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Oct 7, 2024 | 
theoldie.co.uk | Elisabeth Luard
Pursuits - Cookery
Calling all jam-makers, preservers and picklers – trainees and old-timers. It’s that time of year. Apricots, peaches, damsons and plums are ripe and ready in orchards, hedgerows and gardens throughout the land.
Eliza Acton gets straight to the point with ‘General Rules for Preserving’ in Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845): ‘Let everything be clean and dry. Keep the preserving pan away from the direct heat of a flame or the base will burn.
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Aug 17, 2024 | 
read.substack.com | Emiko Davies |Elisabeth Luard |Saghar Setareh |Nic Annette Miller
This week’s digest was curated by Japanese-Australian cookbook author , who writes on Substack and is the author of six cookbooks. The latest, Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking, came out in October 2023 and won Fortnum & Mason’s Cookery Book of the Year Award. She has lived in Tuscany for the past 20 years.
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Jun 6, 2024 | 
theoldie.co.uk | Elisabeth Luard
This spring, try Regional Cooking of England (edited by Carol Wilson).
It’s a hefty, encyclopedia-sized 650-pager, with 280 updated recipes set out on double-page spreads with numbered steps and elegant, updated photographs. All the old favourites are present and correct – braised oxtail, steak-and-kidney pud, mackerel with gooseberries, angels on horseback, syrup sponge, elderflower cordial – and not a pomegranate seed in sight.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
architectural-review.com | Elisabeth Luard |Kristina Rapacki
The much vaunted Mediterranean diet is at risk of extinction in the face of global heatingThe olive tree has grown in the Mediterranean region, says the fossil record, for 20 to 40 million years. Mediterranean olive groves – the result of a happy conjunction of landscape and latitude – gave rise to one of the oldest civilisations on Earth.
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Feb 5, 2024 | 
theoldie.co.uk | Elisabeth Luard
Once in a blue moon, Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day, as it does this year.
Decisions, decisions. Sins of the flesh or sackcloth and ashes? No need to choose. Cover both bases with a batch of home-made chocolate truffles and a couple of fiery little salsas that’ll make even the shortest of Lenten commons taste good.
Chocolate truffles
Roses are red, violets are blue and if you’ve already spent the winter-fuel payment, so are you.
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Jan 9, 2024 | 
theoldie.co.uk | Elisabeth Luard
Cornwall are wrong to put their jam on first, says Oldie cookery correspondent, Elisabeth Luard
Jam first or cream? That is the question.
Devon and Cornwall disagree. The Queen's pastry chefs have revealed they follow the Devon pattern - cream first, then jam.
My source of all things Cornish informs me that the true Cornishman (woman or child) spreads the jam first, cream second and would not do it any other way for fear of rioting in the streets and exile across the border into Devon.
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Dec 14, 2023 | 
perspectivemag.co.uk | Elisabeth Luard
How does a culinary icon earn a literary reputation? Certainly not through writing cookbooks. In what was once the land of meatloaf and spam fritters, attitudes to what’s for dinner may have changed since 1950, the date of first publication of Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Food, but good writing is not the reason that cookbooks sell by the million. Mrs David earned herself literary respectability not because she wrote about cooking, but in spite of her choice of subject matter.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
theoldie.co.uk | Elisabeth Luard
Gather rosehips while ye may… for jelly and syrup when perfectly ripe and red, ideally after the first frost has had time to soften the skins. Lacking frost, pop your gatherings in the freezer overnight. Both wild and garden varieties are ready now – or shortly will be – and all are suitable.
To fill a couple of 1lb jars, you'll need 500g hips, same volume of water, same weight of sugar.
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Aug 24, 2023 | 
theoldie.co.uk | Elisabeth Luard
Stay at home this summer with Daniel E Bender’s The Food Adventurers, a gloriously entertaining survey of gastronomic travellers’ tales from Toronto University’s Professor of Food Studies.
The story runs from the mid-19th century till the Instagrammers take over and we can watch from the safety of our armchairs as the late Anthony Bourdain swallows a cobra heart live on TV (sorry, folks!).
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Jul 27, 2023 | 
theoldie.co.uk | Elisabeth Luard
Nettles, our closest plant companions, are enthusiastic colonisers of compost heaps, rubbish dumps and anywhere (let’s not be dainty) where gentlemen empty their bladders. It's all about the alkali, you understand. Once established, Urtica dioica is around for ever. Archaeologists will tell you that a patch of nettles is a sign of human habitation long after the stones they're looking for have tumbled.
