Sometimes dishes come from escapist inspiration. It’s about conjuring a memory of time spent away, and recreating the experience of ‘other’. You might write elegiac blog posts about them (and perhaps put a whole bunch of them in a book). Some of those meals find their way into anecdotes which you store up for dull […]
soup
The film: The dish: The reason: I stole a loaf of bread. My sister’s child was close to death, and we were starving… (Jean Valjean) And so it begins. At the end of the day, this is a Gallic soup for poverty, leaning heavily on the thrift of onions, broth and hunks of stale bread. […]
There are times when you feel rotten and you need something to make you feel better. Maybe it’s a honking cold. Maybe it’s a hangover. Maybe it’s manflu. Or maybe it’s just the mean reds. Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure this soup can help. Rather than leaning on noodles, matzo balls, rice, or a […]
Cream of salmon soup. That’s what was prescribed to start my grandmother’s day-dreamed menu for a summer dinner party in 1937. The party itself never came to be, but there’s something that makes me think the soup may have made an appearance in on her table. Her original recipe has all the hallmarks of her […]
This is a dish for special occasions. If you were to overhear the start of a conversation about why, it has all the hallmarks of an appetising one. ‘Coffee, dark, aura, chilli,’… there’s every chance these will be muddled in the first sentences. It’s only afterwards if you catch the references to vomiting, pain and […]