Britain has a real love affair with the potato. Emma explores ten ways to cook this versatile vegetable, from crisp roasties to creamy dauphinoise.
On average, each person in Britain eats three potatoes every day – but they are so entrenched in the fabric of British food culture that I worry we don’t give them enough applause. From classic roasties, baked potatoes and dauphinoise, to chips, crisps and mash, there are no limits to the versatility of the humble spud. Make the most of your bag of potatoes with our handy guides and recipes. Learn how to store potatoes so they stay fresher for longer, and discover simple ways to cut down on waste, including how to waste fewer potatoes and how to turn one bag into five easy meals. Short on time? Our guide on how to microwave a baked potato shows you how to get fluffy results in minutes. Once it’s ready, try one of our top baked potato toppings to keep weeknight dinners fresh and varied. As the weather turns colder, explore our comforting potato recipes – hearty, family-friendly dishes that are perfect for cosy evenings at home. Then check out our collection of potato recipes for year-round favourites. Read on for 10 recipes that celebrate potatoes in their finest form... Next, learn how to microwave a baked potato with our useful guide. 1. Crispiest ever roast potatoes Transform a bag of Maris Pipers into something special with a fluffy middle and golden crisp exterior. Using a combination of hot rapeseed oil and butter is the key to this method, allowing the spuds to crisp up nicely. Cooking your potatoes with their peelings plus a hint of lemon thyme, garlic and sea salt also intensifies the flavour. Try this recipe and soggy roasties will be a thing of the past! Elevate your Sunday dinner with this recipe for crispiest ever roast potatoes and read our guide on how to make the ultimate roast potatoes. 2. Baked potato I thought it was impossible to improve on a simple baked potato. I was wrong. Steam the spud for 20 minutes to infuse with moisture, then bake for 40 minutes in a hot oven to get the perfect combo of fluffy inside and extra crisp outside. If you want a filling, simple supper, try our jacket potatoes with home-baked beans. Or check out more brilliant baked potato recipes 3. Classic potato salad Picnics and barbecues would not be the same without a bowl of creamy potato salad on the side. This classic recipe pairs boiled new potatoes with shallots, capers and cornichons for a tangy kick. Bind the mixture together with mayo and stir in chopped parsley for a burst of freshness. If you are catering for kids, this simple salad can easily be adapted by leaving out the stronger flavours such as capers and cornichons. Everyone has their own favourite version of this dish so why not use our classic potato salad recipe as the perfect starting base to experiment? Find more perfect picnic accompaniments in our potato salad recipe collection. 4. Fondant potatoes These potatoes may sound fancy but there's no need to whip out your chef whites quite yet! Recreate this traditional French dish with crisp, crunchy edges and a soft, silky middle for an elegant dinner party side or Sunday lunch accompaniment. Butter is essential here to add richness whilst rosemary and thyme provide a subtle herby flavour whilst simmering with the potatoes. Impress your family or friends with our easy fondant potatoes recipe. 5. Mashed potato I’m not going to lie, I have found it hard to do full justice to this most magnificent of side dishes. However, everything improved once I got my head around this hack: after you’ve boiled the potatoes, drain them, return to the pan and cover with a cloth for 10 minutes. This dries them out, so that when you add butter they absorb it and taste buttery, rather than absorbing their cooking water and tasting watery. Tiny step – big difference. Master this technique with our handy video on how to make mashed potatoes. Discover more marvellous ways with mashed potatoes. 6. Rösti Potato rösti are a classic Swiss dish of crisp, golden potato patties, often flavoured with onion and herbs. Wonderfully versatile, they work just as well alongside a roast as they do at brunch, especially topped with a perfectly poached egg. Start with our potato rösti recipe for a traditional take, then branch out with twists such as our brunch rösti or hearty rösti-topped lamb & rosemary pie. Find more of these crispy potato cakes in our rösti recipes collection. 7. Hasselback potatoes If you’re looking to upgrade your Sunday roast, hasselback potatoes are a simple yet striking way to add a sense of occasion. This clever cutting technique creates crisp, golden edges that fan out beautifully while keeping the centres soft and fluffy. To make even cuts with ease, place each potato between two chopsticks – this stops the knife from slicing all the way through. A small trick that makes a big difference. Discover more hasselback recipes. 8. Smashed potatoes My new favourite method, this is a real game-changer: Boil small potatoes in their skins, then drain in a colander. Pop the potatoes onto a tray and squish with a glass. Drizzle with olive oil, scatter over grated garlic and chopped rosemary, and roast in a hot oven for 20 minutes until golden and a bit crisp, or in your air fryer. It's the joy of a boiled spud, the texture of smashed potatoes and the crunch – but not the fat – of a roastie. These rosemary & thyme smashed potatoes or smashed roasted new potatoes are just the ticket for Sunday dinner. Are you a fan of roasties? Find more variations on this super side in our roast potato recipe collection. 9. Dauphinoise potatoes We’ve arrived at nirvana – layered potato slices with lots of cream, garlic and melted Gruyère – to be served on feast days on my desert island. Classic dauphinoise tips: 1) If your life is too short to peel potatoes, try potato peeler gloves, which have rough, abrasive palms. You peel by rubbing, though be warned – they look like murder weapons. 2) Don’t demean dauphinoise by calling it a ‘side’ – it’s the main event. A glass of wine is the side dish. 3) Wear elasticated trousers when you eat them, for obvious reasons. Try a classic Dauphinoise potatoes recipe for yourself – it's well worth the effort. We've also got plenty more inspiration in our Dauphinoise recipes. 10. Oven chips Some foods are at their peak only when cooked brilliantly using the most expensive ingredients. The potato is not in this category. You can achieve perfectly crispy, golden chips using a home oven, which also takes away the effort of frying. We consider Maris Piper to be the best potatoes, by far, for chips, with Désirée and King Edwards your next best options. Simply simmer your potato batons in salted water for a few mintues before draining, cooling, then baking in the oven with oil. Tossing the chips in a coating of flour, baking powder and cayenne pepper provides a nice crunchy outside with a touch of heat. Make these best ever oven chips for yourself or discover more comforting chip recipes. Why not go one step further and make these into chip butties? The ultimate indulgence of carb-on-carb plus butter-on-fat make these so wrong they’re perfect. Four ingredients: floury white bap, butter, ketchup and thick-cut chips. Meddle with this formula at your peril. More perfect potato recipes... Our best potato recipes Ways to perfect potato salad How to make the ultimate mashed potato How to cook jacket potatoes in the microwave Hasselback potato recipes Potato wedges recipes A guide to British potatoes What are your favourite ways to cook potatoes? Leave a comment below...
