Did I go for the performative tomahawk? The high-luxe filet? Well, no. The economics of these businesses is insanely tight. And when I saw a big old brisket in the freezer, I thought Yes! That I can use. I’ve met their cows. Happy, plump little buggers... plodding around fields, eating natural stuff and getting... well, basically fat and happy. A brisket might be a second-grade cut to some people, but to me, that’s going to be all about the character of a pretty exceptional animal.

Scroll forward a couple of weeks, and Lib is coming home. She’s graduated. She’s handed her flat back to her mafia landlord, and I’ve done the ‘parent run.’ You fly in low, hover over an LZ that’s defended by withering cover fire from Hammersmith Council Parking Dept in the treeline. You extract your team and their kit and torch anything left. I don’t think we actually touched the ground. To you, it’s a rusty Honda CRV. To Lib and I it’s a Jolly Green Giant.

But the Prodigal’s Return required a good dinner. And I had advance warning. I thought straight away of the brisket. I mean, c’mon. If there’s anything in the world that say’s the warmth of homecoming, it’s going to be brisket. First, I thought about BBQ. But honestly ... it makes me weary. I can tense my forearms and hold my gut in for a certain amount of time, but not while continuing to breathe. It’s too butch. Fuck it.

Then I got really enthusiastic about Italian/American ‘Sunday Gravy’. A big, cheap cut of beef, some sausage, maybe some guanciale. All cooked for a couple of days in a tomato sauce and then served with pasta, on Sunday to a delighted family.

I thought about it. I even started assembling ingredients. And then I went online for a recipe.

There’s a metric shit-ton of recipes for ‘Sunday Gravy’ and all are distinguished by the terrifying level of crap in the comments. Apparently, Italian Americans in Jersey call it ‘Gravy’, but Italian Americans everywhere else call it ‘Sauce’... and ‘below the line’ in online recipe writing, is where they need to fight about this.

Jesus wept.

I really wanted to cook it. But after ten minutes of reading third-rate suburban plumbers slagging each other off like they were mafia bosses, it honestly felt like I didn’t want it in my house. Genuinely. Fuck you! It’s a family-friendly slow cook. It’s Irish Stew. It’s lobscouse. It’s cholent. If you genuinely feel you have to escalate Sunday lunch into whacking Sammy ‘The Bull’ Graziano on the sidewalk outside Springs. Y’know what... go back to your Sopranos box set. Not in my kitchen.

Then I remembered @petes_pans.

Peter Hanley walks an interesting line. He’s all about authenticity, but he also loves food to an absurd degree. He investigates the way food is cooked, forensically, but less as ‘recipes’ than as ‘foodways’. I’ve met Peter. He has a daughter the same age as mine. Whatever he thought was a good way of welcoming someone home was ... well, it was worth listening to.

So I dug out his YouTube about the Gascon Daube. He does his with beef cheeks, which, of course, work brilliantly, but he points out that it can also be done with a macreuse, a paleron, a jarret, or any other powerful but challenging slab.

Marinade your meat with wine and aromatic veg. Sear it. Soften the veg from the marinade, then add the liquid. Simmer, then add the meat back and cook for weeks. Remove the meat, strain the braising liquid. Reduce and serve. That’s a ‘foodway’.

The intriguing difference in Peter’s ‘Gascon’ daube, though, is that the meat is left as a single large piece. Not cubed down. It’s little short of genius. And, of course, it’s the ideal way to treat a big ol’ chunk of fine Cambridgeshire beef brisket.

Watch Peter’s YouTube here. It’s where I started.

If your brisket is rolled, unroll it. Chop up some onions, leeks, carrots, celery, and garlic into coarse chunks and kettle them in a Ziploc bag with your brisket. Add pepper, salt and a bottle of red wine. Store in the fridge for a day or two.

I rendered down some guanciale I had lying around, in a bit of pork lard. If the idea of that doesn’t give you stirrings, leave now.

Take the brisket out of the marinade and sear it on all sides. (I should write ‘Set aside’ but I genuinely can’t. Nobody talks like that.)

Then strain the solids out of the marinade. Soften them in a little olive oil. Add the liquid from the marinade, the meat, and enough wine, or chicken stock, or both, to cover. Put a lid on. Rack the temperature down to something absurd... I mean the braising liquid should be somewhere around 90º... and let it cook for about a week. Peter will hate this, but my induction ring has a built-in probe thermometer. I set it to 92º, hung the probe in the braising liquid, and just let it go for ten hours while I went about my business.

I had a load of dried morels in the larder so I soaked them for ages and then also ‘set them aside’ along with their soaking liquid.

Once the brisket had got to a core temperature of 92º, I lifted it out, let it cool, and refrigerated it overnight. I passed the cooking liquid through a sieve, then added the soaked mushrooms and their liquor. That, too, was refrigerated.

