Bonus food post
A very good London restaurant, St Patrick's Day, cake, the easiest bread, sugar flowers and one fantastic novel (not about food)
I’ve been in London for a couple of days seeing my sister who is over from Los Angeles, my mother who has cracked a vertebra, my friend/agent for breakfast, another friend for lunch and two of my (adult) children for dinner. This is called going full chompatron; thank God for elasticated waistbands.
The children and I went to St John in Marylebone and ate the best food any of us have eaten in months. We had delicious bread and delicious butter; pickled sardines; deep-fried rarebit; beetroot, red cabbage, creme fraiche and chervil (I LOVE chervil1); 3 oysters; brown crab meat on toast; lentils, squash and goat’s curd; and skate, brown butter, croutons and wild garlic. And a wedge salad and little buttery potatoes.
I tell you this a) because all of it was sublime and b) because sometimes people think they’re going to be presented with a trotter or similar sitting starkly on a plate if they go to St John - not so. We didn’t eat any meat at all.
Note that unlike at the other two, this usefully central Marylebone outpost is all shared plates. If I was by myself in the daytime, I’d sit at the bar and have deep friend rarebit for lunch and - well, and a glass of water because I don’t drink, but a glass of cold white wine if you do: a perfect lunch, and not expensive. Nice room, nice vibe, nice staff, nice everything, a few tiny pavement tables for two that would be lovely in the sunshine.
Also they have the most amazing bread and butter pudding but made with the leftovers from their excellent bakery - so almond croissant, doughnut, cinnamon roll, etc - in a sort of beautiful stripy slice, with custard. I am not a pudding person but I had to sit quietly for a moment, so awed was I by the goodness. (They really understand custard. This custard was hot; the custard on my older son’s apple cobbler was cold, which was as it should be).
I didn’t set out to write about food but it’s St Patrick’s Day on Sunday and you might want to make Nigella’s unimprovable Chocolate Guinness Cake (which freezes beautifully minus the icing, and which I’m sure would work just as well with Murphy’s).
Or make Ballymaloe’s unimprovable white soda bread for breakfast - it takes under five minutes, requires no skill and is extremely nice eaten warm with lots of butter. It makes excellent toast on day 2. That link has loads of variations, too. I made this bread constantly in lockdown when everybody was teaching themselves sourdough. If you don’t have buttermilk, sour normal milk with lemon juice or use normal full-fat (not Greek) yogurt thinned down a bit with milk or water - various methods here.
Speaking of Ireland, I must write up my guide to West Cork. I was waiting until I was next physically there to write it in situ, but maybe I should just get on with it. If you’re interested in the Irish food scene, including where to go to eat, I strongly recommend John and Sally McKenna’s Substack, The Irish Stew.
My favourite ‘Irish’ cookbook - in that it is written by someone Irish - is Cook Well, Eat Well by Rory O’Connell. It’s one of my most used and splattered. He is great at putting flavours together and at explaining things properly, which isn’t surprising because he co-founded Ballymaloe Cookery School. He also more recently wrote this lovely book of (mostly) food essays plus (a few) recipes.
In non-food news - it seems a bit mean to put up the paywall here, so I won’t - I am reading Wellness by Nathan Hill and loving it. It’s about a couple, Jack and Elizabeth, who meet when they are young, edgy and alive, ready to chomp up the world and each other. It follows them into marriage and middle age, and into the gentrification not only of their Chicago neighbourhood but also of themselves.
It’s a brilliant satire on modern life and takes in love, art, sex, marriage, parenting, tech, aspiration and the search for meaning, among other things. Wellness is the name of the company where Elizabeth, a scientist, works, using placebos to test out commercial products that make ludicrous claims about improved lifestyles. Wellness is also obviously the quest for enlightenment through shopping while pretending that ‘holistic’ stuff somehow exists entirely outside of capitalism.
The book is incredibly funny and well-observed. Nathan Hill misses nothing. Yesterday on the train I yelped with laughter because Jack’s fitness bracelet - which he has bought to help him work out because he is physically slight and the fashion of the age requires him to be ripped - has recorded him snoring, and he doesn’t think he snores. Then he realises that the noise is actually his wife’s vibrator - the vibrator he’s bought to perk up their moribund sex life after 20 years, assuming they’d use it together (when he presents her with it she says hmm, yes, maybe one day, and briskly puts it away in a drawer).
It is also deeply melancholy in parts, full of pathos, and I expect it gets sadder further on. If you want a fat book to lose yourself in, I strongly recommend it. It’s like a snapshot of everything that is tragicomic about 21st century life and relationships. I think he’s very well known in the US but less so in the UK, or maybe it’s just me.
Look at these! They’re SUGAR flowers. I followed the account on Instagram for a couple of years thinking they were just exceptional flower arrangements and only twigged when Natasja Sadi’s extraordinary creations ended up on the cover of World of Interiors. I also didn’t realise how powerful her work is in context. She lives in Amsterdam and is a Surinamese immigrant - Surinam being a former Dutch colony - and, according to her book jacket, ‘began making flowers out of sugar to honour her African and Indonesian ancestors who worked in the sugarcane fields’.
She says here: ‘I’m a descendant of slaves; I’m also a descendant of Indonesian contract workers. My great-grandparents were from Java, Indonesia, a former Dutch colony. When slavery was abolished, the Dutch were one of the last to sign the treaty and continued to look for workers in their other colonies. They found workers in Indonesia.’
Surinam only became independent in 1975 and Dutch is still the official language.
This is an accidental extra food post - they’re normally fortnightly - so free to read. For anything else, you’ll need a paid subscription.
Chervil is hard to come by at the shops but easy to grow from seed. I’d do this quite soon - the seeds don’t like germinating in too much heat. Ideally you’d sow them again in the autumn (using this different variety, which is hardier) and have chervil all winter. It tastes like parsley crossed with tarragon, but milder than either of those - it’s fresh and delicate and aside from anything else is amazing in salads. When I was a child in Brussels we were always having chervil soup, but I don’t think that’s a thing outside Belgium - a pity.
Fifty-one years ago, when I was twenty, I spent a day in Levis’s, being presented with a great variety of lovely drinks by the friends and family of my then intended, (who was quite soon to become an ex). When the mixture of cordials took effect, the kind sisters, who ran it then, took me into the back to their cozy rooms, and tucked me into crisp white sheets, where I slept through the day and evening of my first day in Ireland, while the rest of my party partied on. Thank you for bringing back the memory.
I often pop into St. John in Marylebone Lane for just a cup of their tea & a rest. They never mind, mid-morning or after lunch. It was blended by my friend The Rare Tea Lady, Henrietta Lovell @raretealady and is the proper, powerful sort of stuff you can almost stand your teaspoon up in. I MIGHT have been known to have a pastry or hot madeleines with, but not compulsory x