Category Archives: Food and drink books

Diana Kennedy, influential guru of Mexican cuisine, dies at 99

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Politicians and chefs pay tribute to the ‘Indiana Jones of food’, who helped preserve and popularise Mexican recipes in the English-speaking world

Diana Kennedy, the British-born food writer who dedicated her career to promoting the richness and diversity of Mexico’s culinary heritage and helped to popularise the national cuisine in the English-speaking world, has died aged 99.

The Mexican culture ministry confirmed Kennedy’s death at her home in Michoacán and paid tribute to her legacy, saying that she, “like few others”, understood that conserving nature and its diversity was crucial to upholding the myriad culinary traditions of Mexico.

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Delia Smith: ‘The world is in chaos… but together we have such power’

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At 80, Britain’s queen of cookery has written a surprising new book about spirituality that was turned down by six publishers. She talks about meditation, MasterChef and her beloved Norwich FC

Why is it so exciting – and so nerve-racking – to be meeting Delia Smith? Down the years, I’ve interviewed a lot of famous and important people (and three prime ministers), and yet I can’t remember any of them having induced this combination of extreme eagerness and mortal fear. Is it because when I was a teenager, she was one of the very few truly successful women then in public life? I suppose it must be. It’s no exaggeration to say that she was up there with the Queen, Mrs Thatcher and Madonna – and just like them, her word was The Law. For my 21st birthday, my parents gave me a cheque and a copy of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, and for all that I was still in my radical feminist stage, I hardly batted an eyelid. Simone de Beauvoir was all very well, but did she have any advice on roasting times or how to make sure your yorkshire puddings rise? No, she did not.

Anyway, one result of this desperate, anxious state was that I stupidly decided to bake a cake for her – my God, even to write such words – and when I arrive at her cottage, the conservatory of which I recognise from the TV shows she once presented there, the very first thing I do is hand it over. “It’s a bit … flat,” I say, mournfully (for those who are interested, it’s Nigella’s ordinarily easy-peasy cardamon and marzipan loaf). But it seems that I’m worrying unnecessarily. Delia looks completely delighted by my foil-wrapped house brick, cradling it in her arms as if it was a newborn baby. “You used good ingredients,” she says, kindly. “It will still taste nice.” Cooking isn’t about perfection, she tells me; it’s about achievability. “I once went to a Women’s Institute thing, and I remember thinking: I’m not at all sure my jam would pass muster here.”

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The big idea: is going vegan enough to make you – and the planet – healthier?

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Simply avoiding meat and dairy isn’t going to cut it if you still turn to ultra-processed foods

Did you change what you ate or drank for January? The start of the year is an annual cue for a Pandora’s box of diet demons to be released; from meal replacements and super-keto diets to slimming teas. Alongside these trends live the regular and more ethical health-conscious messages of dry January and Veganuary, both of which have grown in popularity and have a much cleaner public image. Despite that, they are still not perfect. So this year I’d like to propose another idea that hopefully has longer staying power: call it the “real food revolution”.

The premise of Veganuary is simple: use the pivotal month of January to make a big change to your diet, your health and the planet’s health by cutting out animal products. Veganuary is a not-for-profit charitable company that provides recipes and motivational emails to help you give up meat and dairy products for just one month, with, ideally, positive effects on your waistline and your carbon footprint. Overall, they do a great job, and there is plenty of evidence to support the efficacy of reducing animal-based foods for our health and our planet’s survival. We now know that agriculture is responsible for about 25% of global heating and the single most important action we as individuals can do to help address the climate crisis is not to give up cars, but to eat less meat.

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Colombian family win award for world’s best cookbook

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Mother-and-daughter team scoop gong at Gourmand awards in Paris for volume of traditional leaf-wrapped recipes

A Colombian mother and daughter’s celebration of their country’s traditional leaf-wrapped dishes has been named best cookbook in the world at the Gourmand awards in Paris.

Colombia’s envueltos are part of a culinary heritage that stretches across much of Latin America, from the tamales of Mexico and Guatemala to the humitas of Chile.

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The day I cooked timpano with Stanley Tucci

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The giant Italian pie was the centrepiece of the star’s Big Night film. Now he’s invited me round to his house to make it

• Now try cooking Tucci’s timpano yourself

Getting your homework marked by Stanley Tucci is terrifying. Not because he is scary. On the contrary. He has impeccable, courtly manners. It’s terrifying because of what is at stake. I prise off the lid to the plastic box and turn its contents towards him, shyly. Tucci plucks a single chilled meatball from the one kilo throng, each the size of a large marble, and pops it into his mouth. He nods slowly, then smiles. “Perfetto,” he says, simply. Thank Christ for that. The meatballs, made to his own detailed recipe, are a key part of a grandiose cooking adventure we are embarking upon today, here in his kitchen. They need to be right.

