On The Side

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…

The end product, obviously Eukaryotic! A most splendid word. In my Italian classes we devised a Parola della Settimana (Word of the Week) competition. Were there to be an English equivalent, eukaryotic would be right in there. The biologists among you will be familiar with it. I was not, encountering it for the first time…

Be a stunning guest. You can come back any time. Image Generated by Zeph, my AI assistant This article was inspired by a recent lunch which we had. It was a great success. Out of modesty I won’t mention the food, but the conversation flowed, good fun was had by all, and it was a…

There are many good reasons to be a member of Slow Food Scotland. This was one of them. Gordon Newlands A Wednesday in May found a couple of dozen souls in the premises of the New Town Cookery School in Edinburgh’s Queen Street. The food smells were incredible – of that more later. On the…

Clocks with features are not new. Many cities feature them. London, of course, is best known for the chimes of Big Ben and their preamble, beloved of many doorbells. Prosaically, that clock keeps good time. Take Edinburgh by contrast. The clock on the Balmoral Hotel is always three minutes fast. If you are at the…

Well, I always knew that this day would come, the food alphabetical reaching the letter X. Xanthan gum would not, I fear, have interested you. There is apparently a soup named Xavier, but that held no appeal either. I could of course have done something contrived, eg X is for Xtra large eggs; however, I…

I heard someone on the radio proclaiming that this is National Doughnut Week. As promoted by Messrs Krispy & Kreme, I muttered to myself darkly. Bizarrely, it transpires that there is such an event, which has the worthy object of raising money for The Children’s Trust. More details here. But please don’t make the elementary…

So, you have an important visitor from Malta who’s partial to a dram. What to do? Why, take her back to 1494, of course. To Fife. The Kingdom of Fife, if you please, county of my birth, and home to many wonders. Imagine, say, that you are a farmer. Imagine that one fine day a…

    Chef Watch Featuring Paul Gunning, Chef Patron, Purslane Restaurant, Edinburgh       How long have you been a chef? 26 years Why did you become a chef? I was working in a factory after leaving school which I didn’t see as a career. After thinking about what I enjoyed doing and would…

This is not a W which has ever occupied my thoughts much. Come to think of it I’d be surprised if many of our ancestors would have heard of it. For me, it’s bracketed in the Foods From Hell section, along with English mustard. The comparison is hardly surprising, since they are both members of the…

Well, stop right there. Clearly this article is NOT for you. Why? Because I know for a fact that all of my readers are knowledgeable, sophisticated oenophiles who require no input from me. But, perhaps, for your children, or your less rounded cousins from the provinces? Anyway the idea for today’s piece came from Jancis…

Luxury. What does that mean to you? What about – We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence  a month, come home, and dad would beat us around the head…

L to R – Tim Hayward, Jancis Robinson, Jay Rayner. Marina O’Loughlin No, this isn’t the latest blockbuster from Marvel Films nor, sadly, does it feature Diana Rigg. It’s the tongue in cheek description for the the line up of food writers assembled in the Financial Times Weekend Magazine. As a result of the controversial…

It might be thought that in history as recent as the 20th century, it would be matter of simple record to attribute inventions to the appropriate people. Yet, a little time as a tour guide, boasting of all things Scottish, throws up any number of anomalies. The telephone, for example. Not much doubt about the…

A couple of weeks ago, I announced that during the month of March the recipes in Tom Cooks! would be meat free. The reason was simply that I thought it had been a bit meat heavy in recent months, but it did get me thinking about some of the pros and cons of diet types.…

No, I’m not suggesting for one second that you even consider joining this elite band. Heaven knows there are far too many of them/us, albeit of variable quality. On Sunday last in a national newspaper I read a review of what sounded like a very pleasant lunch – with no clue as to cost. But…

If you’ve been reading these columns since we got back from Sri Lanka you’ll be aware of the importance of the coconut in the cuisine of that lovely country. Because of that I learned a great deal about it, and was appalled at my prior ignorance. While I’m sure your knowledge level isn’t as low…