forming little patties and frying them up, then eating them topped with fried egg.) And later, there was tea, not just the drink, but the meal: my dad would set out a spread of cakes, like Battenberg and Mr Kipling Bakewell Tarts, and crisps and sandwiches of strawberry jam or cucumber or ham.
Since those Sundays in Birmingham, I’ve met a lot of great cooks and eaten a lot of food that has just blown me away. Yet when I cook today, I draw just as often on the food of my childhood, whether an entire dish or an ingredient or flavour. I think for some people the appeal of the food you once loved fades over time. Not for me: the appeal is still there, as strong as ever, just waiting to be improved upon.
In many ways, I got lucky. I graduated from cooking school during the early days of the gastropub, when entrepreneurs started buying dank old pubs and tearing up the carpets. They installed little kitchens and proper chefs, who turned out rustic terrines and lovely slabs of roast beef, cooked to that magical place between rare and medium-rare.
Immediately after graduation, I moved to London, where I got the chance to work for some of the chefs who were leading this movement – among them, Rowley Leigh at Kensington Place, Adam Robinson at the Brackenbury, Simon Hopkinson at Bibendum – and others who were leading movements of their own, like Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray at the River Café. I spent a lot of time listening, and even more watching. I watched how they moved their hands, how they sliced, how they seasoned. I learned that you can make a dish ten times and it will never be the same each time. That just when you think you’ve mastered something, it’ll turn out like a dog’s dinner and you realise you haven’t really mastered it at all. To this day, I’m always on my toes and always ready to learn something new.
Even after all this time in the kitchen, I still love watching garlic go nutty in hot fat or peeking underneath a piece of caramelising fennel to see it browning and growing sweeter by the minute. I love spooning pan liquid over roasting meat, piling any vegetable matter on top and gently smooshing it. And as many livers as I’ve seared in my life, the smell of one meeting a hot pan still makes my knees tremble. The small delights are the most lovely.
My affection for these little things makes me a very particular cook. That’s a nice way of admitting that I’m a bit of a control freak. Some of my cooks describe my cooking (affectionately, I hope) as ‘anal rustic’: ‘rustic’ because I prefer pan liquid to complicated sauces, and because I’d rather assemble food by hand than plate it with tweezers, and ‘anal’ because I like everything just so. I must drive my cooks mad when I go on about cutting radishes a certain way to accentuate their slender shape or slicing other vegetables into pieces that taper, so that when they cook, little bits will tumble off into sauce or soup. I sometimes demand that they brown garlic until it’s almost too brown or that they not completely cook off alcohol (I like the acidity of slightly raw white wine).
But being a fussy cook doesn’t always require more effort. For my pesto, I don’t toast the pine nuts – not because of the extra step, but because I find toasting them actually muddies the pesto’s flavour. I don’t usually peel my beetroots. Rather, I roast them skins on. I even like to leave on the willowy root, which is tender and rustically pretty. For my roasted vegetables, I leave the skins on the onions and garlic, but I peel the carrots. I should really figure out why I peel the carrots.
When you run three restaurant kitchens, trying to make sure the details aren’t lost in the race to feed your customers can drive you up the wall. At home, though, there is no such rush. So, for my recipes here, I chose not to gloss over the little things that I think make food taste great and that also make it a pleasure to cook. To that end, the recipes are a little longer than they might otherwise be and, I think, a lot more helpful.
Many of the dishes in this book have shown up in one form or another on my restaurant menus. I’m not much for cooking complicated food, but I do understand that what’s straightforward for me and my team of cooks might be a bit knotty for those of you at home just looking for a nice dinner. So, for each dish, I thought, how can I make this more like something an Italian grandma might do? For instance, sometimes I call for using water instead of stock. Or, if at the restaurant we cut vegetables into tiny cubes, I ask you to cut them into chunks. It’s easier, the resulting flavour is almost identical, and I think it’s quite nice to bite down on a big chunk of carrot or celery here and there.
I’ve included a few dishes that do take time and effort to make – veal breast stuffed with prosciutto and more veal, cassoulet with duck confit you make yourself, and mussels stuffed with mortadella. They’re not difficult to make, but to further encourage you to give them a go, I’ve included tips for doing some steps in advance.
In general, always read the full recipe before you get started. That way you’ll know what to expect and nothing will catch you off guard. You might be tempted to follow a recipe loosely – I know I often am – but on your first go, please try it my way. Then once you’ve made it one or two times, feel free to tweak it as you’d like. Oh, and always try to use the right pot. I tried to strike a balance between describing the proper pot for a particular dish without being so specific that I scare you off. But do keep in mind that the size and shape of a pot will affect your outcome.
I hope you have as much fun cooking these dishes as I do. And I also hope you’ll focus on the little things. Remember, it’s easy to make simple food taste great – as long as you don’t fuck it up.
Before you go headlong into the recipes, I’d like to tell you why they are the way they are. Here I take you through a few of my idiosyncrasies, from the way I think when I cook to the admittedly obsessive measures I take with common pantry staples, and that I urge you to take as well. But, so you don’t think I’m a complete nutter, I’ve given you alternatives whenever I can stomach them.
AT THE MARKET
Please buy great ingredients. I insist on it in my kitchen, and I’m quick to have a fannywobble if the parsnips are spongy or the greens have begun to go limp at the edges. If what you’re planning on cooking with doesn’t look nice at the market, alter your dinner plans. Talk to your butcher or fishmonger and make it clear that you’re after the best he’s got. Or order in advance – sometimes that’s the best way to be sure that you’re buying tasty proteins at their prime. Set your standards high: you might not always meet them, but you will always be better off in the end. Low standards are easy to meet, but the food you’ll end up with isn’t always good to eat.
Once you’ve found a great product, get to know it. Taste it raw and as you cook, but first give it a sniff and a good look over. Touch it. The more you do this, the sharper your intuition will become. You’ll understand why, for instance, there’s no need to peel young carrots and why I urge you to choose fresh sardines with skin that sparkles. That’s a good rule of thumb, actually: choose ingredients that sparkle, whether literally or not.
AMOUNTS
I don’t like precision. Converting cups to grams and measuring out tablespoons of chopped parsley does my head in. It feels odd, unnatural, and it’s not how I cook. After all, one carrot or tomato is not the same as another. So you don’t want to be inflexible, like a machine. If you open up a pumpkin and it looks a little different than usual, you might have to treat it differently too.
Yet you can’t have a cookbook without recipes, and you can’t have recipes without measures, so, in the end, I’ve provided amounts and weights for ingredients I never thought I’d quantify. But where it made sense, I kept the measures called for casual, using handfuls and glugs rather than teaspoons. Use these quantities as guidelines, and use your intuition too.
FINDING