Scoop out the flesh of a watermelon and make these refreshing piña colada boats, with rum and coconut milk. Save the skins to serve your cocktails
Our easy cookie dough mixture is totally safe to eat and can be made in minutes. Keep a batch in the fridge, eat it by the spoon, serve it with ice cream, or mould it, shape it and colour it with food dye
Our columnist cooks with The Great British Bake Off’s Chetna Makan and chats about her latest book, having nothing to lose, and why she uses her children as her camera crew.
Ten million people saw the moment when Chetna Makan’s masala chai baklava failed to take her into the final of The Great British Bake Off series 5, but since that dark day, her stunning cookery books and popular YouTube videos have kept her centre stage. Her latest book is Chetna’s Healthy Indian Vegetarian, and in reading and cooking from it, I’ve fallen in love with her writing. There’s something magical about the gentle way she communicates – she’s tender about the culture which created this cuisine and immensely respectful of the ingredients. There’s also a quiet optimism about her world view. I asked her where that quality came from. Chetna: Yes, I am optimistic. I think this is why I left home at 17 to go into the crazy Bombay world of fashion. But at 27, I had to leave behind everything I’d built up as a fashion designer overnight when I moved to the UK. I had nothing to start off with. I wanted to get into fashion here, but it would have been four or five hours travelling a day and I thought, I can’t do it. Emma: Did you have family in the UK to support you? C: No – I’ve got absolutely no relatives in this country, not even a cousin, which in Indian terms is shocking because you always find cousins. I worked for a while in a beauty salon, and then in retail, and I just tried to make this place as happy and comfortable as I could. I’ve had no training, apart from as a fashion designer, and I didn’t think of making food my career at all. But I don’t believe opportunities land in your lap. You have to go out and get them, and this what I’ve done all my life. That’s why I applied to do Bake Off – I had nothing to lose and thought, ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ So I went in and just enjoyed it. That’s my optimism. E: Not every baker on the show ends up with a publishing and broadcasting career like yours – why do you think it worked so well for you? C: I think people can associate with the food I make because it’s genuine. This is how I eat. I’m not trying to follow trends, this is just me. E: Is your mum a great cook? C: Yes, she is. Amazing. E: I know your mum’s a great cook – who taught her? Was it her mother? C: Actually, no – her mum wasn’t a great cook. She learned through her newspaper, they used to print a recipe once a week.Every week she would cut it out and stick it in a scrapbook – that’s how she taught herself. E: Because you aren’t surrounded by an Indian community in the UK, has your cooking become more anglicised? C: Actually, no. This is exactly how my mum cooks, I haven’t done anything different. The basic spices are the same ones she uses. Interestingly, when I see the food many people in India put on social media, they often anglicise it more than people here. They’re trying to make it Western for an Indian audience. E: For your latest book, you travelled to India and were invited to go inside the kitchens of some wonderful home cooks. How did you find those women? C: It was all thanks to Instagram. I asked online if anybody had an Indian aunt or mum who was really fond of cooking and might talk to me – and I got lots of messages. Even somebody from America who said, ‘My mum’s an amazing cook, you must meet her, but she works all week.’ I went and she gave me all of her Sunday. I know how people are in India, so it shouldn’t have surprised me, but you know, they are just so welcoming. It was incredible. E: You talk about how the kitchen is a sacred space to an Indian family. C: Oh my gosh, so sacred. It’s quite basic but they come up with amazing dishes. There aren’t many gadgets; a lot of the kitchens still don’t have ovens. My own mum still has the portable oven from my childhood – it’s the shape of a slow cooker – and it moves from room to room. But it’s still not very common to have one. Chetna and I start to cook her chapatti recipe together. We add beetroot purée to the spiced flour and two different types of alchemy happen – I cover my kitchen in vivid red splatters, while Chetna creates a silky dough using only one hand, rolls it expertly into perfect discs, and cooks them into stunning flatbreads to eat with the vibrant raita. It’s like witnessing a modest masterclass in life skills. E: Are you happy with the way your career is going? C: I would have loved to do a little bit more television, but that hasn’t happened. E: Is that why you created your YouTube channel? You’ve become your own broadcaster. C: It is such a joy – I’m literally a one-man band. I’m my own agent, I do my own videos, I shoot them on my phone, then I edit them, upload them, I answer all the emails, I talk to the brands and I do the book deals. I am the one person – I’m quite proud of that. And it’s odd, people have stopped me in India to chat in the street because they’ve seen my YouTube videos, which I find really amazing. E: Do you want to do more now? C: I don’t think I can do any more than what I’m doing and that’s plenty for me. I’ve still got kids and I don’t want to leave them, so I’m happy that I can do it on my own terms. My children filmed all my videos during lockdown. E: Wow – but they’re 10 and 13! C: Well, I also want to make sure that they chip in a little bit with Indian cooking and traditions because it’s so hard to educate them within their culture. We live in a very white area, it’s not really mixed at all. When my daughter was in primary school, she was the only Asian child. So it’s difficult for them to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, because there’s not much they can see and learn from here. E: Do you think enough is being done to support diversity in our food culture? C: Oh wow, that’s a really tough one. London lives in its own bubble where you can find almost any national and regional cuisine – Indo-Chinese, Nepalese, Burmese. You name it, you can get it. But if I look at where I am in Kent, there are no Indian restaurants here, it’s just Italian and English. I’m not sure if people are brave enough to start up in these places, but if they were there, I believe there would be people willing to try them. That’s my optimism again. QUICK-FIRE QUESTIONS What spices do you always have in stock? Whole spices, cardamom, cinnamon, bay leaves, chillies. The ‘must-try’ recipe from your latest book? Spinach masala chickpeas. Your go-to meal? Tadka dhal and rice. What’s your food heaven? Anything cooked by my mum. And your food hell? Cheese. Your favourite meal cooked by someone else? My husband’s masala super noodles. Your most-used piece of kitchen equipment? Chakla belan (wooden rolling pin and board used to roll out chapattis). The best cooking advice you’ve ever received? Enjoy it. For more of Chetna’s recipes, visit chetnamakan. co.uk, or search YouTube for Food with Chetna. Photographs: Sia Gupta Read more articles by Emma Freud Emma Freud meets Davina McCall Emma Freud meets Nigella Lawson Emma Freud meets Jason Isaacs Emma Freud cooks for The Rangoon Sisters Emma Freud cooks for Sabrina Ghayour Emma Freud cooks for Rick Stein Emma Freud cooks for Vivek Singh Emma Freud cooks for Nigel Slater
Our columnist talks to the TV presenter about her childhood, her cookbooks and evocative memories baked into particular recipes.
