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Friendless Churches and Faithless Futures – Steeple Chasing by Peter Ross

One boon of the lockdowns, as we sought solace beyond our isolation, was stumbling upon digital escape routes for which we felt a kinship. Mine were strangely consoling. Among the social media tumult of misinformation and malice what a relief each day to receive via Twitter an Eric Ravilious artwork (@Ravilious1942) or a snatch of Seamus Heaney verse (@HeaneyDaily)? Best of all was my discovery of the Friends of Friendless Churches. I was not alone – there were 46,000 followers of @friendschurches helping spread the word about a tiny 65-year-old charity ‘caring for 60 redundant but beautiful places of worship in England and Wales.’

I also follow @BatsinChurches. This project tailors the interests of our 18 native species to the delicate structures they choose to inhabit. Both these niche organisations – the first mostly privately resourced, the second a Heritage Fund recipient, each a labour of love – get their moment in the spotlight in Peter Ross’s vivid trawl across the ecclesiastical edifices of our island, Steeple Chasing (Headline, £22, published May 11).

Friendless? St James, Llangua
Abandoned – St Peter’s Seminary

Appropriately enough, Friendless Churches is the focus of the chapter titled Dust. The author meets its director, Rachel Morley an Irish woman in her thirties, on site on a bend of the River Monnow just across the Welsh Border. St James Llangua is nearing the end of its working life. It’s not in a good state. Can they afford to rescue it it? It will take £300,000 to fix the roof and make it safe. That’s half of the Friends’ annual income. 

Further chapters are entitled Steel, Fire, Stone, Bone, Fen, Light etc in this award-winning Scottish feature writer’s neo-WG Sebaldian quest for meaning among the steeples and bell towers. Elegiac, yes but more… The melancholy element is inevitable, if not as pervasive as in its predecessor, A Tomb With A View: The Stories and Glories of Graveyards (Headline, £20).

That came out in 2020. This suggests a publisher cashing in with a quickfire follow-up. Far from the case. Steeple Chasing is given an extra dimension by the intervening pandemic. The quirky stories are still there, as is Ross’s wry charm, but essentially this is a book about people caring deeply. About the fabric of churches and the fabric of community. It has become a state of the nation book. While focusing on structured religion in decline.

The dressing-up box meets secret anointment excesses of this weekend’s Coronation (of the ‘Defender of the Faith’) made me wish for a simpler communion with history. Alone in a Norman church, perhaps, among fields. Such architectural survivors, of course, feature in Simon Jenkins’ comprehensive England’s Thousand Best Churches, which offers a star rating for each. This can easily become a tourist ticker exercise. I say this as a man already compiling a Steeple Chasing bucket list. On it for starters are two slightly spooky churches – Holy Trinity at Stow Bardolph in Norfolk and St Peter’s and St Paul’s at Chaldon in Surrey.

Effigy of Sarah Hare
Section of the terrifying mural at Chaldon

The former is host to a life-size wax effigy of one Sarah Hare, a member of the local gentry who died aged 55 on April 9, 1744 ‘after poisoning her blood with the prick of a needle’. It was her wish to be memorialised this way; the body itself is buried beneath the church floor. The face is “plump and over-ripe, ingrained dirt gives the impression it is veined like cheese, The eyes are blue. Dark curls fall across the forehead. The effigy has grown grubby and worn. The neck and décolletage are filthier than the face and the hands are filthiest of all. Her left index finger is coming away at the knuckle, “ writes Ross.

He compares the experience to Dorian Gray, Miss Havisham or the end of Don’t Look Now. “It would be the most natural thing in the world, the most dreadful thing in the world, if she smiled.” After which he takes tea with her descendant, Lady Rose Hare, who is rather fond of Sarah. The only other funeral effigies in the UK are in Westminster Abbey. Surely some Royal hangers-on were auditioning for the part last Saturday.

Grand Guignol in pictorial form at the Chaldon church, tucked in a fold of the North Downs. Dating back to 1170, ’The Ladder of Salvation of the Human Soul and the Road to Heaven’ is a 17ft by 6ft red mural depicting purgatorial torment. Demons stir a cauldron full of murderers, a hell hound chews a woman’s arm, devils press forks to the head of a money-lender until white-hot coins spill from his mouth. How precious to find such a masterpiece still in situ rather than transported to a museum.

As so often in the book, Ross’s empathy comes to the fore. Acknowledging it is intellectually quite complex, offering new ideas about the afterlife, he writes that “the total  effect is visceral. It must have been a fearful experience for medieval churchgoers to stand facing the altar with this horror show behind them. I bet they smelled the sulphur. I bet they felt the heat on the back of their necks.” 

Linking it tenuously to Picasso’s Guernica, Ross concludes: “it seems both ancient and queer and radical and modernist”. That could apply to Stanley Spencer. In the same chapter, Paint, Ross takes in his vast religious war painting, Resurrection of the Soldiers, at Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, Hampshire. I love these (sic) leaps of faith throughout Steeple Chasing.

The book ranges far beyond country churches. Sheela-na-gigs and other ruderies, wooden angels among Norfolk rafters, Glastonbury’s sacred springs, the abandoned brutalist seminary of St Peter’s outside Dumbarton. The mighty centres of Christendom are also tackled – Lindisfarne, Durham Cathedral, St Paul’s. With the latter, in the Fire chapter, his fascinating tangent features the air wardens who stood sentinel over it during World War II, when miraculously it survived. My favourite London contribution, though, is in the next chapter Cats. Worth buying the book just for this account of a feral Borough Market ratter enlisted to serve in the same capacity at adjacent Southwark Cathedral. Christened Doorkins Magnificat, she patrolled the grounds by night and found favourite spots inside to snooze during the day. This famous feline even met The Queen on one royal visit. 

Alas, Doorkins’ eventual end was hastened by being caught up in the 2017 Islamist terror attack on London Bridge with its fleeing crowds, sirens and flashing lights. After the Cathedral doors were blown open in a controlled explosion, she was never the same cat again. No spoilers. Buy this fabulous book to find out what happens to Magnificat.

A YouTube postscript

Each time I finish reading a Peter Ross book there’s a pattern developing. I Google a film. In the case of A Tomb With A View it was One Million Dollars, Anife Kellehers’s documentary about Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery that’s also an elegy for its legendary tour guide, Shane MacThomais (who committed suicide aged 44, though that’s not mentioned in the film). It’s a remarkable watch.

In Steeple Chasing John Betjeman’s A Passion for Churches gets a mention in relation to Norfolk’s rich holy building heritage. The BBC screened it in  1974 and it’s still available grainily on YouTube. Watch it and be amazed at how 50 years has transformed Britain (an absurd lapse into medieval kingship ritual aside). Did people really look like that? Was it all so grey? It out-Larkins Larkin, a vastly superior poet to Betjeman (witness Church Going or An Arundel Tomb). And yes, at least in the country parishes, we were still clinging on to being a church-going nation.

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Proudly playful, Gurdeep’s Mother Tongue is an Asian cuisine game changer

Take in the Indian food shot above. The mutton keema is adapted from a recipe by my beloved Dishoom, the paratha was bought in frozen, while the date and tamarind chutney and coriander/mint dip were both home-made. Star of the impromptu tiffin, though, is hidden under that tangle of radish sprouts. Step into the spotlight Gurdeep Loyal’s Punjabi Ranchero.

It comes from his Mother Tongue (4th Estate, £28) and follows the template of this utterly utterly distinctive cookbook, whose playful manifesto proclaims: “Food is a living form of culture that evolves: its boundaries are fluid, blurred, porous and dynamic… authenticity is an unending reel of culinary snapshots, an evolving spectrum that captures many transformative moments along flavourful journeys in generations of kitchens.”

So where we are at with this “second generation British Indian food writer and home cook, a descendant of Punjabi farmers and Leicester market traders with big appetites” is a dish such as this ‘Aloo Chaat Wedge Salad with a Pink Peppercorn Ranch Dressing’. Potatoes and chaat masala meet American iceberg lettuce dressing. His aim? To marry the “same splendidly kitsch garnishing skills as Indian street snacks” with the “Fanny Craddock meets breakfast buffet school of culinary arts.” Cue some ‘visual mood board’ fantasy about the iconic Fanny sporting a sari on Christmas Day!