On the day, I set the meat to warm up in the sauce. I turned off the extraction so the kitchen would smell like an anteroom in heaven, and I sweated down a tonne of onion, aiming for maximum sweetness.

As soon as the internal temperature on the brisket hit 75º, I hauled it out onto a serving plate. Then I added the onions and the morels back to the sauce, reduced it, and poured it over.

I also made chips.

There’s no ‘hero shot’. Partly, I didn’t want to be prancing around with a camera; I wanted to be serving it. Carving off thick slices of brisket, the texture of jelly, and ladling over sauce that looked like melted chocolate. And partly it’s the best example I’ve ever seen of Elizabeth David’s idea that photography sells food short.

It was the brownest thing I’ve ever cooked.

Also, quite possibly, the best.

I think Peter would be proud.

There. I said it.

I’ve already got 10 points on my Middle Class License so I basically I haven’t got a hope.

But it’s true!

Bouillabaise is a recipe - or more correctly a series of hotly defended recipes - codified by a cartel of expensive restaurants for tourists in Marseille. The “Marseille Bouillabaisse Charter”, was created by a collective of local restaurateurs in 1980 to “safeguard the traditional recipe and serving methods of the iconic Provençal fish stew”.

Bourride isn’t a recipe at all. At least not in the sense of a foolproof list of ingredients, quantities, times. It’s a foodway that’s found all over the coast of the Med... and not just the French bit.

Bourride is a rough technique that people who work around fish developed to make the most of by-catch, discards and trim. It is, therefore, infinitely superior.

I will not be taking questions.

If I have my facts straight, Cambridge is the city in this sea-girt isle farthest from all available saltwater. This means that most clouds have dropped their water by the time they reach us, giving us the lowest precipitation, usually less than 250mm pa, making us, iirc UK’s only ‘temperate desert’. So I’m thinking of getting good at grilled lamb and couscous... but my desire to own a small fishing boat is a total bust.

So I don’t have ‘by-catch’.

Except that I do!

Today I was working with the estimable Kenneth Lam on a shoot for an article about fish stews. I had a terrific haul from Waitrose fish counter, the blokes on the stall in the market and via courier Rockfish in Brixham. It was a ludicrously grand catch and I hadn’t even had to don an oilskin and get salt in my beard as I hauled on ropes. I didn’t even sing while I did it. (I’m avowedly Anti-Shanty)

So I built a bourride with my by-catch.

I beat down some leeks, garlic, saffron and thyme in olive oil. Added a can of tomatoes and cooked it down for 20 minutes. Then I added half a bottle of wine and a litre of water (it should have been seawater but, you can’t drink the Cam without some kind of dreadful rat-piss disease so, yeah. Water and salt). I let it simmer for an hour then used this to poach, severally, some mussels, a few prawns, two spare langos and a thick slice of leftover hake. Lifting each out and into a bowl as it cooked to just short of perfection. I whipped up a rouille from mayo and Le Cap Phare Bon, then hoiked up the heat under the remaining juice thickened it with an egg yolk liaison and poured it over like the jism of archangels.

This was so good I don’t ever want to eat anything else. I thought I’d like a baguette and some Pastis but I didn’t need it.

The incredible thing is how simple it is... how opposite to the regimented faff of a bouillabaise. It’s authentically the lunch of aquatic truckdrivers. If they had motorway service stations at sea, transport caffs on docks, they’d slop out bourride. No rules. Ingredients nobody else wants, rendered superb by human ingenuity.

You make the cheapest and easiest possible sauce. You dilute it with water and booze. You poach junk fish in it. Finally, you thicken the broth so nothing goes to waste and pour it back over. Like gravy over a roast.

Stendhal, author of Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), was one of the more sensitive souls of 19th-century European letters. He used to react to objects or images that were overpoweringly lovely by fainting — a fact he first discovered in the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, which must have been embarrassing at the time. These days, the tourists would just step over him for a selfie in front of the altarpiece.

I thought Stendhal syndrome was something of an exaggeration. The writer garnishing his own myth. I was convinced it was all fluff. Until I collected my by-catch like generations of horny-handed sons of the sea, and built a bourride.

You have to put yourself back to about 1985. I don’t know what you were up to, but I was ‘assisting’ a photographer in a grotty studio, four flights up on Goswell Rd. I know it was four flights because I had to run up and down them laden with flashpacks and bloody pig-iron light stands. From the van to the studio and back. Endlessly. For £4 a day (cash-in-hand, obvs).

I lived, though that’s already an exaggeration, in a squat near the Maudsley Hospital. The day went thus. Wake up, dress, pack everything into a kitbag, climb out of the window and stash the bag in the lean-to at the back of the pub where I had an arrangement with a particularly lovely barmaid. Bus out as fast as possible to Clerkenwell for a 7am start.

