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Guide to the River Cottage: Why Hugh Fearnley-Whittingtsall Should Be Your Food Celebrity December 22, 2010 The British television star that has inspired us time and again The River Cottage TV show begins with a ridiculously cheesy cartoon showing a curly haired driver fleeing a polluted city for an idyllic paradise, complete with jumping fish, smiling cows, and some friendly pigs. During the course of three seasons of River Cottage and the many years of spinoffs, host Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall manages to kill and eat every single one of those creatures and many, many more. This isn't some hippie feel-... Read the Full Article	Baked Bean Failures April 23, 2010 Trying (and for now failing) to recreate British Heinz baked beans Baked beans should have been the easiest part. When I set off on this crazy Full English Breakfast challenge I figured I'd spend most of my time stuffing sausages, or learning how to cure a completely different kind of bacon. The beans should have required a few hours on lazy Saturday afternoon. The one problem -- the only problem -- was finding a recipe. There are no recipes. Zero. Or at least none that I could trust. Every single... Read the Full Article	A Guide to Bacon Styles, and How to Make Proper British Rashers April 21, 2010 Everyone loves bacon, but it's not always the same thing. British Bacon vs American bacon If you've been reading the site lately, you may have been following Nick on his rather strange quest to recreate a full English breakfast from scratch (his first project was the British banger sausage). Why, I don't know. But when Nick proposed that I take over the homemade bacon portion of the project, I leapt at the opportunity to contribute. Homemade meat curing has long been a hobby of mine,... Read the Full Article	Homemade British Bangers and the Search for Rusk March 30, 2010 How to make better bangers As I was digging into making my own British bangers for my Full English Breakfast challenge, I kept stumbling onto the same sad story which may or may not be complete bullshit: During the early 20th century thanks to two World Wars, meat was scarce in England and pork sausages were padded with some grains and extra liquid to help stretch the meat reserves. When cooked, these padded sausages had the tendency to burst out of their... Read the Full Article
Idea Lab: Full English Breakfast from Scratch March 16, 2010 Can you replicate the best English breakfast at home? To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day. - W. Somerset Maugham I survived my half a year in England on a diet of boiled potatoes, canned peas, Heinz beans, and 99p egg and cress sandwiches I purchased from a convenient store. The dollar was nearly worthless next to the mighty pound at that time, and I hoarded what little cash I could for bus passes and the odd pint, relegating whatever was left to keeping... Read the Full Article	Part Two of My Cucumber Sandwich Revenge: Tea Time August 21, 2009 How to create the perfect cucumber sandwich. I feel like I finally understand the cucumber sandwich. After weeks of thinking about it, and trying to recreate the most authentic version I could muster, it finally sunk in. The taste isn't rich, indulgent, spicy, acidic, comforting, salty, or fatty. It's cool, calm, and collected. The strongest reaction I had towards one was a contented sigh, a sort of momentary delight. So why was I breaking a sweat trying to make one? I had... Read the Full Article	Part One of My Cucumber Sandwich Revenge: Pain de Mie August 18, 2009 Starting with the perfect loaf of bread. (Check out Part Two of My Cucumber Sandwich Revenge for the sandwich recipe) I went to see a man about a loaf pan. All the traditional outlets had failed (Crate and Barrel, Sur La Table, Williams-Sonoma and four restaurant supply stores) and I was starting to get desperate. See, I needed a very peculiar kind of loaf pan, one that would help me create the mysterious loaf, pain de mie, which would hopefully provide the base for the perfect... Read the Full Article	A Story About Eggy Bread April 27, 2009 What if French toast could be improved by the Brits? Eggy bread, a slice of white loaf dipped in egg whisked with milk and fried in butter, is simply French toast without the sweetness. It is a food I've consumed in countless American diners, and on countless Sunday mornings as a kid. But that morning I found eggy bread unrecognizable without its sheen of maple syrup and its fragrant nutmeg and cinnamon spices. Still, there it was, plain and obvious. And it floored... Read the Full Article
Easter Dinner and My Mysteriously Cheap Lamb Chops April 14, 2009 Cooking Easter dinner with no oven. Easter dinner has always been a giant-baked-ham affair for me. Glazed with a sticky concoction loaded to its saturation point with brown sugar and splashed with bourbon, studded with cloves, and baked until warm and tender--ah, it's hard to beat. Living here in a country full of pork, I figured reproducing this wouldn't be too hard to pull off. But two problems presented themselves: one, it's quite hard to find any... Read the Full Article	Egg Mayonnaise and Cress Sandwich February 14, 2006 Recreating a fond memory from being poor in London Though egg mayonnaise is essentially the same thing as American egg salad, it doesn't taste like your average pitch-in. The mayonnaise was creamy but it had a lightness to it, which probably has something to do with the proportion of ingredients. Instead of deli-style New York sandwiches where a literal pound of meat is thrown on each sandwich--"It's like a cow with a cracker on either side," as the late... Read the Full Article	English Cucumber Sandwiches February 4, 2006 "Why cucumber sandwiches? Why such reckless extravagance in one so young?" Read the Full Article