Gurdeep’s revelatory cookbook
Starring lasagne rolls

Like all the 100 determinedly hybrid recipes in his debut collection, it works a treat. Hard to imagine in advance Gurdeep’s anarchically fusion take, Lasagne Rolls with Kasunda Keema (the recipe for which is at the end of this piece), but I was won over by his introduction to it. A charming, accomplished writer, he is as good on intros as tweaking traditional food styles.

“It was the daytime clubbing scene where the boundaries of bhangra and Asian underground were pushed, blending Punjabi folk music, classical Indian melodies and Bollywood anthems with hip hop, R’n’B, soul, dance and garage. I remember South Asian friends bunking off college on Wednesday afternoons, heels in their bags, to get to afternoon raves. 

“Created by and for the diaspora, they served a generation of young adults, united by a need to party coupled with a need to be at home in time to make roti. I encountered offshoots of the scene much later, through the queer-desi night Club Kali and sporadic bhangra DJs that played Popstarz at the Apollo. Those 2am moments on the dance floor were rare times I could be every layer of my identity at once, illuminating with lasers what was often concealed by the code-switching of my life by daylight. Identity is like lasagne: each layer unique, but transformed when brought together as a whole.”

Spices have a key role
Gurdeep Loyal

A professional level cellist, 39-year-old Gurdeep can’t resist peppering his food writing with musical analogies. Born in Leicester, he has pursued his passion for flavours across an eclectic career path that has included helping grow Innocent Drinks and exploring global food trends for Harrods and Marks & Spencer. All this while coping with plural identities as a British-born son of Punjabi immigrants. He recognises the irony of the title Mother Tongue when his mother will never have the English language skills to read it.

And, of course, there is another Loyal identity – as a gay man. It’s not the kind of memoir that dwells on prejudice and the struggles that brings. For that try The Go-Between by the equally flamboyant Osman Yousefzada (Canongate £14.99). He wrote: “My parents come from an underclass; they were illiterate and couldn’t read or write in any language.…they came from humble rural areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan and moved to the UK in the early 1970s to fill the low-level jobs no one else wanted.”

Much of his account is of a child perceptively exploring the confines of the immigrant ‘ghetto’ that was Balsall Heath, Birmingham and the restrictions on women, particularly his beloved mother and sisters. Eventually, he breaks through the barriers to reach university in London, starting his own fashion label (Beyoncé and Lady Gaga were clients) and more recently becoming renowned as a multi-disciplinary artist.

Osman Yousefzada
Nik Sharma
Mayukh Sen

Brought up in America, another gifted gay writer Mayukh Sen trades less on his Asian descent (Bengali). His own breakthrough book of 2021, deals with the marginalisation of female voices within a patriarchal 20th century culinary culture. Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women who Revolutionised Food in America (Norton, £11.39) profiles cookery writers familiar to me on this side of the Pond – Italian champion Marcella Hazan and Indian Julie Sahni, restaurateur and recipe rival of the higher profile Madhur Jaffrey – but the remaining five were equally fascinating in their struggles to promote their authentic cooking styles.

These may seem yesterday’s battles when we now have a bewildering proliferation of cookbooks defining authentic cuisines of nations, even regions. And with one click online you can source multiple variants of one exotic recipe or other. In the midst of this tumult my tip is to seek out those second generation Asian writers who are not on repeat, who have loyalty to tradition but bend it to their own culinary will. 

I’d first recommend the remarkable Nik Sharma, California-based molecular biologist/photographer/cookbook author and, a theme developing, also gay. Start with Saison (Chronicle Books, £25), then move on to the more challenging, science-based The Flavor Equation (Chronicle Books, £26) and perhaps his A Brown Table website.

Ravinder Boghal
Meera Sodha
Cynthia Shanmugalingam

In the UK women writers are to the fore. Sumayya Usmani blends an expectation-defying memoir and a contemporary take on her native Pakistani cuisine in Andaza (Murdoch £20). Meera Sodha’s Made in India and Fresh India (both Penguin Figtree, £20) are my go-to weekday meal gospels. Her story, too, is one of emigration. She was born in Lincolnshire to Ugandan Indian parents and the cross-fertilisation shows in a dish like a brussels sprout thoran and she is not too purist to promote a curry featuring a Lincolnshire sausage. On the fipside, I’m not sure how much beaching up in Coventry from the Tamil northern tip of Sri Lanka has influenced Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s recently restaurant Rambutan near Borough Market. Her cookbook of that same name is a retro look at the (delicious) family food she grew up with and its transformation in exile, while not shying away from the tragic sectarian strife of her homeland.

More recently another second generation Punjabi, Sarah Woods, in her Desi Kitchen (Penguin, £30), has charted the diaspora of a variety of regional Indian cuisines in assorted UK regions, again recognising the mutations of ‘authentic’ dishes. Ravinder Boghal, Kenyan-born to Indian parents, doesn’t even claim, in her Marylebone restaurant Jikoni and the cookbook of the same name to be remotely ‘traditional’. ‘Proudly inauthentic recipes from an immigrant kitchen’ is the sub-heading of Jikoni (Bloomsbury, £26).

Crab crumpets
Chalai chicken wings

I’m a big fan of Ravinder’s paneer gnudi with saag or clove-smoked venison samosas with beetroot chutney but, for the moment, I‘m loyally smitten with Gurdap. Oh, those Coconut Crab Crumpets with Railway Crispy Eggs (I kid you not), Tahini Chalai Chicken Wings, Hariyali Coconut Fish Pie, Miso-Masala Fried Chicken Sando, Desi Kofta Meatballs with Sticky Mango-Lime Tomatoes, Sweet Chilli-Gunpowder Roasted Cauliflower, and Chocolate-Orange Jalebis. Pure genius. Meanwhile, finally, lasagne as you’ve never known it…

Kasundi keema lasagne rolls

(Serves 4) 

For the kasundi keema: 

2 tbsp ghee 

2 large onions, finely chopped 

1 tbsp coriander seeds, crushed 

1 tbsp black mustard seeds 

1 tbsp cumin seeds 

8 garlic cloves, very finely chopped 

2 tbsp finely grated fresh ginger 

2 tsp chilli flakes 

500g minced lamb (20 per cent fat) 

2 tbsp Garam Masala (see page 23) 

2 tsp fine sea salt 

5 tbsp tomato purée 

2 tbsp dark brown sugar 

3 tbsp apple cider vinegar 

½ x 400g can of chopped tomatoes 

For the cheese paste: 

200g mature Cheddar cheese, grated 

2 tsp cumin seeds, crushed 

3 tbsp coarse semolina 

1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper 

1 egg, lightly beaten 

For the greens: 

200g cavolo nero, coarse stalks removed 

1 tbsp English mustard 

4 garlic cloves, very finely chopped or grated 

4 tbsp lemon juice 

For the lasagne rolls and tarkha: 

10-12 lasagne sheets 

500g jar of tomato pasta sauce 

2 tbsp vegetable oil 

30–35 fresh curry leaves 

1½ tbsp black mustard seeds 

1 tsp chilli flakes

Method

To make the keema, heat the ghee in a large pan, add the onions and cook for 7–8 minutes until golden. 

Next add the coriander, mustard and cumin seeds, cooking for another 2–3 minutes, before adding the garlic, ginger and chilli flakes. Now add the lamb, browning for 4–6 minutes before mixing through the garam masala and salt. Finally add the tomato purée, sugar and vinegar, along with the tomatoes. Simmer and reduce for 5–7 minutes, then set aside. 

To make the cheese paste, mix all the ingredients together into a crumbly mixture. 

For the greens, boil the cavolo nero in salted water for 5–6 minutes until tender, then blend with the mustard, garlic and lemon juice into a thick smooth paste. Add a little water if needed, then let it cool. 

Preheat the oven to 200°C fan. 

Cover the lasagne sheets with boiling water and leave for 4–5 minutes to soften a little. Slice each lasagne sheet down the middle lengthways, making 2 strips ready for rolling. 

Take one pasta strip, spread with 1 tablespoon of the mustard greens, sprinkle over some cheese paste and finally add a spoon of keema. Roll up tightly into a snail. Repeat to form all the lasagne rolls. 

