting like lava over the top, with a scattering of black pepper like ash. Anything, I thought at the time, was better than my mom’s cooking. Now I realise I was a bit hard on her, because she did make an excellent fried egg, brown and crispy at the edges, and the best bacon sandwich, floppy strips crammed between crusty bread and lashed with HP sauce or ketchup.
I loved Sundays. That was when my nan had us over for