When Davina McCall began working on TV over 20 years ago, she changed the game for female presenters. She’s professional and accomplished, but also honest, open, emotional, funny, authentic and relentlessly true to herself. Now in her 50s, she’s added a fitness business to her CV and written four cookbooks. Emma: You had a complicated childhood (her mother moved to France when Davina was three, so she was brought up in the UK by her gran, only seeing her mum in the holidays). What kind of food did you eat? Davina: My granny, Pippy, made lots of old-school home food. All the pies, roast everything, plus a smattering of 70s-style convenience food like canned ravioli and chicken noodle packet soup. My favourite was her boiled ham with parsley sauce and mash – such a lovely, old-fashioned dish. When I went back to France it was a three-course meal, every meal, of pure gastronomy! Rabbit, the best cuts of every meat, frogs’ legs, seafood (which I never really got to grips with), every salad known to man, and huge platters of cheese, plus expensive wines – I’d be given a little glass from age 10. E: Was food a comfort as you kept moving home? D: Food with my granny was love. After bringing up three young children in post-war Britain, cooking was how she could care for me. She wanted to lavish me with sugar and butter in a way she couldn’t with her own children. But in France, it was a bit of a chore really as every meal went on for so long! There was only about an hour after a meal before we had to eat again. My mum cooked for me sometimes – she was a good cook – but it was rare. My grandparents had a maid called Maria who was more of a mother to my sister and I than our mother was. E: What was the first meal you remember cooking? D: My dad and my stepmum used to come down to Pippy’s every weekend to see me. My granny would make a pie for Friday night and give me the leftover pastry to fashion into something. They would have to eat it and pretend it was delicious. E: You’ve written four cookbooks now. How did that become part of your professional life? D: I was approached a few years ago to make a sugar-free cookbook as I had started eating without sugar. There was one problem – I wasn’t a chef and I wanted to be totally transparent. So I worked with food writer and recipe developer Catherine Phipps. She made healthier, sugar-free versions of my favourite dishes, then I tried them out and wrote about experimenting with new ingredients, or finding shortcuts or hacks. I’ve got no idea how I got from a nightclubbing, pizza-eating maniac to here. How on earth did that happen? E: Your diet is exemplary, though as a teenager your lifestyle was wild – and dangerous. Is that partly responsible for why you live so healthily now? D: I have a healthy diet to watch my weight and live longer. I can’t take my eye off the ball for a minute! E: Do your children have a healthy lifestyle too? D: I do police their food but not too much. The girls (Davina has three teenagers – Holly, Tilly and Chester) have developed a good attitude to healthy food. Holly, my oldest, is way more of an instinctive cook than I am. She’s always marinating, making rubs, adding seeds, spices, extra fibre here and there. She’s going to study dietetics at university this year. E: How did you feel about your son judging (and eating) all 25 entries in his godmother’s Best Sweet Tournament? And have you forgiven her for making him do it? D: Yes, Emma, I’ve forgiven you for all of your outrageous sweet-themed gifts. Let’s not forget the giant 2kg blue gummy bears you gave him for Christmas. E: Are there any foods that you connect particularly with your sister, Caroline? D: My sister lived with me a lot of the time, which I loved. We cooked together every Sunday – she was my right-hand woman. I really struggled with cooking Sunday lunches alone after she died in 2012. Holly, my daughter, has started cooking them with me now and I often tell her how much it reminds me of Caroline. It makes my heart happy. One of her favourite dishes was poule au pot – poached chicken with a lemon crème fraîche sauce and white rice. So French, so gorgeous. E: Is it strange for you to eat those dishes now? D: Food does bring back enormous memories of both sides of my family. Sometimes happy, sometimes painful, but it’s in a good way. E: It’s big news about you presenting the return of Changing Rooms on Channel 4. Were you always a fan? What do you love about it? D: I’ve always been obsessed with that show. At home, I’m seriously uncreative and need to be hand-held through any home renovations and decorations, so I’ll be learning on the job, too. E: Has the show been updated to speak to a world that has a very different relationship with their homes, and with money? The year 2020 has left so many people increasingly broke. D: It couldn’t come at a better time. Money is tight at the moment so we’ll be looking at affordable, impactful changes that anyone can do, and giving lots of support online. I think lockdown has changed so many things; our use of space, creating home offices, renovating rather than moving. That’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about it. QUICK-FIRE QUESTIONS 5 ingredients you always have and need? Cans of mixed beans, red onions, peppers, quinoa and chicken stock. What would your last meal on earth be? Bangers and mash with peas, or baked beans and onion gravy. The meal you make most often? A ‘picky plate’. One ingredient you couldn’t live without? Salt. One ingredient you hate? Do you know, I really can’t think of one. The meal you find hardest to make? Complicated and ‘bitty’ posh dinners. Find out more about Davina’s health, fitness and well-being website at Own Your Goals. Read more articles by Emma Freud Emma Freud meets Nigella Lawson Emma Freud meets Jason Isaacs Emma Freud cooks for The Rangoon Sisters Emma Freud cooks for Sabrina Ghayour Emma Freud cooks for Rick Stein Emma Freud cooks for Vivek Singh Emma Freud cooks for Nigel Slater
Nigella talks to our columnist Emma about her food philosophy, her zeal for leftovers, the joy of camp cocktail ingredients, and her newest cookbook, Cook, Eat, Repeat.
