My Last Supper: One Meal, a Lifetime in the Making

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In 1997 he won a Sony Radio Award for Papertalk, BBC Radio Five Live's magazine programme about the newspaper business, which he presented. He chairs a BBC Radio 4 programme called The Kitchen Cabinet. [9] Jay Rayner combines personal experience and hard-nosed reportage to explain why the doctrine of organic has been eclipsed by the need for sustainable intensification; and why the future lies in large-scale food production rather than the cottage industries that foodies often cheer for. From the cornfields of America to the killing lines of Yorkshire abattoirs via the sheep-covered hills of New Zealand, Rayner takes us on a journey that will change the way we shop, cook and eat forever. And give us a few belly laughs along the way. While many of Madhur Jaffrey’s books remain in print, Indian Cooking is not one of them. But many copies are still available secondhand News bites

Tofu is a blank canvas for the flavours it carries’: deep-fried tofu and pepper. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer He was awarded the title Beard of the Year for 2011 by the Beard Liberation Front. [11] He plays piano with his jazz ensemble the Jay Rayner Quartet. [12] Books [ edit ] Fiction [ edit ] A masterclass in both braising meat and reducing sauces’: Jay Rayner’s version of Gary Rhodes’s braised oxtail. Photograph: Jay Rayner I am ashamed of my handiwork. Then again it does taste fabulous’: Saint-Emilion au chocolat. Photograph: Jay Rayner

One very positive thing did happen after David’s death. David was Jewish and there’s a thing called Shiva [a week-long mourning period following a death] when [family and close friends] gather for prayers. I went every night and I came to understand the importance of it. And a bunch of his friends from school came to me and said, we know who you are, we know you were a very close friend, and you’re our friend now. I’m actually getting emotional just thinking about it. It was just a beautiful, beautiful thing. And that’s exactly what they did, this beautiful, cosmopolitan lot – they immediately started phoning me and inviting me to parties. They just looked after me. And some of those boys and girls became my oldest friends. The best plate of the stuff I have eaten in years’: beetroot carpaccio. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer For the main, I choose his braised oxtail, another so-called “signature dish’ that at the time of publication was banned because of the BSE prohibition on beef sold on the bone. It requires braising the oxtails with vegetables that are then discarded as a mush, and replaced with more, freshly chopped. The recipe says it should take no more than two hours. It takes me closer to three, but it’s worth it. Rhodes’s oxtail is a masterclass in both braising meat and reducing sauces. I finish with his baked egg custard tart which, hilariously, demands 500ml of cream and eight – count them – eight egg yolks. Rhodes insists this should be eaten at room temperature and he’s not wrong. It puts the “call my cardiologist” into “lush”. I am encouraged by various waiters to have their spicy wonton, which they all tell me is their speciality, and the sauce with that is a belter. Our waiter spoons a little of it over the taut-skinned dumplings, filled with a fine dice of unidentified but crunchy vegetables. It’s a deeply flavoured and inviting bowlful. I could do serious damage to a lot of those. I end up drinking the sauce. But success is never simple. Before long pressures draw them away from the comforts of their roots. They find themselves cutting corners, taking risks and breaking the law. Finally Mal has to confront his life, his friendship with Solly and where their very different ambitions have led them.