Pour the jarred tomato pasta sauce into an ovenproof dish and tightly pack in the lasagne rolls. Cover with foil and bake for 25 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for a final 10–15 minutes until piping hot and crusty on top. 

Meanwhile, for the tarkha, heat the vegetable oil in a pan, then add the curry leaves, mustard seeds and chilli flakes. Sizzle for 1 minute, then drizzle over the baked lasagne rolls just before serving. 

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Still squeamish about squirrel eating? Well, from little acorns…

Bushy-tailed serendipity rules. There I was, digging out my copy of Robert Owen Brown’s Crispy Squirrel, Vimto Trifle to check out what, as ghost writer, I’d written about the origin of Eccles cakes – for a review of a new biography of 18th century cookery writer/force of nature Elizabeth Raffald –  and realising the book is a decade old this year. I still remember the legal worries we had about Vimto challenging the use of their brand name and my own stickler qualms that really it should not be ‘Crispy’ but ‘Crisp’.

In the same week I spotted on social media one of those weary local newspaper clickbait forays – ‘The Manchester restaurant serving up WLD SQUIRREL to adventurous diners’. The story claimed: “For many, it was seen as a culinary step too far, with some urging the restaurant to ‘please leave the squirrels alone’. Others said they drew the line at ‘creamy rodent stew’, but there were also a fair few who were keen to give it a taste.”

Crispy Squirrel recipe. Images and design by Joby Catto, Anti (Design Services) Limited

The admirable Street Urchin in Ancoats  weren’t exactly skinning endangered red squirrels for the pot, just taking a sustainable approach to the over-abundant grey variety, duplicating pretty much (with interesting twists) Rob’s Southern-fried recipe that put the crispy into deep-fried rodent parts. See below.

Street Urchin chef/patron Kevin Choudhary at Street Urchin has subtly modified his take on buttermilk fried rabbit since the press exposure, partnering it with home-made black pudding, puy lentils, wild garlic and pickled blackberry salad.

Earthy flavours there to echo squirrels’ woodland habitat. 20 years ago Fergus Henderson gave it his own ‘nose to bushy tail’ treatment, braising it with bacon and porcini. That was at his St John restaurant alongside London’s Smithfield Market, which I’m sure didn’t trade in squirrel meat.

The best place to buy it (as recommended in Crispy Squirrel) is the Wild Meat Company in Woodbridge, Suffolk, though I‘ve just checked with their website and it’s fur-on only at the moment, not the ‘oven ready’. Rachel Choudhary tells me squirrel is available from their supplier, the Cartmel Valley Game. Her husband Kevin once worked for Robert Owen Brown, who in turn is an acolyte of Fergus Henderson. From little acorns, as they say.

Whatever your source, do bear in mind it tis one whole squirrel per person. The only substantial fleshy bit is the haunch. Otherwise, it tastes like a subtler version of rabbit with the same low carbon footprint and available the year round.

The Wild Meat Company suggest an alternative recipe to make the most out of this lean beast – roasting it with squash sage or hazelnuts. Or maybe give it the ragu treatment.

Still there remains a taboo feel to squirrel. Like badger hams, horse meat or Mexican mole (oh, no, that’s something quite different). Mountain folk in America’s Deep South are not so squeamish, even if the racoon (different family from the squirrel) apparently makes better eating. 

Not that everyone subscribes. US President Calvin Coolidge was sent a raccoon from Mississippi to be served at the 1926 White House Thanksgiving dinner. Rescued from that rocky fate, Rebecca was kept as a pet by First Lady Grace Coolidge.

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Elizabeth Raffald presents ‘Rabbits Surprised’, ‘Pigeons Transmogrified’

ECCLES cakes  and orange custards. Blame it on a pair of puddings for a mutual obsession with the greatest English cookery writer you may never have heard of. My own interest in Elizabeth Raffald was piqued a decade ago during research for Crispy Squirrel and Vimto Trifle (MCR Books) by chef Robert Owen Brown. She was one of his culinary heroes and when we included a recipe for Eccles cakes it turned into a homage to this 18th century cookery writer/entrepreneur, who led a remarkable life. Not just as housekeeper of stately Arley Hall (above).

Her own hugely influential The Experienced English Housekeeper of 1786 contained a ’receipt’ for ‘Sweet Patties’ that’s not a million calories from Eccles’ finest, even if the ingredients include boiled calf’s foot, apples oranges, nutmeg, egg yolk, currants and brandy, in puff pastry, and it could be baked or fried.

Meanwhile Dr Neil Buttery, scientist and fledgling food historian, had already chanced upon Mrs Raffald’s recipe for Seville orange custards in English Food by the great Jane Grigson, another Raffald fan. Levenshulme-based Neil famously went on to blog his attempts to cook every recipe in her 1974 classic. Now finally he has authored a biography of Elizabeth Raffald that encompasses the huge impact she had on Manchester beyond the dishes she created and catalogued so brilliantly. It’s enthralling.

That the book is titled Before Mrs Beeton is a polemic provocation. Brand Isabella Beeton has never faltered since her untimely death at just 28 in 1865, four years after the publication of her Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Dr Buttery points out chunks were compiled by anonymous contributors with much copying of recipes and her husband soon sold the copyright, allowing it to be modified over successive editions. “Contrary to public perceptions,” he writes, “Beeton is less the Nigella Lawson or Delia Smith of her day and more the Colonel Sanders.”

Contrast with Elizabeth Raffald, the real deal, publishing 800 recipes. most tried and tested by herself. Indeed the only time this stellar cookery phenomenon “missed a trick”, in Buttery’s words, was with those prototype Eccles cakes, which she developed at her bakery shop in Manchester’s Market Place.

The Guardian of the time reported “a worthy female leaving her, and going to settle at Eccles, Mrs Raffald made her a present of the recipe for this dainty, which made the recipient’s fortune, and that of her niece, who succeeded her in the business – many thousands of pounds having, we are told, been realised by this sweet little monopoly.”

Not that every recipe in The Experienced English Housekeeper is as accessible or as ‘monetizable’, to use that dyspeptic tag. Take ‘Rabbits Surprised’ or, my fave, ‘Pigeons Transmogrified’. The first requires “Take young Rabbits, skewer them and when they are roasted, draw out the Jaw-bones and stick them in the eyes to appear like Horns… stick a bunch of Myrtle in their Mouths, and serve them with their Livers boiled and frothed.”

The Pigeons get off lightly. They are stuffed into hollowed out cucumbers with heads sticking out with ‘a bunch of barberries in their bills’.

Such elaborate show at table is a legacy of her time as housekeeper at Arley Hall, Cheshire, where her aristocratic overlords loved tounleash a ‘Grand Table’ banquet on their guests – some 75 separate dishes on more than one occasion. Other challenging recipes included one for turtles, using their blood and fins and, of course, an elaborate mock turtle substitute. Yet also in the book you’ll find simple dishes that seem quite modern like the first mention in English cookbooks of macaroni cheese and burnt cream (creme brulee by any other name).

The book is split into three parts – the first dedicated to browning, soups, fish, plain meat, game, pies and puddings, the second covering confectionery and ‘directions to set out a table in the most elegant manner and in the modern taste.’ In the third she discusses pickling, potting and distilling. Eminently practicable if you discount the likes of staggeringly elaborate pastry work. Elizabeth can also lay claim to creating the first English wedding cake, as we know it.

Though she wrote English Housekeeper in Manchester, its gestation was undoubtedly at Arley Hall, four miles from Lymm, where  she arrived from her native Yorkshire as Elizabeth Whittaker in 1860. For four years she was housekeeper for Lady Elizabeth Warburton, to whom she later dedicated her book, before marrying the head gardener John Raffald and moving to Manchester. After which it’s really hard to keep up with her hyperactive schedule. in the midst of compiling a series of Manchester business directories  – the original ‘yellow pages’ – launching an employment agency and two newspapers, promoting what might be the first ever ‘ready meals’, running shops and public houses, including her own, The King’s Head, she gave birth to at least nine children. 

Eventually it all went downhill until she died suddenly aged 47, of a stroke or aneurysm, in   1781. Husband John’s alcoholism undoubtedly contributed to the business failure, but she showed him little sympathy. One one occasion he was drinking heavily and feeling suicidal. When he said he wanted to drown himself, Raffald replied: “I do think that it might be the best step you could take, for then you would be relieved of all your troubles and anxieties and you really do harass me very much.”