Nigella Lawson isn’t a trained cook. She creates recipes, but thinks as an eater and writes profoundly on the emotional significance of food. Her first book, How to Eat, became the most valuable food guide of the 90s. Now she’s published Cook, Eat, Repeat, which has changed the way I think about cooking again. Her vegan gingerbread recipe is, according to my son’s college flatmate, the greatest gingerbread of all time. Due to covid restrictions, Nigella has also taken the photos for this feature. Emma: Your twelfth cookbook! Why did you write this one? Nigella: The question ‘why?’ can be such an instant drainer of confidence, as there are so many cookbooks out there, and it’s so easy to think of the many reasons why not to. But, after accidentally becoming a food writer 22 years ago, I think I’ve only just now felt absolutely sure that it’s what I’m meant to be doing. I wanted – partly out of gratitude – to reflect on what I’ve learnt about food, what it means, what recipes can do, what cooking is. E: After all these years, do you still love encouraging people to eat? N: I love feeding people, and I have an evangelical need to share my enthusiasms and convey the deep pleasure I get from food. You know how when you’re eating something wonderful, you want to press a forkful into someone’s mouth so they can taste it too? That’s what I insistently felt writing this. It felt like the right book for me, and that’s a delicious pleasure. E: Did you start the book with a particular mission? N: I don’t think I have anything as highfalutin as a ‘mission’, but I certainly wanted to encourage people to investigate food and think about flavour, and to show how the practical and emotional reside together. I’m not sure it’s something that can necessarily be taught, but in showing the deep joy I get from cooking, I hope readers are led to some delicious wallowing of their own. I also felt a need to show how the fabulous poetry of the kitchen comes out of so many repeated mundane tasks. E: ‘No waste’ has always been a big thing with you. Why is that? N: My inability to tolerate waste has nothing to do with general virtue, I’m afraid. My mother had been a child in the war, and I was brought up never to throw food away, but to use up every last scrap. But, it’s also because piecing supper together out of the bits and pieces lying forlornly in the fridge is where the cook’s true pleasure lies. I think, if you love cooking, you really only feel your creativity being unleashed when you have to make something out of what’s in front of you. Using the water you’ve cooked potatoes or pasta in to make bread, or my banana skin curry – these are two such fond favourites. As I said in How to Eat, cooking, like the sonnet form, is defined by its constraints. And, in many ways, although Cook, Eat, Repeat is a culmination of 22 years of writing about food, it’s also a companion piece to How to Eat. E: There are so many unexpected combinations – marzipan cake, advocaat ice cream, and cooking fennel in martini, then smothering it in gruyère. How do these new ideas happen? N: I don’t have an ice-cream machine, but the idea of a no-churn ice cream that tastes of cheesecake had been dancing on the edges of my mind for a while. I couldn’t get it right until I reached into my cupboard of camp cocktail ingredients and brought out the advocaat. It transformed it instantly! I made the marzipan cake because I had an open packet of marzipan. Have you tried toasting it, then eating it with roasted rhubarb and cream? It’s rapturous. As for the fennel gratin, that was the product of a bout of insomnia! Being a bad sleeper has its benefits. E: You said in the bread chapter, ‘there can be no pleasure without pain’. What does bread mean to your heart and soul? N: Where do I start? I don’t know if there’s any other foodstuff that makes me happier. Is there anything truly better to eat than good bread and butter? It’s not just about the sheer joy of eating bread, but what it means. It feels like – indeed, is – essential sustenance, and yet entirely miraculous at the same time. I love knowing that if I have flour, yeast and water (I haven’t given myself over to sourdough yet), I can magic loaves into being. And, I find making bread so deeply nourishing in itself. The feeling of the soft dough of my old-fashioned sandwich bread in my hands transports me instantly to a safe and calm place. Though much as I love kneading, I am in utter thrall to the life-changing wonder of the no-knead bread recipe in the book. Making it feels like a sacrament, and eating it feels like the profoundest of pleasures. E: Did lockdown change the way you cook? N: I have always cooked properly, even when it’s just me eating, but I’ve never gone so long without feeding other people. I was working furiously, writing and retesting recipes, and I was in total isolation, so it was a long time of feeding just myself. I loved the utter absorption of cooking just for me, the quiet ceremony of it – it was a very pure pleasure, untainted by anxiety. It certainly fed into the book: I added notes for how to change many recipes into solo suppers. E: Do you think lockdown changed cooking attitudes for the country? Did you have a different type of engagement from people wanting – or needing – to cook? N: Yes, I certainly did. I felt that many people who had perhaps not yet discovered cooking’s potential to rub the rough corners off the day, really began to appreciate that for themselves. I also think it allowed people to realise that a recipe can be a starting point, rather than an absolute edict. Having to adapt a recipe to the ingredients you have to hand is what cooking is all about. And, I felt enormously connected to those who asked for tips on Twitter. Cooking is so much about connection, and in that time of isolation, it felt so important to have that conversation; at its most basic, it’s just about shared humanity. E: Are there any qualities as a cook you’d like to have that you don’t? N: Well, I’d start with improving my non-existent knife skills! I have no technique at all. But, whenever I’ve thought of trying to acquire them, I wonder if I’d enjoy cooking as much. Besides, not being an expert is what makes me understand the constraints and fears of other home cooks, and helps me write recipes. Or, maybe I’m just making a virtue out of necessity! E: There are so many cookbooks now, many from non-cooks. Does that make it more exciting, or is it too much competition? N: Well, to the professional chef, I am most definitely a non-cook, so it wouldn’t occur to me to think of others in that way. Besides, I adore cookbooks, and am enormously grateful to other food writers. I don’t think of them as competition, and I’m not trying to fit into any mould – I’m just writing about the food I cook and love. FESTIVE QUICK-FIRE QUESTIONS What will you be doing differently this year? I don’t think I’ll have a lot of people around my table. It’s going to be a small-scale Christmas. What you can’t live without during Christmas My children in the house. Is there anything you’re ditching this year? Parties. Your Christmas comforts Wearing pyjamas and slipper socks for days on end. How long do you tend to spend in the kitchen on Christmas Day? I tend to potter about stove-side for most of the day, very happily. Your tip to compensate for a covid-19 Christmas I’m quadrupling the number of fairy lights and candles, and going into full-on festive mode before we even get to December! Read more articles by Emma Freud Emma Freud cooks for The Rangoon Sisters Emma Freud cooks for Sabrina Ghayour Emma Freud cooks for Rick Stein Emma Freud cooks for Vivek Singh Emma Freud cooks for Nigel Slater
Our columnist chats to the actor about making movies, his Jewish heritage and the ‘mutant’ spaghetti bolognese he’s famed for among his family.
