On The Side

Photo by Douglas Scott A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Scottish Bread Festival which took place at Bowhouse, near Elie on the 28th of February. I went on the 27th. No, I didn’t get the date wrong: I was a judge. This may come as much of a surprise to you as…

Fond of your daily bread? Do you enjoy your loaf as well as using it? On Saturday a treat awaits. Get yourself to Bowhouse, between Elie and St Monans in Fife, for the Scottish Festival of Real Bread. There will be bread stalls, there will be workshops, there will be events for children: and there…

So you want to become Britain’s best known food writer and TV presenter? Build up a chain of restaurants (and possibly watch them crash spectacularly)? Go on TV and swear a lot? Or, in this modern age, get three million followers on social media? In the 1970s and 80s, the answer was, none of the…

Cabbage. Cabbage. Such a dull word, is it not? A word to insult a stupid person. Redolent of school dinner halls and hospital kitchens. But I pose the question – is cabbage making a comeback? But perhaps the better question is to ask if it ever went away. Certainly not in Russia, where the average…

Not even two and a half years since I ranted about The Sunday Times and its choice of restaurant reviewer. Or to be more accurate, about giving my job to someone else. (See Tom Eats! A New Restaurant Critic published in October 2023.) I was then forced to concede that new kid on the block,…

Once again, remember the target audience. Not the expert. While I’m reasonably comfortable with chilli these days, it’s not so long ago since I served up dishes which verged on the inedible. When the legendary Delia ventured into recipe publishing, she infamously wrote one containing a tablespoonful of chilli powder instead of a teaspoonful. As…

Belly Dance is a new fermented soft drink. Made from water kefir, it’s low sugar, caffeine free and vegan. Tom’s Food! can confirm that it’s also delicious. We particularly like the Fiery Ginger one. Other flavours include Cherry Berry and Kiwi Mango.  Drinks expert Diana Thompson has written that it’s now her favourite non-alcoholic drink.…

BLOOD, SWEAT AND ASPARAGUS SPEARS The Story of the 1990s Restaurant Revolution Andrew Turvil Elliott & Thompson         pp241                    £20    Britain has no habit of restaurant use. Thus wrote The Good Food Guide (TGFG) editor Tom Jaine in 1990. Every foodie is aware of…

Oysters, again, I hear you moan. Yes, best beloveds, I do keep an eye on my back catalogue. Yes, I know I wrote about the Stranraer Oyster Festival, and followed up with some bivalve recipes. But while I would never concede my prose to be dull, these were largely factual affairs. So what has brought…

Were you pickled like me? No, Mrs Johnston, not like that. I mean, was your first experience of today’s beauty in a jar with vinegar? And not vinegar as is used by us expert cooks, but the industrial strength stuff which you could use to strip paint. Maybe it meant that the producers didn’t need…

No, not originally my title, though I have written about service before. It comes from the current edition of Scottish Licensed Trade News. At a recent event entitled Art of Service, a Q & A session had been set up involving three experts from different parts of the licensed trade spectrum. First there was award winning mixologist Mal…

No, NOT that one. This is a food column, remember? I have to say that until I read an article in the most recent Noble Rot magazine, I had no idea that Anton Mosimann was still alive and chopping. Truth be told he had slipped out of my memory. Many of you may not even have heard…

If you have pals who love food and with whom you exchange presents, help may be at hand on the gift front. Unless you know them very well, I would counsel against cookery books. (An exception may, of course, be made if the person has been wise enough to drop unsubtle hints.) Suffice it to…

Well I did promise it would return, did I not? But just to confuse you, the A in question isn’t really an A at all. Yes, artichoke does begin with the letter A, but today we’re referring to the Jerusalem “variety”. Now not only is our hero not really an artichoke at all, it certainly…

Readers of The Scotsman newspaper and other good periodicals will be aware of the quirky but elegant writing of Cat Thomson. We lunched the other week – at The Gordon Arms, Yarrow, review pending. With my neck at its brassiest, and my luck pushed to stretching point, I suggested an article for my dear reader…

Granada If you’re thinking of cultural innovations, Spain in the years 1930 – 1950 may not be the first period which comes to mind. And unless you have travelled much in that remarkable country, you may be completely in the dark as to what a parador is. Surprisingly, they started in the 1920s, and developed…

The UK’s native oyster season begins on 1 September. This means that the increasingly popular Stranraer Oyster Festival will soon be upon us, I’m grateful to my friend Cat Thomson for providing me with the official press release. It appears that ice cream sellers have not been the sole beneficiaries of our warm summer. Marine…

And when I say Festival, I obviously mean The Edinburgh Festival, the wonderfully chaotic collection of events which takes place here in my city every August. It’s the world’s biggest arts festival, featuring over 54,000 performances in the month. Don’t be fooled into thinking there is just one Edinburgh Festival. The picture shows The Hub,…

Well, we got there. Five years after the first A made its appearance (for Avocado in July 2020) we’ve reached the end. The end of lap one, that is. It’s been incredibly useful to have as a filler when nothing obvious comes to mind. The On The Side slot is definitely the one which causes…

In last week’s Saucy Mothers article we touched a bit on the naming of sauces. But if you look, not even that carefully, you’ll discover numerous names in food nomenclature. People and places, pandering to divas, sucking up to aristocrats, and a few downright dodgy stories. As with the origins of sauces, which we looked at last…

One must not forget, in fact, that it is through the subtlety by which our sauces are constructed that the French cuisine enjoys such a world-wide supremacy They’re not a modest bunch, French chefs, are they? That quotation is from perhaps the most famous of the lot, Auguste Escoffier. It appears in his seminal work,…

You may recall I invited contributions from you on either your best meal or your worst meal – or both. This is a variation on that theme. Hearing of my holiday plans to Corfu, good friend Pat Mennie sent me this tale of woe of her own experiences there. Bless her heart, she awaited my…

  We first met prize winning wine writer Diana Thompson last year. We’re delighted to welcome her back for an occasional series on wine and drinks. With the rather nice (so far) summer upon us, Diana considers some low-and zero-alcohol alternatives.   In recent years, we’ve seen a marked rise in low- and zero-alcohol wines…

Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. Groucho Marx Not even if they offer you a good sandwich, Groucho? But why is this delicacy so called and from which club, if any, did it originate? Lovers of acronyms have made the suggestion that…