Dr Buttery is compassionate:“He’s the perfect scapegoat, the one who caused the collapse of Elizabeth’s empire, hurrying her death as she exhausted herself… but the truth is Elizabeth was working too hard before the coffee house, indeed even before the King’s Head; working too hard was her natural state and something was going to give eventually…

“Elizabeth’s untimely death released him from the life choices he had regretted, a life that led him into a depression he self-medicated with alcohol, a life that took away his wife. Returning to his beloved brothers and working in the family gardens was the only sensible thing to do.”

Elizabeth was buried in the Old Church family plot in John’s home town of Stockport, but you can’t locate her gravestone because John couldn’t afford to pay for an inscription. That run-down Exchange Coffee House, the Raffalds’ last venture. was on the site of today’s Selfridge’s. Check out the discreet blue plaque to Elizabeth on the side of the store. Market Place, epicentre of her commercial success, was destroyed by World War II air raids. Arley Hall, much changed architecturally from her tenure, remains the sacred Raffald place.

And it’s here that I like to think of Elizabeth in culinary over-drive. This new Buttery book, like its precursor, The Dark History of Sugar, occasionally gets bogged down in heavily researched historical context (nothing that keener editing wouldn’t obviate), but it’s at its best when the author’s deep empathy with kitchen practice comes to the fore. It inspires me to recreate one of those ‘receipts’ that earned Mrs Raffald such a following (including Queen Victoria).

So let’s conclude with an ode to flummery. We are back in the exhausting territory of those Arley banquets with their emphasis on display and munificence. In her book Elizabeth includes a table plan for her ‘Grand Table’. Fortunately diners weren’t expected to devour every dish of the litany of delights – mock turtle soup, broccoli, kidney beans, bottled peas, salad, house lamb, fricassee of veal, a small ham, sweetbreads, ox paletts, ducks almonde, boiled turkey, pigeon compote, chicken fricassee, haricot beans, beef olives, hare soup, florindene of rabbits, pork griskins, larded oysters, sheep’s rumps and kidneys, cod sounds, French pye, lambs’ ears stuffed with forcemeat and transparent soup.

And the flummery then? Her actual menu is mind-bogglingly labour-intensive. With a wacky whiff of Heston Blumenthal about it. Let me quote Dr Buttery’s paraphrase: “Jelly and flummery were the media of choice for 18th century ‘subtleties’. They were made from gelatine derived from calves’ feet, ground hartshorn or, on fast days, isinglass extracted from the swim bladders of sturgeon. (I’m tickled by one of the author’s acknowledgements – “I’m also indebted to Ellie Huxley for going through the rigmarole of of making Mrs Raffald’s calves’ foot jelly, so I didn’t have to.”)

“Flummery was a sweetened dish made from the boiling of cracked oat grains in water. The resulting opaque ’stock’ was strained through cloth, flavoured and sweetened. Once cool, it set to a delicate jelly. Elizabeth needed her flummery toto form a wobbly, quivering but ultimately stable structure, and therefore made hers from almond milk mixed with calves’ foot jelly, rather like a modern blancmange or panna cotta.”

Don’t even ask how all this segued into gargantuan, moulded creations such as ‘Eggs and Bacon in Flummery’ and the cochineal and brandy driven showstopper, ‘Solomon’s Temple in Flummery’. To find our more you’ll have to acquire Dr Buttery’s excellent tome.

Upstairs and downstairs incarnate, all this endeavour was about creating an “immersive experience for guests while, Elizabeth, the creator, worked tirelessly with her staff out of sight and earshot in the hot, noisy kitchens.

Before Mrs Beeton – Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper by Dr Neil Buttery (Pen and Sword Books, £20) is out now.

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Source yourself some reindeer brains – how to keep the Noma flame burning at home

It all sounds a mite deja vu Noma announcing 20 years on from its foundation it will soon be abandoning the formal restaurant concept that finally won it a third Michelin star in 2021. Adding to its cluster of World’s No.1 restaurant awards that focused the world’s eyes on the culinary wizard of Copenhagen, René Redzepi.

Didn’t that previous groundbreaker, El Bulli in Catalonia close its doors to customers a decade ago to mutate into a culinary research laboratory? The critical Sabatier knives were out then for the perceived pretension. Not everyone had bought into the refined spheres of ‘molecular gastronomy’ and the heavy-handed satire of recent movie The Menu is witness to continuing hostility to a fine dining world few of us can afford – or, when it comes to epic tasting menus, tolerate.

As with El Bulli the broadsheets were quick to react to the Noma ‘bombshell’ with ‘Is This There End for Fine Dining?’ headlines, Observer critic Jay Rayner wading in with ‘Twenty Six courses. £400 bills, artichoke creme brulee… I won’t miss super-luxe restaurants’.

He has got form for whacking bloated, exorbitant establishments, but Noma is a different beast despite its exclusivity. I remember a leaner Rayner lauding Redzepi in the same pages back in 2009 when he was viewed as a natural successor to super chefs Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal. Since when the Dane’s templates of foraging and fermentation have filtered down to absorb a whole generation of chefs.

It’s not even clear what form Noma 3.0 will take when it emerges at the end of 2024, the statement hinting “serving guests will still be a part” of a “Noma Projects’ experience that will not be a conventional restaurant. What is certain is that the team will decamp to Kyoto in Japan between March and May 2023. So Japanese influence looks certain. A previous sabbatical foray to the Yucatan in 2017, while the Copenhagen base relocated to include an urban farm, resulted in the swerve in direction that became Noma 2.0.

Simon Martin was along for that Mexican ride and the success of his Michelin-starred Mana in Manchester is proof the expensive tasting menu experience is not dead. I‘m a fan and last year I endorsed the multi-course extravaganza offered by Gareth Ward’s mighty Yynyshir. At both these places the waiting list stretches into the distance. Expect Noma now to be even harder to get into despite a dinner menu for its recent ‘game & forest season’ that cost £415 a head with an additional £214 for wine pairings or £154 for juice pairings. 

Or you could just buy the book, Noma 2.0: Vegetable, Forest, Ocean

Quite a stocking filler. 2.5kg is a lot of cookbook. Particularly for one without printed recipes. And ingredients you are unlikely to pick up at your local Waitrose. So what makes this magnum opus (Artisan, £60) my Food Book of 2022? Pipping very different, pleasurable tomes from Jeremy Lee and Debora Robertson, it is the polar opposite of their domestic charm. Lord Sauron to their Hobbit. Except, tenuously extending the Lord of The Rings conceit, it ultimately casts a near Elvish spell.

Beyond its extreme pictorial beauty there’s nothing approachable and immediately useful about this latest edict from the realm of Copenhagen’s Noma restaurant and its shape-shifting magus, Rene Redzepi. That may represent its true magic.

Regular readers of this blog will recall my (rewarding) travails tackling 2018’s Noma Guide to Fermentation. The new book is more a follow-up to Rene’s original mission statement, Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine (2010), tracing the literal journey that took Noma from derided obscurity to world’s best restaurant. Noma 2.0 records the leap forward, via a sabbatical that involved ‘cuckoo nesting ‘in Mexico, to a new custom-built site in the Danish capital with that radical fermentation lab to the fore, providing all the menu’s building blocks. Noma is relocating to Kyoto, Japan in spring 2023 and friends close to the operation tell me that might mark a radically different stage 3 in its restless evolution.

The story so far is captured by the remarkable photography of New York-based Ditte Isager, who is on back on board for the new book, more brilliant than ever. Her startling image of Blue Mussel and Quail Egg (above) represents an element in one of the three seasonal sections. Ocean reflects the menu for January to April. The others are Vegetable (May through August) and Forest (September through December) – teasing us with 200 dishes in all.

Noma 2.0 on its new site
Redzepi with his co-authors

Let Rene and his co-authors explain: “This book is a cookbook, but it is not necessarily meant to be cooked from. At Noma we constantly return to nature as a primary source of creative inspiration, however, creativity is a unique process for each individual. This book is meant to help catalyse that unique creative spark for each reader. If you do wish to recreate any of the dishes, there is a QR code in the book which will bring you to every detailed recipe exactly as they are used in the kitchen at Noma.