Jason Isaacs is one of the UK’s busiest movie stars. His films include Green Zone, Peter Pan and the Harry Potter series. He’s less well known for his cooking – but as our columnist found out, there’s an Italian chef inside him that longs to be acknowledged... by his children. Emma: Tell me about this bolognese. It’s brilliantly eccentric – how did it evolve? Jason: It started when I was a student living in a shared house in Bristol and the only one who cooked. I could entirely indulge my twin desires: first, that every bite must be a sensory overload of riches – sweet, savoury and spicy – and, secondly, that everyone must be left undoing buttons and groaning with equal parts regret and delight. This recipe wins on both those accounts. E: Do your children enjoy your food? J: An interesting thing happened in lockdown – my kids won’t let me cook. Anything. They want their mum’s dishes and nothing else. I’m hoping it’s less a vote of no-confidence in me, and more a reflection of their hunger for the familiar during this strange time. It’s been great to have this feature as an excuse to cook this over-garlicky version of bolognese that’s usually eaten for weeks afterwards on toast in our house. E: What role did food have in your home growing up? J: I grew up in Liverpool, one of four argumentative brothers. Mealtimes were a deafening battle zone and the anchor points for family life. We lived in a tight- knit Jewish community, but in our house there was never a mention of God. As far as I could tell, the Jewish rituals and festivals were a way to remind ourselves of the many times we survived, and to eat spectacularly unhealthy food to excess. My cooking owes so much to my late mum who made the greasiest, tastiest, heart-attack food in the western world – my dad’s two quadruple bypasses were evidence of that. E: What were her signature dishes? J: Her food fell into two categories: meals I couldn’t get enough of, such as roast potatoes that squirted hot oil across the room when pierced, and the rarely seen Jewish truffle known as the ‘grivener’ (a hardened lump of ultra-concentrated, chewy chicken fat). Then there were those I’d pull teeth to avoid: calf’s foot jelly, anything to do with tongue and the innards of animals – all of it food she’d learned from her grandparents. E: What happened when you left Liverpool for London? J: We moved when I was 11 and I spent my teen years learning to juggle multiple identities. There was the version of me who stayed tribal, hanging with local Jewish friends and encountering the anti-semitic thuggery of the growing National Front. There was the ‘school me’, trying and failing to mix with people whose secular, suburban worlds – though almost identical to mine – seemed utterly alien. And there was the skateboarding-obsessed version, who would sneak down to the South Bank every available second, change uniform and accent, and ride for hours with a rough crowd, trying not to let my Ali-G persona slip. E: Why did you feel you had to be different people? J: I’d been raised to see the world through an us-and-them, under-siege prism, and despite the rise of the fascist party in Britain, it was increasingly clear that the world was not quite as I’d been told. I had a clear sense I’d be leaving a lot behind and felt guilty about abandoning the battleground, but I knew I was going. E: You ended up studying law at university, but then ditched it for acting – why? J: I studied law because I loved an argument – still do – and had no idea what to do when I grew up - still don’t. For the first few weeks I did what everybody else did: drank subsidised alcohol in industrial quantities so I could talk to strangers. I also tried to sound and seem like whoever I was talking to, which, in this case, was a lot of people with double- barrelled names and voices that sounded like the royal family. Luckily, one night I stumbled into an audition for a play thanks to a sign asking, ‘Can you do a northern accent?’ By that point, speaking as a northerner felt like the only thing I knew to be true about me. So I auditioned, got given a part, went to my first rehearsal and was instantly and forever smitten. E: And did it help? J: More than that. Instead of spending my time feeling uncomfortable in my own skin and worrying what people thought of me, I got to spend my time exploring other people’s minds and not giving a monkey what anyone thought of me. I neglected law completely and did extra-curricular drama full time, acting, directing and producing for all three years. When it was time to graduate, a future loomed involving a choice between expensive suits, mortgage discussions and weekend escapes as a lawyer or, as I saw it then, eating beans, wearing sweatpants and complete creative fulfilment as an actor. The sweatpants bit was true, at least. E: How do you decide which parts to accept? J: I do what I fancy, the rest is post-rationalisation. If someone’s written something that I’m interested in, if I keep turning the page, if I can’t tell you what the characters are going to say before they say it, if I think I’m going to be able to do something I’ve not done before – I’m in. I’d like to say I’ve never taken a job just for money, but it’s not true. I’ve done it three times in 32 years. One didn’t even happen. One didn’t turn out too badly, but the other one’s an absolute stinker. E: Do you go through a different process acting in a Hollywood movie, compared to a small indie film? J: Apart from salary, there really isn’t any difference between acting in a blockbuster or a film shot on an iPhone. My job is the same, whether the catering is noodles in a cup or sushi. The satisfaction is to live in my imagination, creating the 99.9 per cent of a person that doesn’t come out in the script. But the embarrassing truth is it’s really nothing to do with the actors. Great three-dimensional writing creates great three-dimensional performances. If you just get out of the way of the writer, you get all the praise that doesn’t belong to you. So that’s what I do – follow the talent. E: How did Harry Potter change your career? J: I was often unavailable for jobs because of filming Potter, and was ruled out of others as being a clichéd casting choice. It’s impossible to know what doors parts opened and which they closed. Did playing the captain in Star Trek prevent me from spinning a light sabre? The truth is, I don’t care! I’m incredibly grateful to be in some of the most beloved films of all time, as the bullying, cowardly, racist Lucius Malfoy. The hardest and most important challenge for all of us, particularly during these surreal times, is to work on waking up and feeling grateful for what we have each day. I’m just so grateful to have been in things that matter to people. E: What’s your career plan from here? J: Career plan? Hilarious! When it’s safe for everyone to work in our industry again, I’ll start to think about it. Right now, there are more important things. There’s a plague to beat and many ways to try and mitigate the worst effects on the most vulnerable. There’s the incredible power of the anti-racism movement sweeping the world and the need to turn that into concrete change. And then, selfishly, I want to help my kids to stay sane and have things to look forward to. I’m not dusting off my tap shoes quite yet. QUICK-FIRE QUESTIONS One ingredient you couldn’t live without? Garlic. One ingredient you hate? Olives. Five ingredients you always have and need? Salt, pepper, oil, garlic and Aretha Franklin. What would your last meal on earth be? Slow. What’s the meal you make most often? Roast chicken with honey and mustard, roast new potatoes caked in paprika, garlic, sea salt and rosemary, and seared broccoli with chilli and garlic. Read more articles by Emma Freud Emma Freud cooks for The Rangoon Sisters Emma Freud cooks for Sabrina Ghayour Emma Freud cooks for Rick Stein Emma Freud cooks for Vivek Singh Emma Freud cooks for Nigel Slater
