Posts by Tom Johnston

Friday morning, no article written for Tom Cooks! A task usually allocated to a Thursday. Yesterday, however, I was away on important business, to wit gorging on good food and drinking wine for a future Tom Eats! article. Fresh as a daisy I set to. Simplicity will be the order of the day. We’ll end the…

If you are a fan of Antiques Roadshow, you’ll be familiar with the Good, Better, Best, challenge where Fiona Bruce is invited to assess three items in order of value. The inspiration, in an odd way, for today’s column. A recent trip to Vienna brought potato salad to mind. I see that nine years have passed since I…

Corfiot, in case you were wondering, is the adjective meaning from Corfu. Given the fact the Greeks call the island Kérkyra, I have no idea where our terminology comes from. Never mind. We ate very well there, as you may have seen in a recent edition of Tom Eats! This was a very unusual salad which…

Sometimes it’s tricky to write a title which is sufficiently precise. Proper Greek Tzatziki? As opposed to improper? No. Or Real? Not to be confused with fake, I suppose. Tzatziki, or tzaziki or tsatsiki will not be new to many. It’s one of the more common dips to have reached these shores. But already I have…

I’m featuring this today as it’s a dessert which requires yeast, following on from Wednesday’s On The Side column. Rum Baba. Or Baba au Rhum, if you’re French. But if you think we’re tracing its origins back to France then wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m told it comes from eastern Europe. Poland/Ukraine way. Baba/babka/babushka are Grandma…

This is a nod to the main dish which L enjoyed very much at Scotts, Mayfair. I sourced the recipe on the net, aided by Zeph, my AI assistant. I haven’t cooked this specific recipe, but it looks fairly authentic. Rather too authentic in fact. How so? Well, the recipe calls, inter alia, for kingfish,…

Some enchanted evening you may walk into a room filled with the glorious aroma of slow cooking lamb. That’s what happened to me courtesy of Slow Food Scotland – see Wednesday’s column. There’s only one thing better than eating great food, and that’s when someone sends you the recipe so you can attempt to recreate…

The title really isn’t accurate, but who could resist such delightful alliteration? In spite of my sourcing our eponymous condiment on the self same street, the words have entirely different roots. In the UK, we’ve been preserving fruit and veg forever, but the idea of a specially made ingredient to tart up food came later.…