“It is about composing a plate that delights the eye as much as the palate, whether through the trompe l’oeil of a “flowerpot” chocolate cake or a dazzling mandala of flowers and berries. It is about pushing the boundaries of what we think we want to eat—a baby pinecone, a pudding made of reindeer brain—to open our palates with startling confidence.”

Let me quote one daunting dish description. It’s my promise to myself next year, aided by what lies through the QR portal to recreate Noma’s Wild Boar and Nasturtium. That’s ‘Forest’,  I’ll have hang fire until Fall. The journey starts when “nasturtium leaves are compressed with parsley oil, then folded over dots of gooseberry-coriander paste and smoked egg yolk paste to form nasturtium ravioli. 

“Chestnuts are cooked in smoked butter until crisp and caramelised, glazed in roasted kelp salt, peaso reduction and smoked seaweed shoyu, and then diced. Fermented wild boar belly is fried to brown its surface and then sliced. Smoked egg yolk paste is piped onto the boar slices, which are then topped with the diced roasted chestnuts and folded to enclose the fillings.

“Three fermented wild boar belly wraps are brushed with chestnut smoked butter and briefly grilled over charcoal. The belly wraps and one nasturtium raviolo are skewered with a blackcurrant wood skewer. The belly wraps are brushed with cep tamari and seasoned with ancho chilli paste, quince vinegar, salt and black pepper. The skewer is served on a hay plate with a wedge of Japanese quince.” 

Or maybe I’ll divert to the more straightforward Sikha Roast, one of many deer recipes, including Reindeer Brain Jelly or Reindeer Marrow Fudge or, gulp, Reindeer Penis Salad. Off-puttingly exotic? Definitely, but what shines through is the determination to make the most of whatever is local and seasonal and sensual. Here not just empty nods to fashion. And if it’s not our ‘local’ who cares? That’s no excuse not to buy an exquisitely beautiful volume for the foodie in your life.

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Happy 25th to Paul Heathcote’s landmark Rhubarb & Black Pudding

The last time I ran into Matthew Fort he was with fellow food critic Tom Parker Bowles at Booths Salford Quays flogging an upmarket brand of pork scratchings they were both associated with. They later jumped ship when the actual producers abandoned a core selling point – the use of English pigs. 

Not the high point of Fort’s championing of British food. That would have to be the publication 25 years ago of Rhubarb and Black Pudding (for evocative northern cookbook titles it vies with Crispy Squirrel and Vimto Trifle, in which I admit a vested interest). I hugely enjoyed his foodie romps around Italy on a Vespa, but his account of a year in the Lancashire kitchen of chef Paul Heathcote was equally evocative… and benchmark influential at the time. A real fly on the wall record of an exceptional restaurant’s workings and relationship with suppliers in the unlikeliest of regional settings.

In the preface Fort wrote of the Eureka moment of his first visit to the Longridge Restaurant – to review for The Guardian. “I was immediately transfixed by the style and quality of the food. I was served poached salmon with a courgette flower stuffed with courgette mousse, smoked chicken and broccoli soup, slow-roasted shoulder of lamb braised with an aubergine mousse, and chocolate parfait with honey and oatmeal ice cream (all for £12.75!). Although the influence of French cooking and finesse were uppermost, nevertheless there was English sensibility running through the flavours, the textures, the combination of ingredients.”

The influence of one of Paul’s mentors is obvious. On occasions he had crossed swords with Raymond Blanc while working for him at the Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons but also found inspiration for when he set up his own restaurant. Aged just 29 and with a £200,000 loan he opened in 1990 and within four years had won his own two Michelin stars.

I treasure my copy of Rhubarb & Black Pudding as much as the memories of meals Paul cooked for me over the years. But as 2023 stumbled into life it took an image re-Tweeted by my friend, the food historian Dr Neil Buttery, to tangentially remind me of its distant impact. Ah, rhubarb. There, glowing enticingly crimson in a custom-built ‘forcing’ shed in Pudsey, West Yorkshire, was the first of the new season crop, due to be harvested by candle light in a week’s time.

The social media charting of the coveted stalks’ development is a recent phenomenon, but Twitter poster Robert is the fourth generation Tomlinson to grow forced rhubarb by this traditional method. The plants first spend two years outdoors to harden against frost, then are brought in to a dark, heated habitat, to grow quickly, while straining for light. Once ready, the spears are picked by candlelight because too much light causes photosynthesis, which can halt the growth of the crowns. This process produces a sweeter fruit with a white core – a kind of Rhubarb ‘premier cru’.

It’s estimated only 12 such producers remain across the ‘Rhubarb Triangle’ between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell. Originally the trade benefited from a surplus of cheap heating coal from the local pits.

Paul Heathcote’s rhubarb source has aways been from nearer his Lancashire base in Longridge – via long-time veg and fruit supplier Eddie Homes, who set up a supply chain of raw materials of the quality he required.

“Rhubarb and asparagus were just two items we persuaded local allotment holders to grow for us,” Paul tells me as I catch up with him at Preston North End, another connection that goes back a long way. His Heathcote & Co team have been responsible for match day dining and events since launching in 1997 (with a six year hiatus). His flagship restaurant, eponymous Brasseries and Olive Presses are now all in the past, the Longridge site forlornly on the market, but his corporate catering business maintains the iconic Heathcote brand. 

No looking back for Paul? “Until you told me I hadn’t given it a thought it was a quarter of a century since the book came out. It certainly took longer to do so than we envisaged! It was expected to come out in 1996 or 1997 after first being mooted in 1994. 

“I remember vividly Matthew turning up at what was our makeshift front door – we were having a new kitchen fitted on the other side. He’d got off the train at Preston and, satchel on his back, walked the 14 miles as the crow flies, a lot of it along an old railway track. It was a warm day and he looked knackered.”

Matthew Fort’s personal Lancashire journey had begun long before. The family home for generations was Read Hall, near Padiham, his father (who died when Fort was 12) the MP for Clitheroe. After Eton, the food critic to be studied at Lancaster University, further sowing the seeds of his knowledge of the county’s topography and cuisine. 

The acquaintance was resumed during his exhaustive research for Rhubarb and Black Pudding. Paul agrees with me: “Yes, there was a lot of Matthew in the book, but there have been few better evocations of how a restaurant works. Certainly not a place as off the beaten track as ours.”

A quarter of a century on what still shine vividly are the portraits of the suppliers who Paul cultivated primarily to have the freshest raw materials to hand. “It was not deliberate policy on my part to promote the area’s produce as such. It never occurred to me to put images of my suppliers on the walls. Good products come to you or in some cases you create them. There was so much enthusiasm but it could be a slog at times. In Fleetwood Chris Neve (still an active supplier of fine fish) got it straight away. Reg Johnson down the road recognised what I wanted but it took a bit longer to produce the quality of corn-fed poultry I required. It was frustrating at times, there were failures along the way if I’m honest.”

Still poultry farmers Johnson and Swarbrick never looked back as top-end restaurants across the land coveted their speciality chickens and ducks. And Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire cheese from down the road gained much needed national recognition. 

Black pudding, too, got a serious profile upgrade thanks to Paul. And it was all down to his old friend and Ribble Valley gastro rival, Nigel Haworth, once of Northcote, now back at the Three Fishes, Mitton (where he once dispayed images of his suppliers).

“We were in a team of chefs, who travelled over to Champagne and had to cook for our French equivalents and Nigel challenged me to create something different. So I decided upon my own refined version of black pudding and it was a success – the dish I’m most proud of.

“I used to make black pudding from scratch, using fresh blood in those days, but after BSE came along we had to change to powdered. The texture of the original was different – much creamier.”

It all seems far off now. The last black pudding of PauI’s I tasted was in a main at The Northern, a restaurant Heathcote & Co launched briefly pre-Pandemic inside the town hall complex of his native Bolton. It tasted good but no fine dining aspirations with its mustard grain sauce, mushy peas and triple-cooked chips. Alas, no rhubarb on the menu. Maybe it was the wrong season. Maybe you can be too elegiac.