Our columnist chats to actress, writer and comedian Meera Syal about her Indian food heritage, and tries her signature vegetarian biryani.
Meera Syal is one of my favourite humans. Not only is she a brilliant actress and stunning novelist, but she makes the best vegetarian biryani I’ve ever eaten. Her culinary skills were taught to her by her mother, Surrinder, who lives with her in north London. We talked about her mum’s rural Indian childhood, and Meera cooked me her signature dish. Her husband – comedian and actor Sanjeev Bhaskar – took the photos. Emma: How did your mum become such a great cook? Meera: My mum grew up in a small village in the Punjab, and her family were farm owners so they cooked whatever they had picked that day. They didn’t have fridges, ovens or kitchen appliances, and never wasted anything. Mum grew up making her own butter and yogurt, and the whey that was left over was mixed with spices and drunk as a health tonic, or used as a conditioner for hair to keep it shiny. When she took her father his morning tea, she would swing by the goat, grab the udder and squirt the milk directly into my grandpa’s cup before delivering it. As they didn’t have easy access to doctors or pharmacists, they relied on the medicinal and nutritional value of foods and herbs. They used ginger to help digestion, garlic for colds and blood thinning, nuts to generate warmth in the body in winter, and turmeric as a natural antiseptic, which was often mixed with warm milk. E: She taught you that side of her food culture while bringing up the family in the UK? M: She taught us all these things, so food was always important to us. It was how we kept healthy, but also it was soul-food for my parents as it was a way of keeping their mother country alive. It abated homesickness as well as hunger, and through mum’s recipes I learned about my family history and her childhood. Hopefully I keep those foods and memories alive. E: How hard was it for her to cook when she first got to the UK? M: Mum said that when they first arrived in the early 60s, trying to find garlic, ginger and black pepper was like trying to score crack. (She didn’t actually say ‘crack’ – that’s my analogy!) It was only when people from India set up their own stores that suddenly spices became available and saved a whole generation’s palates. If we had British or Italian food at home, it inevitably had an Indian twist – for example, we added pasta to curry sauce and topped it with chillies. E: What were your favourite foods? M: Like most first-generation Indian kids, I went through a stage of thinking Indian food was boring, and I begged for ‘proper’ food like fish fingers and chips. But mostly anything English on offer in the 70s was a shocker, at least where I grew up. I couldn’t believe how vegetables were boiled to within an inch of their lives and then presented with no flavouring. E: What was your relationship with food? M: I loved all aspects of it, too much. I got chubby around the age of 10 and stayed there for years (quite happily, it has to be said). I always found the transformation of a bunch of random ingredients into something that could make you cry with pleasure so fascinating. Plus our social life, with my parents’ wide circle of Punjabi friends, was centred around food. Our kitchen became an assembly line of aunties cooking vats of curries and mounds of chapatis. We all ate in shifts; kids first, men, then women. E: Was it always the women that cooked? M: Yes – and it always rankled me that cooking was inevitably women’s work. The men would sit next-door playing cards and telling jokes, while the women fed the armies and ate last. I know it was the same for most people of that generation. That has changed, thankfully. I find it bemusing that most famous chefs are men, whereas I think the really creative cooks are the women who transformed whatever was in the cupboard into three meals a day. That’s proper cheffing, not doing something fancy with a blowtorch. E: You said that you can recognise your mum’s food by ‘flavour mix’ – how does that work? M: Every family has their own flavour footprint. We could all probably recognise our family’s macaroni cheese or dhal from 10 others if doing a blind taster. Maybe it’s because food is emotional as well as physical, and it comes with so many associations. In our circles, every auntie also has their own way of cooking. Because nothing was written down, all these recipes were remembered and handed down through making them. So if your family liked huge amounts of chilli in their dhal, that’s how you’re probably going to cook it (and wonder why your guests have their heads in the water jug). E: Have you got family recipes that have been passed down through your family? M: I wish my mum would write a book. I’ve tried several times to get her to transcribe her recipes, but it’s impossible because of the instinctive way her generation cooked their food. Forget about precise quantities – it comes down to a bit of this, a splash of that, cook until you feel it’s ready. E: Is it important that you keep these dishes authentic? M: I’ve definitely had to reinvent some, as we can’t eat the same amounts of fats or spices. They were tailored to people living very physical, oudoor lives, and in a different climate. Cooking has to evolve to stay relevant. E: You’ve a great reputation for bringing bakes into the dressing rooms of shows you’re in. M: I’m a feeder, I can’t help it. I think it’s one of the loveliest ways of connecting with people. I often practice my lines while I’m cooking as they seem to go in better when I’m doing something physical (hence the endless rehearsal room treats). There’s a wonderful connection between the creative back brain and physical body that cooking releases for me. Or maybe I’m greedy and just grab any excuse for a cake. Find the recipe for vegetable biryani in the July 2020 issue of BBC Good Food magazine. Read more articles by Emma Freud Emma Freud cooks for The Rangoon Sisters Emma Freud cooks for Sabrina Ghayour Emma Freud cooks for Rick Stein Emma Freud cooks for Vivek Singh Emma Freud cooks for Nigel Slater
Emma Freud cooks for The Rangoon Sisters
Our columnist, Emma Freud, celebrates Burmese cuisine with Emily and Amy Chung, whose successful supper clubs led to their first cookbook.