In 1996, Tucci introduced the world to one of his family’s great culinary traditions, courtesy of the movie Big Night, which he starred in, co-wrote and co-directed. In the film, set in 1950s America, Tucci plays a recent Italian immigrant who, along with his chef brother, runs a struggling Italian restaurant on the shore not far from New York City. To raise its profile, they decide to stage a special dinner which, they have been told, will be attended by the great American-Italian singing star Louis Prima. The centrepiece of this magnificent, delirious feast will be a timpano.

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Claudia Roden: ‘What do I want from life now? Having people around my table’

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The food writer discusses her new book, Med, while Yotam Ottolenghi, José Pizarro and Sam Clark pick their favourite dishes

Claudia Roden wasn’t sure that anyone would be interested in her writing another cookbook. “I kept telling my agent, ‘Nobody will want a book from an octogenarian!’” she says on a video call. Roden has just turned 85 to be exact, and she knew she wouldn’t have the energy for her usual process: travelling across countries and regions, painstakingly collecting recipes and stories from food lovers and chefs. But she is still a formidable home cook and relentless entertainer – for friends, for her children, now in their 50s and 60s, and their children – and, with a nudge from her agent, Roden wondered if there might be something in that.

“I was thinking, ‘What do I want from my life now?’” she says. “And I found that having people for dinner was what I enjoyed more than going to the theatre or to a concert. To have them just around my kitchen table was my idea and it will be what we cook. So I cooked hundreds of dishes and when we thought, ‘This is marvellous,’ it went in the book. I didn’t plan it to be Mediterranean. But it just was Mediterranean. Because that’s where I went.”

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How to Love Animals by Henry Mance review – the case against modern farming

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Turning vegan ... a series of investigations, presented with humour and humility, into our contradictory relationships with pets, livestock and wildlife

While researching this book, Henry Mance worked briefly in an abattoir, or “a disassembly line”, as he aptly terms it. As he watched sheep being stunned, their throats slit and then hung up, still twitching, from metal hooks on a motorised track, Mance asked himself: “How did humans come to this?”

His book is an attempt to answer that question, as well as an exploration of how our attitudes to pets, livestock and wild animals have changed through history: “I wanted to know whether my love for animals was reflected in how I behaved, or whether – like my love for arthouse films – it was mainly theoretical.”

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Nigella Lawson: ‘I can be ecstatically happy with just bread and cheese’

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In an exchange of emails for Observer Food Monthly’s 20th anniversary, the broadcaster and writer explains how Twitter helped her through lockdown and what she eats on a night off

What were you doing 20 years ago this month?
I’m afraid I have only a rather muddled memory of that time. My husband, John Diamond, who’d had his cancer diagnosed in March 1997, had died in March 2001, and consequently all I can remember of this time 20 years ago, is feeling dazed, and mainlining bagels and cream cheese from Panzer’s. I know I’d been filming (and this must have been for the second series of Nigella Bites) as I had – ridiculous as it now seems – just a week off in the middle of it, and my one acute memory is feeling painfully aware that the herbs we had back of shot when John had died were still alive and flourishing when I resumed. I suspect most of April, once the series had been finished, was spent taking the children, who were then four and six, to school then going back under the duvet until it was time to collect them.

What were you mostly cooking then?
I dare say none of us is impervious to fads and fashion, but my cooking seems to change mostly according to where I am in my life, and at that time I remember rolling endless meatballs – or rather, getting my children to do so, their small hands perfectly suited to the job. The pasta machine, a basic hand-cranked model, was often clamped to the kitchen table, too. My kids used to love turning the handle. Makes me feel I should reclaim it from the back of the cupboard and bring it into play again, even if I have to turn the handle myself!

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Ainsley Harriott: ‘My sister still takes control of my cooking at home’

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The chef and TV presenter on being lectured by his siblings, what to drink while playing backgammon – and cooking for his dog

I have a painting of an old lady stirring a pot on a fire in a West Indian kitchen, cooking with her children. It used to hang in my mum’s kitchen and now I’ve got it in mine. It’s lovely and tells of yesteryear.

My father was an entertainer and had lots of people in showbiz – like Des O’Connor – round in the front room. Mum used to make them snacks and nibbles and I’d watch the reactions of appreciation and hear the banter.

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Good enough to eat? The toxic truth about modern food

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We are now producing and consuming more food than ever, and yet our modern diet is killing us. How can we solve this bittersweet dilemma?

Pick a bunch of green grapes, wash it, and put one in your mouth. Feel the grape with your tongue, observe how cold and refreshing it is: the crisp flesh, and the jellylike interior with its mild, sweet flavour.

Eating grapes can feel like an old pleasure, untouched by change. The ancient Greeks and Romans loved to eat them, as well as to drink them in the form of wine. The Odyssey describes “a ripe and luscious vine, hung thick with grapes”. As you pull the next delicious piece of fruit from its stalk, you could easily be plucking it from a Dutch still life of the 17th century, where grapes are tumbled on a metal platter with oysters and half-peeled lemons.

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