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Please spare the pineapple! Parsi puts Dhansak in proper perspective

Pineapple as pubic enemy number one? We all know how divisive it is as the Hawaiian Pizza topping alongside its sidekick, ham. Not just Neapolitan diehards rail against this perversion of the One True Pizza. This version was created in Canada 60 years ago by a Greek immigrant called Sam Panopoulos (the ‘Hawaiian’ comes from the canned brand he used). Yet it’s not being ousted from our supermarket chill cabinets any time soon.

Similarly ‘old school’ curry house menus still feature Dhansaks given a sweet kick by the addition of pineapple chunks to the chicken/lamb and lentil template devised by its creators, the Parsis. As with our lager lout Anglicisation of Vindaloo, that subtle Goan vinegar and garlic driven pork dish, into the tonsil-cauterising ‘hottest curry on the menu’, so too our Indian restaurant ‘soft option’ Dhansak’ is a culturally appropriated travesty.

Give them their due, most Indian cookbooks omit the pineapple, but rarely put the dish in its Zoroastrians-in-exile context. Parsi – From Persia to Bombay: Recipes and Tales from the Ancient Culture (Bloomsbury, £26) does. All the more surprisingly, its author works at the heart of a very British culinary stronghold. Farokh Talati’s day job is as head chef at Fergus Henderson’s St John Bread and Wine in London’s Spitalfields.

One Parsi recipe that definitely straddles that restaurant’s ‘nose-to-tail’ ethos and Farokh’s heritage is Masoor Ma Jeebh (lamb’s tongue, masoor dal and spinach) It’s definitely on my kitchen bucket list. Less so a little chicken gizzard number, another nod to authenticity. 

I was drawn to his new book because I envisaged it as a companion piece to Dishoom: From Bombay With Love, one of the most glorious cookbooks on my shelves – inspired by the Irani (Parsee) cafes of Mumbai. I was eager for a bit of back story. The Dishoom tome is a celebration of a much-loved London (and Manchester) brand via an evocative homage to its creator’s home city, but its recipe roster strays across the Sub-continent.

Equally personal, Parsi, is more specific, offering historical context from the introduction onwards… “Around the seventh century, during the Arab conquest of Persia, a small group of Zoroastrians fled persecution by sailing from what is now known as Iran and found themselves on the shores of India. The community that originally settled in Sanjan became known as the Parsis because of their Persian heritage, and throughout the centuries they spread across India”.

Bombay (Mumbai) was for many the final port of call. The newcomers assiduously learned English to become indispensable to their imperial masters, but the Indian assimilation started in Sanjan a few miles inland from the Gujarat, coast. Regard it as a landing stage for a resourceful, adaptable religious group, who brought with them the remarkable flavours of their homeland – dried fruits, nuts, saffron, and rice. In Gujarat they learned to fuse these with Indian spices and extended their cooking range to include fish.

The result many Parsi dishes are balanced between sweet, sour, savoury and salty. Traditionally that balance was achieved with the use of brewed cane sugar juice, affectionately nicknamed ‘Parsi vinegar’ and jaggery (reduced cane sugar). Native coconut  fitted into the scheme of things, but maybe canned pineapple was a sweetener too far.

Dhansak and ‘brown’ rice
Pineapple pizza

Which bring us back to Dhansak, which is the quintessential Parsi dish. In Farokh’s recipe – sourced, like so many, from his family – the meat is mutton, brined first, and on the bone. Four types of lentils are slow cooked with vegetables, squashes, spices, onion, ginger, and garlic for a long time until the mutton is tender. It is then served with caramelised onion rice and jaggery.

What sets it apart from your Rogan Josh or your Dopiaza is the effort needed to make the Dhansak Masala – involving 15 spices and counting. Farokh’s dishes generally require a beyond fast fix degree of attention. No bad thing. The lockdown was a boon for this busy professional chef in perfecting dishes for the book.

He recalls: “Even though it started a couple of years before the pandemic, the majority of the book really got going during lockdown. I got very bored in the first two weeks, so every Wednesday, I’d go into St John, when it was closed. I’d type up a three-course Parsi meal, cook it that day, and finish and hand-deliver it to the locals on Thursday. That helped me refine the recipes and get feedback.”

When I’ve filed this piece I’m beginning preparations to cook my own Dhansak. The mutton is merrily defrosting. All the spices for the Masala are gathered in rank, just awaiting the belated arrival of the black cardamom.

Check: coriander seeds, cumin seeds, bay leaf, black peppercorns, dried Kashmiri chillies, green cardamom pods, caraway seeds, cinnamon (or cassia bark), cloves, ground fenugreek, mace blade, grated nutmeg, poppy seeds, saffron, star anise, ground turmeric, mustard seeds, one whole black lime.

That latter element is the cultural giveaway. It is essentially Persian, reminding us how far the Parsis have travelled. I’ll alert you to the success or otherwise of my personal, pineapple-free Dhansak voyage of discovery via social media. Now where in the store cupboard are all those lentils?

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Butter, sugar, wine and wellbeing – my favourite food and drink titles of 2022

Here are my favourite food and drink books published in 2022 with something to suit everyone’s prezzie stocking. I make no apologies for kicking off with a couple addressing, in their different approaches, a wellbeing approach to eating. The health of our planet seems inextricably bound to the healthiness of what we eat.

Food For Life by Tim Spector (Jonathan Cape, £20)

Initially sceptical about yet another nutritional gospel, I was won over by the famous epidemiologist dissing ‘superfoods’ and proclaiming his own food passions, which include dark chocolate, red wine and butter alongside all those key ferments, kimchi, kombucha and sourdough bread. Such food choices for health? Im with him all the way.

The new tome is an upgrade on his The Diet Myth, (2015), which popularised the idea that each of us has a unique and constantly changing gut microbiome that is crucial to our health and 2020’s Spoon Fed, in 2020, which debunked a legacy of food misinformation that encourage us to consume many products that are of scant nutritional value. The microbiome continues to take centre stage but the research message is that each individual’s ideal diet is different and common sense should prevail.

Healthy Vegan Street Food by Jackie Kearney (Ryland Peters & Small, £20)

A key element in Spector’s message is the importance of plant-based while avoiding the trap of vegan ready meals. He is keen on spices too, so Jackie’s latest book, revisiting her food discoveries across South East Asia, is a natural companion in the stocking. The former MasterChef finalist expounds on the health value of these tasty cuisines in my recent interview with her. What really impresses is, seven years on from her debut cookbook, the lack of recipe duplication alongside the lessons she has learned about the health value of ingredients as she tackles he own auto-immune issues.

Rambutan: Recipes from Sri Lanka by Cynthia Shanmugalingam (Bloomsbury, £26)

Like with buses, you wait around for ages for a definitive book on Sri Lankan cookery and then two come along. Compendious indeed is Hoppers, from the London chain name-checking the savoury rice crepe synonymous with the island, but I prefer this more narrative-driven alternative with its 80 attractive recipes, including fabulous mutton rolls. Coventry-born Cynthia’s family hails from the northernmost tip of Sri Lanka – Tamil territory – and the book does not shy away from the terrible conflicts as it explores the ravishing culinary culture. Above all, it is a celebration of a family in exile maintaining its links via food.

Notes from a Small Kitchen Island by Debora Robertson (Penguin, £26)

Now for a read that is less dramatic but with it own distinctive, domestic voice. The chapter names reveal the wry take on food from this erstwhile Daily Telegraph columnist: No one wants brunch’; ‘Why everyone hates picnics’; ‘How to survive having people to stay’; ‘unInstagrammable, that’s what you are’. Like Nigella Lawson, I am a fan of this diarist, whose kitchen apercus straddle Co Durham and the Languedoc. 

Here’s Debs on Roast Lamb with Durham Salad: “ My slow-roast lamb is luscious and garlicky, which would probably have offended my northern antecedents, who greeted the arrival of garlic in the trattorias and brasseries of County Durham circa 1970 with no small amount of suspicion, bordering on disdain. My mother, being a free spirit and one of the first people in the county to wear cork wedges, suede trouser suits and, famously, a crocheted bikini made by my Auntie Dolly, was an early adopter and always loved, and still loves, garlic, so this is for her.”