The Rangoon Sisters are two young doctors whose Burmese supper clubs became legendary. They came to my house for mohinga – a rice noodle & fish soup described by food critic Grace Dent as ‘the most delicious thing I put in my mouth in 2017’. Emma Did you grow up on Burmese food? Emily Not really – we had a mix of everything. Mum comes from Burma (we still call it that, though it’s now known as Myanmar), Dad was Chinese, and we’re English, so we ate food from all three cultures and more. We often cooked for the family, and made the Christmas dinner while we were still at school. E Why did you both want to work in medicine? Amy We were both good at science, and there was a certain expectation and pressure at our school to go in that direction. But I have no regrets – it’s good. I’m doing psychiatry in east London, and Emily’s in south London working in sexual health and HIV. Emma So how did you end up with a supper club on the side? Amy We wanted to spread knowledge and awareness of Burmese food and what it offers. When we started the supper clubs back in 2013, there wasn’t much access to it and we wanted people to try it. People expect it to be like Thai food – and there are similarities – but it has its own flavours and textures that make it unique. Emily We also wanted to give ourselves a challenge. The food industry is so different to working in hospitals, and it’s quite nice for us to have that break. When you apply for medical school, you have to show you’re an all-rounder, so you’re encouraged to do the Duke of Edinburgh Award, or play an instrument. But when you start work, you don’t have time for any of that stuff. Amy In medicine, we know people that have become burnt out because they don’t give themselves time to do other things. Emma Anything that slows you down and encourages you to look in another direction has got to be healthy. I also cook for that reason. So how did your first supper club come about? Amy We went to an American supper club in Walthamstow that served different cuisines each time. At that point, Burmese food wasn’t something many people had heard of. We already liked cooking and entertaining, so we talked to the man running the event, and he said yes. It wasn’t a thought-out decision – he didn’t know us, but he somehow trusted us to do it. Emma What did you make? Emily The same dish you’re making today – mohinga. It’s the national dish of Myanmar, usually eaten at breakfast, and you can get it on most street corners and in restaurants. Everyone has their favourite vendor, and the best ones sell out quickly. Amy The version we have in Yangon (formerly Rangoon, hence our name) is made with catfish and sliced banana stem. We can’t get those easily here, but you get a good flavour substitute with canned pilchards instead of catfish, and shallots instead of banana stem. It’s comforting, moreish, and full of flavour and texture, including one of our favourite fried foods, pe kyaw – a crispy cracker made from dried chickpeas. Emma Did that first event go well? Amy We had no idea it was going to be so much work to prep and run. We always ask three or four friends to help us – we don’t pay them and they still want to do it – but it’s really hard work. I think it went okay. Emma Do you both cook everything together? Amy We have things that we are better at. Anything deep-fried, Emily loves doing. I’m curries and sweet things. We both do portion control. Emma Is that difficult? Emily At our last supper club, we had 90 people, and when it was over, we had enough noodles left for 90 people. Emma Wow. Massive fail. Your supper clubs tend to donate the profits to charity – how much are you able to give? Amy It depends, but a few thousand. We sent the money from one of the first clubs to a charity called Medical Action Myanmar. They have clinics that focus on HIV and TB. Emily volunteered with them a few years ago on the HIV side of things. As there’s little mental health provision in Myanmar, I taught the trainee doctors and counsellors – they’re so keen to learn new skills. Emily We brought you some treats – a relish called balachaung. It’s dried shrimp, onion, garlic, chilli flakes and sesame. I sometimes have it on buttered bread. Emma Dried shrimp crops up a lot in your dishes – what’s the point of it? Emily It’s so important. Like fish sauce or shrimp paste, it gives it that other layer. All Burmese food looks for a balance between sour, salty and spicy, but unlike Thai food, there isn’t much sweetness. More sourness and ‘shrimpiness’. (I try it – it’s not like anything I’ve ever eaten before, and is a bit like eating a dried shrimp that, just before it was dried, ate a spicy curry). Amy We also brought lahpet – a salad of pickled tea leaves. The leaves look rank on their own, but you mix them with cabbage, fried butter beans, peanuts, garlic, sesame, chilli and some lime. It’s unique to Myanmar. Emma Wow – this is gorgeous. Why have I never even heard of pickled tea before? Amy Partly because it doesn’t look very nice! The tea leaf gives a little caffeine kick – it’s great as a pick-me-up. I once ate a bowl of leftovers and then couldn’t sleep. Emma Your first book comes out soon and it’s so beautiful! Amy I’m really proud of it and excited, though to be honest we’ve been working on it for two years and I’m slightly sick of reading it! But, it still seems unreal that we’re being given opportunities like this. Emma My theory is, it’s karmic. It’s because you’re doctors. If you put healing into the world, good things like this should happen to you. Would you ever do this full time? Emily No, it’s nearly 20 years of my life that I’ve trained to be a specialist, and I couldn’t bear to not do it. The NHS is the best thing ever and I’m always going to be part of that. I don’t want it to end, and I’d never stop fighting for it or supporting it. Not even for mohinga! Find the recipe for mohinga in the May 2020 issue of BBC Good Food magazine. Read more articles by Emma Freud Emma Freud cooks for Sabrina Ghayour Emma Freud cooks for Rick Stein Emma Freud cooks for Vivek Singh Emma Freud cooks for Nigel Slater Emma Freud cooks for Mary Berry The Rangoon Sisters Cookbook by Amy and Emily Chung (£20, Ebury Press) is due to be released 9 July. Good Food contributing editor Emma Freud is a journalist and broadcaster, director of Red Nose Day and a co-presenter of Radio Four’s Loose Ends.
