Are desserts the forgotten art? So many cookbooks are packed with astounding starters and mains, yet inexplicably tail off when it comes to desserts. Perhaps it’s because we don’t get excited about desserts as we did when children. Today as adults we often prefer cheese, feeling that desserts are bit bad for us or a bit self-indulgent. Once upon a time, though, everyone’s mother could make all kinds of desserts, knocking up trifles in an instant or assembling a fabulous sponge cake in an afternoon. And we lapped them up. Read more

You’ve got to love a book that has an embossed beer mat on its cover. Well you have to love a book about beer anyway don’t you? In a London where ‘cooking lager’ has become ubiquitous and any request for ‘bitter’ gets you the kind of look you might earn if asking for a Pink Gin, decent beer is having a tough time of it. Indeed breweries that have been around for a hundred years are closing and being turned into flats. So if you ever wanted to live in a brewery, chances are that if you have the cash now you can. Read more

Not so long ago a book of Great British Cheeses would have been a contender for the title of Shortest Book Ever. Stilton, Cheddar, Wenseleydale and errmmmmm does Primula count? Today we are lucky to be in the middle of a British cheese resurgence with more people making cheeses than perhaps ever before. Great cheeses too, ones that can, and often do, appear on the tables at top London restaurants.

Regional, seasonal. Seasonal.regional. This the mantra most London restaurant chefs are muttering to themselves as they scurry round their kitchens. Vegetables are interrogated harshly. ‘Where do you come from? How did you get here? Show me your papers, bitte.” It has become a commonplace to say both that vegetables taste better the fewer miles they travel to get to the plate, and that the anticipation and consummation of waiting for each vegetable to be in season is a great part of the pleasure of eating them.

This book is breaking my desk. It isn’t just heavy; it’s condensed neutron heavy and requires two hands to lift. Drop it and it might go through the floor like a cartoon grand piano and not stop till it gets to the boiler room. Its weight is in knowledge. A thousand ‘every day’ recipes that are easily achievable and remarkably varied and that can turn a non-cook into a chef and take a middling cook up a lot higher. Read more