Cooking: Simply and Well for One or Many? by Jeremy Lee (4th Estate, £30)

Distinctive voices? Well that surely bring us to ‘national treasure’ candidate Jeremy Lee, whose debut cook book has been rapturously promoted. For once, happy to endorse; this really is an instant classic – my prime Christmas prezzie recommendation. I devoted a whole article to his recipe for salsify but in my heart of hearts would settle for the signature sandwich at his Soho restaurant Quo Vadis – smoked eel.

Butter: A celebration by Olivia Potts (Headline, £26)

Jeremy Lee prefers light, unsalted butter for cooking and baking. In her debut cookbook Spectator magazine `Vintage Cook’ columnist and former barrister Olivia begs to differ. Salted is her go-to in th fridge. Who’s to argue with a cook devoting 350 pages to the glorious (and healthy) key to so many culinary delights. I’ve been cooking from it ever since it dropped through my letterbox – most notably a Wild Mushroom, Tarragon and Mushroom Pithivier.

A Dark History of Sugar by Dr Neil Buttery (Pen & Sword, £20)

Sugar – now there’s another much-debated kitchen essential, this time with a troubled history to match its place on the table. I interviewed the Levenshulme-based (and yes sweet-toothed) food historian about his research which encompassed the murky worlds of both slavery and later, teeth-rotting commercial exploitation. Dark stuff indeed, but this is a delightful read, if not for the squeamish.

The World of Natural Wine by Aaron Ayscough (Artisan, £31.99) and The Wine Bible by Karen McNeil (Workman, £31.99)

Two very different approaches to wine writing, each to be treasured, both authors from the States. Natural wine proselytiser Ayscough is based in Beaujolais, the crucible of the natural wine movement thanks to certain key figures over the past four decades. Across 400 pages he traces that timeline in depth, exhaustively explaining what make this alternative ethos superior to mainstream ‘manipulative’ winemaking. 

Karen McNeil’s encyclopaedic tome runs to 700 pages and embraces the mainstream. The first two editions have old more than 800,000 copies. This updated third now has the advantage of colour and whole new chapters on Great Britain, Croatia, and Israel. he chapters on France, Italy, Australia, South America, and the United States are greatly expanded. What I like are the little sidebars on regional food or culture anecdotes. A great, approachable yet opinionated entry in the ever-evolving world of the grape.

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My favourite books of 2022 – ecology, poetry, fiction, art and memoir 

Fen, Bog & Swamp by Annie Proulx (4th Estate, £16.99)

In my intro to my food and drink book recommendations I traced links between the health of our food and the wellbeing of our planet. Ecological devastation is now a subject occupying so many creative minds. So it is no surprise, with this slim volume, to see Pulitzer-winning novelist Annie Proulx enter the field – or should that be wetland? The book’s subtitle says it all: “A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis”. If that sound a bit grey, don’t worry. The glorious prose that infused novels such a The Shipping News is still present. The 87-year-old, now based in Washington State,  is particularly acute in her lament for the draining of the UK’s own Fenlands. Such an eco-system, if treated better, they prove vital to the world’s salvation, she argues.

Ephemeron by Fiona Benson (Penguin pb, £12)

Poetry is so often a celebration of the natural world. Prime contemporary example: Alice Oswald’s Dart. I hugely admire the work of our current Oxford Professor of Poetry but there are the other outstanding female voices out there. Devon-based Benson has garnered awards for her previous two slim volumes but this is  a step-up, bravely and tenderly confronting family shibboleths, the love, the fear. Central to the volume is her ‘Translations from the Pasiphaë’, which violently re-tells the Greek myth of the Minotaur, as seen from the point of view of the bull-child’s mother – the betrayed and violated Pasiphaë. Hard not to weep when she calls for her lost son: “They took him away from me/and they killed him in the dark, for years.”

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber, £10)

Forget Sally Rooney, Elmear McBride, Anne Enright, the finest Irish female fiction writer de nos jours is Claire Keegan. If her miniaturist tendencies suggest a lack of ambition, consider what resonates most when reconsidering Joyce – Ulysses or Dubliners. Her latest work, a novella really, clocks in at 110 words but within is a whole universe of nuance. The story ought to major on the shame of a Magdalene Laundries discovery but at  its core is a small town coal and timber merchant, disaffected with what life and family expects of him. Genius.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (Picador, £16.99)

The New York-based fashion designer turned chronicler of the Glasgow of his youth has sold more than 1.5 million copies of his debut novel Shuggie Bain on the back of its Booker Prize victory. Superficially this follow-up might sound more of the same, especially with it depiction of a gay boy dealing with a feckless mother he loves. It has it own strengths, though, charting first sexual awakening against a backdrop of sectarian violence. The fishing trip to a Highland loch is a tour de force of numbing exploitation.

Act of Oblivion By Robert Harris (Hutchinson, £22)

I felt I ought to include a genre fiction best seller. The obvious choice was Ian Rankin’s A Heart Full of Headstones, but there was a melodramatic edge to it that seemed strained, as crime lost out to historical fiction in the shape of Harris’s gripping, at times hallucinatory account of two Roundhead colonels being hunted own across an untamed 17th century America. The fugitives’ crime that has put a price on their head? To be complicit in the execution of Charles I. It’s all based on real characters, though Richard Naylor the regicide fanatic on their trail, is an invention of Harris’s.

The Escape Artist  by Jonathan Freedland (John Murray, £20 )

Another true story of escape and redemption that is all the more amazing for not being fictionalised. Aged just 19 in April 1944, Rudolf Vrba and a fellow inmate became the first Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz against terrible odds. The Slovakian had committed to memory every heart-wrenching detail of the camp and his mission was to alert a world that must be told the truth. Painstakingly researched and utterly gripping, it us up there with the great Holocaust accounts of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel.

Endless Flight by Keiron Pim (Granta, £25)

I’ve finally got round to reading The Radetzky March (Granta, £9.99) thanks to the spur of the first ever biography in English of the Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth. The novel, his greatest, is a lament for the old Hapsburg order, banished forever by the Great War, in which Roth fought. His middle years were spent restlessly reporting from the frontline as the Nazis rose to power. From Jewish peasant stock in Galicia, he used Vienna as the launchpad for a lucrative but spendthrift journalistic career that took in Berlin, Prague, Moscow and finally Paris. Living in hotel rooms, taking root in bars, coping with his wife’s schizophrenia and his own infidelities, finding his fictional voice late. Apt then the title of Kieron Pim’s exemplary account of an undervalued genius. Roth died, an alcoholic, aged 44, in a Paris pauper’s hospital in May 1939.

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf (John Murray, £25)

Jena has always felt under the shadow of Weimar in the timeline of German culture. Think again. In the 1790s this tiny university town was the cradle of th Romantic movement with poets, critics and philosophers engaged in a free spirit whirl of relationships, both intellectual and sexual. My personal hero from this romp of a book is the more buttoned-up resident, Friedrich Schiller, who was addicted to the smell of rotting apples – “without it he couldn’t live or work,” his wife Charlotte told his literary soulmate Goethe, retching after discovering some in a drawer.

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars by France Spalding (Thames & Hudson, £35)

It started with Eric Ravilious joining Paul Nash and Lucian Freud in my pantheon of 20th century English painters. I passed hours of lockdown dreamtime in their company via surveys by the like of Alexandra Harris and Martin Gayford. This substantial summing up is the icing on the cake, introducing me to some lesser-known byways of the English artistic landscape. Critic Herbert Read thought the Twenties and Thirties “more vital and experimental than at any time since the Renaissance.” 

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan (Canongate, £20) 

Disaffection ought to be at the core of Nick Cave, coping with the untimely accidental death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015. The demons are all confronted in his remarkable Ghosteen album. But here in this extended ‘conversation’ with veteran journalist and mate Sean O’Hagan he finds solace in grief and traces the visionary, redemptive paths of his now epic musical career.

Holding Tight, Letting Go by Sarah Hughes (Blink, £16)

A book about terminal cancer that celebrates life. Sarah was one of my dearest friends and this posthumously published series of articles, full of her distinctive voice, resonates on every page. I could never share her passions for horse racing, bonkbusters or shoes; her hugely popular Guardian blogs about Game of Thrones and Line of Duty passed me by because I never fancied the programmes. Maybe I should have listened to her. In her 40s Sarah lived with terminal metastatic cancer for over three years and died in April 2021. Throughout that period she hymned all the small wonders and joys that made holding tight so important. Forensically she charted how the topography of her body altered during chemo. Dresses she fancied would now fit her! How rare to find a book with such an inevitable denouement bursting with such laughter and joy. 