Now with a new epilogue, the UK's most influential food and drink journalist shoots a few sacred cows of food culture. If I could re-live one time in my life I think it would be my 18th birthday party. My parents had a tradition, which was that they would throw a lunch party. We invited 50 of their friends and 50 of mine. It was a beautiful early autumn day. All my friends came and they were a beautiful lot. I remember that afternoon at that great party house very, very well. And I’d like another turn around that garden please. The Apologist is a deliciously funny satire on the complexity and greed of international – and personal – politics, as well as a powerful paean to the diplomatic role of a well-made almond soufflé. My father was not a big eater. “I’d be happy if I could just take a pill for my lunch,” he once told me, when I was eight or nine years old. I had already concluded that the adult world could be wilfully baffling, but this seemed unnecessarily provocative. It felt like a betrayal. As a child, an unfocused mess of fat-softened limbs and round edges, I knew that food was great. I loved bacon sandwiches on white bread and chocolate éclairs, and lived for evenings when my parents were short on time and dinner was the convenience of Findus Crispy Pancakes filled with delicious, if unidentifiable, brown matter.In 2015, a 25th anniversary edition of White Heat was published, full of testimonials to the book’s brilliance by chefs it had influenced. One of those was the young lad from Nottingham who had only been able to afford it because he found it in a charity shop. “How mad is that?” Sat Bains says. Three decades on from its first publication there is no doubt: to a certain type of chef White Heat and Marco Pierre White still matter. If it wasn’t empty shelves in supermarkets through suddenly increased demand for home cooking, it was the nature of being forced to eat together in a family unit, or alone when we didn’t have one. It was about the communal experiences in cafes and restaurants of which we had been robbed. It was about so much more than just how things tasted. Which was when the idea of collecting these columns together arose. They were all about the detailed pleasure and pain of the table. Rayner was one of the panel of critics who made up the "enemy" on the daytime cookery show Eating with the Enemy, and performs a similar role on the UK version of MasterChef. He is the food reporter on the BBC magazine programme The One Show, and was on the panel of judges on the American programme Top Chef Masters. He appeared as a guest judge on the "UK" episode of The Final Table, season 1. But now they had their first child, a pregnancy which had encouraged in Cassie such a profoundly sweet tooth she started making fudge (stay with me; these things will all tie up eventually). Off to the West Midlands they went in search of affordable housing. Cassie set up Sweetmeat Inc, a fudge-making business on the high street in Stirchley just to the south of Birmingham city centre. James took cheffing jobs, but also cooked his Chinese food at pop-ups.

There are essays on why the messiest of dishes can also be the ones that taste the best, or why the secret to flavour lies in giving ingredients lots of time together. There are a few columns about restaurants which, after all, is my specialist subject. I write about the dishes that professional kitchens do so well and those they do terribly badly. Lesson: you’ll probably make a better apple crumble at home than any chef could ever make in a restaurant. A t the age of 16 I was the youngest child of an extremely successful and famous person [journalist and TV agony aunt Claire Rayner], and I was trying to find my own way in the world. My 16th was the most dramatic year of my adolescence, for a bunch of reasons. It was the year that I lost a lot of weight, and weight had been a preoccupation throughout my young life. It was the year I was thrown out of school for four months and plastered all over the national press. And it was the year that my closest friend was killed in a mountaineering accident. So it was a very, very dramatic year for me. There is no dessert on the menu today, but at weekends they serve cherry pie. These have already been made in preparation for the rush. And yes, if I ask nicely, they will pop one in the oven. A note of warning: it is a dish with a sugared pastry crust. If you are livid about this being described as a pie because there isn’t pastry all the way round, please write to your MP. They’ve not got much on at the moment. Beneath that toffeed crust is what happens to fresh cherries cooked down in sugar syrup for a long time. On the side is a gravy boat of double cream. The dish is a tenner, and is designed to serve two, even if one of them is me. Racine, which means root, was meant to be a neighbourhood restaurant, but by 2015 there was not much of a neighbourhood left. Too many people had treated property less as a home than an investment. Harris moved on. He brought a little of his Francophile magic to a bunch of pubs and, along the way, for the sake of full disclosure, cooked the last supper for the end of my book of that name, in a room above one of them. We ate very well that night.Meanwhile, Manchester is to get a new craft beer and food space, just as soon as restrictions lift. Society, which will be located on Barbirolli Square, will house two bars, plus five food outlets from the likes of Falafel Guys and Dokes Pizzeria. It’s a sister operation to Assembly Underground in Leeds. This article was amended on 24 January 2021 to replace the first recipe photo. An earlier version had a photo which was described as being oxtail, but in fact showed a different dish. It’s in the nature of a column written for a newspaper supplement that some are tagged to events in the news, but many more have ranged far and wide across the edible landscape in a less time-fixed manner. Hopkinson allows for additions, so I add a dollop of Dijon, a little grated parmesan and parsley’: onion tart. Photograph: Jay Rayner