Like most cookbook readers, I’m not a culinary school grad. Before working with April, I had never made aioli, let alone welcomed a lamb’s head into my oven. Yet now I’ve served friends almost perfect clones of her cumin-spiked lentil purée, her bright-green pea soup punctuated with little chunks of ham and blobs of crème fraîche, and her veal kidneys tossed in garlic butter. Even my regular everyday cooking has improved since I succumbed to her infectious perfectionism, her attention to the little things. I splurge on salt-packed anchovies, as she does, because they make my food just taste that little bit better that pushes a dish from good to great. I use lemon to add brightness, not necessarily acidity, just as she does. I cut my carrots into oblique chunks so when they’re simmered, the edges will be soft but the centre will retain its soft crunch and I won’t miss out on the joy of chomping on one now and then.
One day, I decided to follow April’s recipe for devilled eggs, and I brought them to the Spotted Pig for her to taste. I was terrified, anticipating a meatball moment. Instead, the famously finicky chef pronounced them ‘quite good’. She complimented me as if it were my recipe, as if I were responsible for how bracingly cold and vinegary they were. And, in some way, I suppose I was.
JJ Goode
When I was a girl, I wanted to be a policewoman. But then, when I was sixteen, I handed in my application too late. It’s funny how a small thing like that can change everything.
I grew up in Birmingham, in a neighbourhood called Druid’s Heath, which sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings. It was not that interesting, I’m afraid. It was a fine place to be a kid. Everything there seems to be made of concrete. It’s also full of housing estates and massive high-rise flats. Quite a few of my family members have lived in housing estates at one point or another, when they were struggling to afford rent. The buildings were all scary and cold and quite grim.
As a teenager, I got hooked on programmes like Cagney & Lacey, CHiPS, and other cop shows. I know this sounds a bit nerdy, but I wanted to walk the beat, to work as part of a team. I liked rules and structure and repetition, the idea of doing something again and again until I was good at it. I even fantasised about wearing the uniform, although at the time, policewomen weren’t allowed to wear trousers: imagine chasing some villain while wearing a skirt.
I’ll tell you, I wasn’t the brightest bulb in the cupboard. I struggled through my work at senior school. I was always serious, and I never missed a day of studies. (I have the attendance awards to prove it.) Still, I preferred to put back pints with my mates at my local pub, staggering home late at night, my eyes squinty like two pissholes in the snow. And, like a prat, I missed my opportunity with the police academy and couldn’t apply again for two years. I had to do something in the meantime. My mom sat me down. She suggested I consider becoming a florist. Just then, one of my sisters walked in wearing her cooking school uniform. I thought, I could wear that uniform. Why not have a go at cooking?
Back then, cooking wasn’t a way to get your face on the telly. It was a job. To me, making stock, chopping carrots, braising meat, and the like were all just tasks to try to master. My food icons weren’t celebrity chefs. Instead, there was my granddad, who always cooked a proper fry-up for breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausage, and bread crisped in the fat left in the pan. At school, I ate mountains of boiled potatoes, a knob of butter melting like lava over the top, with a scattering of black pepper like ash. Anything, I thought at the time, was better than my mom’s cooking. Now I realise I was a bit hard on her, because she did make an excellent fried egg, brown and crispy at the edges, and the best bacon sandwich, floppy strips crammed between crusty bread and lashed with HP sauce or ketchup.
I loved Sundays. That was when my nan had us over for roast lunch, often pork with all manner of veg, much of it copiously buttered. (The next morning, we’d make bubble and squeak with the leftovers, forming little patties and frying them up, then eating them topped with fried egg.) And later, there was tea, not just the drink, but the meal: my dad would set out a spread of cakes, like Battenberg and Mr Kipling Bakewell Tarts, and crisps and sandwiches of strawberry jam or cucumber or ham.
Since those Sundays in Birmingham, I’ve met a lot of great cooks and eaten a lot of food that has just blown me away. Yet when I cook today, I draw just as often on the food of my childhood, whether an entire dish or an ingredient or flavour. I think for some people the appeal of the food you once loved fades over time. Not for me: the appeal is still there, as strong as ever, just waiting to be improved upon.
In many ways, I got lucky. I graduated from cooking school during the early days of the gastropub, when entrepreneurs started buying dank old pubs and tearing up the carpets. They installed little kitchens and proper chefs, who turned out rustic terrines and lovely slabs of roast beef, cooked to that magical place between rare and medium-rare.
Immediately after graduation, I moved to London, where I got the chance to work for some of the chefs who were leading this movement – among them, Rowley Leigh at Kensington Place, Adam Robinson at the Brackenbury, Simon Hopkinson at Bibendum – and others who were leading movements of their own, like Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray at the River Café. I spent a lot of time listening, and even more watching. I watched how they moved their hands, how they sliced, how they seasoned. I learned that you can make a dish ten times and it will never be the same each time. That just when you think you’ve mastered something, it’ll turn out like a dog’s dinner and you realise you haven’t really mastered it at all. To this day, I’m always on my toes and always ready to learn something new.
Even after all this time in the kitchen, I still love watching garlic go nutty in hot fat or peeking underneath a piece of caramelising fennel to see it browning and growing sweeter by the minute. I love spooning pan liquid over roasting meat, piling any vegetable matter on top and gently smooshing it. And as many livers as I’ve seared in my life, the smell of one meeting a hot pan still makes my knees tremble. The small delights are the most lovely.
My affection for these little things makes me a very particular cook. That’s a nice way of admitting that I’m a bit of a control freak. Some of my cooks describe my cooking (affectionately, I hope) as ‘anal rustic’: ‘rustic’ because I prefer pan liquid to complicated sauces, and because I’d rather assemble food by hand than plate it with tweezers, and ‘anal’ because I like everything just so. I must drive my cooks mad when I go on about cutting radishes a certain way to accentuate their slender shape or slicing other vegetables into pieces that taper, so that when they cook, little bits will tumble off into sauce or soup. I sometimes demand that they brown garlic until it’s almost too brown or that they not completely cook off alcohol (I like the acidity of slightly raw white wine).
But being a fussy cook doesn’t always require more effort. For my pesto, I don’t toast the pine nuts – not because of the extra step, but because I find toasting them actually muddies the pesto’s flavour. I don’t usually peel my beetroots. Rather, I roast them skins on. I even like to leave on the willowy root, which is tender and rustically pretty. For my roasted vegetables, I leave the skins