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A very healthy conversation with Jackie Kearney on her vegan travelogues and Italian wellness plans

Seven years separate your latest book, Healthy Vegan Street Food, from Vegan Street Food (and amazingly it’s over a decade since your statement breakthrough on MasterChef). How has the profile of plant-based cuisine changed in that time?

The landscape has changed so much I hardly recognise it any more!  Plant-based food has become incredibly politicised through the growth in veganism. Which has been both a good and bad thing. On the one hand, there exists quite a hard and sometimes judgemental line about a strict vegan lifestyle but also the increase in the number of people, all people but especially omnivores, eating plant-based food. With the wide availability of products, it’s such a big shift in how people eat. I think people (esp. the younger generations) have embraced this more flexitarian approach to eating and it’s definitely a good thing for them and the planet. Like anything in life there also appears to be a polar opposite response too, that’s quite hardline from dedicated carnivores. As a former sociologist I find all that quite interesting.

How important to the growth of veganism is the kind of South Asian food you promote?

I think we should all be incredibly grateful to the cuisines across Asia because there’s so much more function, health and respect in their cooking overall. South Asian food is more evolved from accessibility and seasonality, rather than relying on Dutch hot houses or globally shipped foods. And, of course, it has many ancient cultural and religious practices that have informed and shaped how people eat. We have so much to learn from Asian cultures in terms of plant-based food. Vegan mock meat was essentially invented in China by the Han dynasty over 500 years ago. 

Jackie’s previous books

The new book is no rehash. Hardly a duplicate recipe in there. Even the travel element is updated. The emphasis is on that word healthy, all aspects of which you explore. Is that growing awareness the main difference?

I think the book reflects both my own journey and also what’s going on around us – that people are more interested in wellness and health now. Although I grew up in a family that was always quite healthy, I think we just know so much more now. Having the opportunity to travel has taught me a lot from other countries approaches to health and wellness. Functional medicine is huge in the US. Sadly it’s quite hard to access that kind of healthcare here in UK. And even those who do have access pay a high price for that.

But I’ve always been interested in wellbeing and health. I worked for the NHS as a researcher in evidence-based practice for 18 years before MasterChef. After I became unwell due to an autoimmune disease I began studying nutrition and developing my expertise in creating healthier food (that’s still amazing to eat).

What are your major healthy eating tips?

Mostly plant-based whole food most of the time. The whole food part is important. If you’re eating vegan ready made crap from the supermarket then you’re going to feel like crap. 

My main tips are firstly making some time for prep. Having real food prepped makes it a lot easier to eat healthier while leading busy lives. Number one for me is batch cooking. You can also prepare one meal while prepping some things for other meals. So I always make at least one sauce (such as a simmered tomato sauce) that I can use in two or three dishes. I usually make this while making another meal such as batch cooking a stew, soup or dal. Something that’s protein-packed, with mushrooms or tofu/tempeh plus lots of fresh veggies. I always have cooked rice in the fridge, as cooled, cooked rice has a much lower glucose curve – and is the easiest thing to stir-fry with fresh veggies. Make it black or red rice and you’ve seriously raised the antioxidant and fibre game! Black rice is also higher in protein and rich in anthocyanin – the same thing that makes blueberries so blue (and good for us).

I always take prepped food when I’m on the go as well because we tend to eat more rubbish when we’re caught out hungry out of the house. I don’t eat gluten, so instead of grabbing a sandwich I’ll have homemade energy bars in my bag – there’s a fab recipe or two in Healthy Vegan Street Food. Or I often post recipes on my Instagram for healthy snacks and treats.

I also try to eat seasonally and locally where possible – apart from my spice emporium at home. Now I’m living in Italy it’s easier to eat like this as it’s simply how their markets and produce are run. Imported goods are super expensive.

Hara bean cutlets from the book
Spinach dosas

How big a part has your own auto-immune problem played in this?

It’s played a big part really. I was always pretty healthy until my 40s. Being a former researcher I became laser focused on finding answers. But what I’ve learned, like any good researcher, is I have a lot more questions. Social media would have us believe we can cure ourselves of all kinds of diseases but I think this is unfair at best and dangerous at its worst.  It can make you feel like you’ve failed if you don’t get better. But the truth is, you can only make the best of your own situation. There are no cure all easy answers sadly. We can keep ourselves in the best shape possible, so we are in the best place to handle whatever comes at us, physically or mentally. That’s all we can do.

What are your feeling about the rash of vegan ready meals?

It worries me a lot. On the one hand, as I mentioned before, it’s drawn more people into eating plant-based. And to be fair, if they’re choosing a ready made vegan lasagne over a readymade meat lasagne, then at least it’s a small change. But we have to compare like with like, and ready made food is not great for us and should not be the main part of our diet. We need to eat whole foods, mostly plants, fresh and raw foods, fermented foods, healthy proteins and fats, this is true whatever our dietary choices and even more so as we age.

This is what I wanted Healthy Vegan Street Food to be about – healthy real food that’s more balanced and considered when it comes to nutrition. It’s a focus on making sure someone whose diet is primarily plant-based, would be getting most of the nutrients they need. If someone is solely vegan then you will always need to supplement a little. But to eat well for most of the time, the food has to be delicious and that’s what I wanted to create. So it’s possible to have treats and snacks as well as gourmet banquets, that are flavour-packed but also satisfying. 

How important is a plant-based cuisine in the fight against global warming?

We know that the commercial production of food impacts climate change in quite drastic ways. Obviously capitalism is, well capitalising, on the whole plant-based market. As it is too with the wellness industry. But we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. We need to take better care of the planet and ourselves. And while it’s just a small thing, I feel that creating exciting, healthy and delicious things to eat made of plants is a pretty good place to start. 

Tell us about your current location in Italy – a far remove both from Chorlton, where you lived, and your Far East adventures.

We moved to Italy just before Brexit. Then the pandemic hit, which slowed our project plans down immensely – as it did for everyone. We moved here to Liguria to create a business that was more aligned to a healthier way of life. We have been building a retreat in the coastal mountains. Nothing complicated or any nutri-nonsense. Just simple principles of Move Well, Breath Well and Eat Well. Looking at the evidence base, these simple principles can give us the longer, healthier and happier life we all hope for. So yoga and hiking, cold water swimming and biodynamic breathwork (think Wim Hof) and together with delicious food and plant forward cookery lessons.

Your ‘Winter Reset’ programme is about to launch. Tell me about the aims of your Wellness Italy project.

This is our first opening for the retreat, so it’s a bit of a soft launch before next year. Our aim is to test the programme before we open the glamping site in the spring. This Winter Reset retreat is focused on yoga and breathwork, with accommodation in the village rather than camping on this occasion. 

We have some incredible teachers coming to support our guests. I actually met one person at a retreat in Thailand and have done some work with her since. I knew I wanted her to be part of the programme as a teacher. We hope next year that we can offer affordable retreat places for people who really need the opportunity. 

I’m well aware that it can be an elitist type of holiday. But we’re aiming to make it something more accessible. Everyone deserves to feel healthier and happier, not just those who can afford it. So we hope to start a Pay It Forward scheme eventually to create a place for someone in need to come for free. I’m also very excited about finally getting to cook for people again. And with small intimate groups too, more like a healthy supper club. And if I get the chance, sneak into the yoga class at the back before I have to get back in the kitchen!

Healthy Vegan Street Food: Sustainable & healthy plant-based recipes from India to Indonesia by Jackie Kearney (Ryland Peters & Small, £20) Photography by Clare Winfield © Ryland Peters & Small. She has published four previous books with them and the BLOG on her ‘Hungry Gecko’ website is an essential background read. 

Don’t miss Jackie’s showstopping recipe for Nasi Campur featured on my website.

‘Winter Reset’ runs from December 8-12 at Jackie’s Italian base of Pieve di Teco, high in the Ligurian mountains.  To find out more email mywellnessitaly@gmail.com .

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