Our columnist chats with the Iranian-born Saturday Kitchen regular about her journey to becoming one of Britain’s best-selling cookbook authors.
Sabrina Ghayour, award-winning author of best-selling Middle Eastern cookery books Persiana, Bazaar and Sirocco, a regular on BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen and guest judge on MasterChef, came to my kitchen where I cooked her amazing baklava buns and we chatted till the cows came home. Emma Did you train as a chef? Sabrina No. Never. But I worked for 17 years in restaurants. I’ve worked in McDonald’s, Pret, I’ve done all the jobs in hotels from switchboard operator to running events and I spent loads of time waitressing when I co-ordinated functions, plus a lot of time in the kitchen. I can run front of house, back of house, I can look at a restaurant with bad service and know exactly what the problem is. There are very few roles in any hotel or restaurant I haven’t done. E Has not being trained ever made you feel ‘less than’ in such a hierarchical industry? S I don’t feel that way, because I know myself and what I’m bad at, and I’m perfectly open, because there’s no shame in not knowing everything about everything. They say that, in business, the people who are most successful are the ones that don’t have a paper education. Heston Blumenthal didn’t train and maybe, if he did, he wouldn’t be making spherical bubbles of salt and vinegar or whatever. E Where do you get this confidence from? S I’m a really hard worker, and I know what I’m capable of. I started work when I was 10, wrapping eggs in a Chinese supermarket for a pound an hour. I’ve always earned my own money and I’ve always cooked. E Why? S I had to – my mother can’t cook to save her life. We lived in Iran till I was two, but when the revolution came, streets were being commandeered and women were being arrested if they weren’t covered up. My grandmother is a glamorous, fierce woman who always refused to be told what to do, so me, my mum and my grandma fled to London. In the UK, I was the one who cooked every family meal. The only thing that was always instilled in me was ‘have your own ship’. When things aren’t working, never depend on anyone else. E Things stopped working so well in your 30s… S I was working in event planning, but in 2011 I was made redundant for the third time. I was unhappy at work, unhappy with myself and broke. But the best things have happened to me when I’ve been in trouble. I’d lost my job, was £40k in debt and I started doing word-of-mouth catering jobs. That was when I realised it was the only thing I was really good at. E Is that when you began your famous supper club? S Yes, I started to think about doing a private supper club, and somebody told me I could never do it. I love a challenge, so it was the best thing they could have said. A famous chef was advertising a seven-course dinner for £250 a head, so on Twitter I said, ‘I’ll do a seven-course dinner for £2.50 – and give all the money to charity.’ People were like ‘What?’ It gathered momentum. I was inundated with offers to help, all via Twitter; farmers offered me food, a whole kitchen brigade wanted to get involved. We ended up with 80 diners, though we could have booked a thousand, and I made £4,000 for the charity. Boom, career formed. E What happened next? S I began smaller supper clubs in my living room, with no help, because I had no money. I’d start prep at 8am and finish at 2am. I’d charge people £40 deposits, make everything fresh, and put on more food than most human beings know what to do with. It was 27 hours of labour for every supper club, earning £200 a time. But I realised that people really wanted Persian food. E How did that lead to your first book? S In 2013 a publisher rocked up to dine – she came back a fortnight later with an editor. The next day I was offered a book deal. They said they wanted my recipes ‘and baba ghanoush’. I said, ‘No. Nobody needs another baba ghanoush recipe. I don’t want to be a slot-filler, that person writing another Middle Eastern cookery book.’ They said, ‘OK. Write whatever you want.’ E What does Persian food do to your heart? S It takes me home. It doesn’t matter where in the world I am, or who has cooked it, in my head it takes me back to being a kid, to loads of family, to being sociable. That’s the thing about Persians, we’re incredibly excitable: a standard Persian party is eight guests, 18 dishes and enough food for at least 30 people. It would be rude if there wasn’t. E Your books are insanely popular now, but you’ve said success can be a double-edged sword. S You can’t be flavour of the month with everyone. I’ve always been Marmite for people, because I’m a woman who is often at the centre of a room, because I’m always chatting, and I’m noisy, which is intimidating for a lot of people. I’m Persian, I’m British, I’m a good cook, I’m a good laugh, I’m an absolute liability on a night out, and I’m a control freak. I’m really scrutinising how you make my baklava buns. E I am particularly fond of the instruction to baste them with butter in the tray halfway through cooking. By the time they come out, they’ve soaked it all up. S Yup. It makes them nice and juicy on the inside. You’re doing a great job. E Now we drizzle them with honey. Here’s a suggestion: we could mix orange blossom water in with the honey before we drizzle it. How do you like them apples? S I do like that, actually. The buns are ready and Sabrina bites into one. E So, how is it? S Dream scenario, my mouth is full, I can’t talk. Though, jeez Louise, you say I’m bossy. Find the recipe for baklava buns in the March 2020 issue of BBC Good Food magazine. Read more articles by Emma Freud Emma Freud cooks for Rick Stein Emma Freud cooks for Vivek Singh Emma Freud cooks for Nigel Slater Emma Freud cooks for Mary Berry Emma Freud cooks for Cerys Matthews Emma Freud cooks for Matt Tebbutt Recipe adapted from Bazaar (£26, Octopus). Good Food contributing editor Emma Freud is a journalist and broadcaster, director of Red Nose Day and a co-presenter of Radio Four’s Loose Ends.