But the end of the day was worse. There was nothing that qualified as ‘home’ in the squat, so sometimes I sat in the pub ‘til closing time, but usually I walked. Back through Smithfield, Clerkenwell, Holborn, to the crust edge of Soho and The Pollo Bar.

The Pollo was one of a string of cheap restaurants around Soho and somehow related to, I think, the ‘Stockpots’ in other parts of the West End. It was ‘Italian’ but not in the way we’d understand it today. It was run by Italians, the menu ran heavy to cheap pastas and a lasagne the texture of a wet futon. But the signs on the front seemed to deny the very idea

‘Food to take away’ - I never saw anyone take the food away. You wanted shelter and steaming fug. If I’d taken Pollo food back to where I actually slept it would have created a kind of critical mass of despair. No one could have survived that. As far as I could tell, The Maudsley was there for the people who’d tried

It said ‘Pollo Bar Restaurant’, but it didn’t seem to have a bar in any accepted sense. There was wine in a sort of jug but only red, as I remember. No complicated choices.

“Pasta Speciality

English and Continental Dishes”

Which read like a get out clause for anyone terrified of ‘Foreign Muck’.

But the thing that sprang up in my shattered memory yesterday was a dessert they used to make. A hot boozy custard. A thick Duralux glass filled with lightly whipped hot zabaglione. I could remember the taste, the intoxicating smell of cheap marsala and, unbelievably I remembered how they made it.

As it happens, I’ve got an espresso machine on the bench at the moment that I’m repairing for someone. So it had to be done.

1 egg yolk, a tablespoon full of sugar (remove fag ends), a tablespoon of Marsala.

Blitz it with the battered milk-shake maker on the back of the bar, then ply the steam wand on the ancient Espresso machine.

It only bloody works!

So the egg yolk is free-range, the sugar is a little more hygienic than the stuff on the red formica tabletops and the Bamix has to stand in for the milkshake machines that no longer exist - possibly because they could mince the ends off your fingers.

But the taste is still sensational. Utterly warming in a way you can only appreciate when you know you’re about to walk two hours down into the bowel of South London, retrieve your bag and sleep on something the texture of a lasagne. But you’re full of £3.75p’s worth of spaghetti vongole, hot, boozy custard, barbarous ‘Valpollicella’ to stave off scurvy, and a girl from St Martin’s just smiled at you from another booth.

I’m tout seul this evening so obviously an opportunity to enjoy things that might otherwise be frowned upon.

The fishfinger sandwich is one such.

It’s one of those things that everyone has a ‘take’ on - 90% of which are utter, pointless bollocks. It’s a sandwich. Made with fishfingers. It’s not supposed to be zhuzhed, improved or pimped. It should not be made elegant or ironic. The more original naffness you can preserve, the better it’s going to taste.

That said.

I have opinions.

Don’t make your own sodding fishsticks! What are you? Mad? And don’t buy Waitrose premium organic cod batons either. If they fanny with the basic physical proportions of a fishfinger, making it ‘chunkier’ or otherwise more artisanal, they mess with the physics. A chip has a ratio of exterior crunch to steamed soft interior. If you make a chip thinner, you get more ‘case’ and less filling. If you go large, you have to do absurd things like ‘triple cooking’ to get that huge mass of centre cooked before the crust overcooks. There is only one size for a chip: 8mm. This was handed down by God and if you have questions I suggest you consult a priest.

Bird’s Eye. Cod or haddock. Their proportion of crumb to flesh is ideal. They cook from frozen.

The bread needs to be ordinary. Sourdough completely doesn’t work. If you happen to have access to a phenomenal bakery, go for the simplest they’ve got (@fitzbillies standard bap in my case).

Of course you can make your own tartare! It’ll be lovely. But remember to keep some properly populist flavours in there. I make mine with 50% salad cream, 50% Hellman’s. I will not be taking questions. If you genuinely are a diagnosed, certified irredeemable hipster, you could use Kewpie... but only because the rest of us are entirely aware that it’s just Japanese salad cream. Of course we’re judging you.

You can have lettuce. Just not much.

Cook the fishfingers (3 per person) in a dry skillet. There’s loads of shortening in the crumb so at 175ºc the crust crisps and browns without extra help. At that temperature, if you’ve gone from frozen, the core will be perfect flaky steamed as the outside reaches the correct Pantone reference.

They spent millions on this. Making fingers taste good, even if they’re thrown at the pan by a stoned student. Use that technology to your advantage. I tried frying them in clarified butter once and ended up with lumpy fishbutter.

You could, at least theoretically, do this with frozen cod portions in batter but it’s an entirely different proposition. If the idea of frozen cod in kid-friendly finger offends you, use the battered pieces to make fish tacos.

Your tartare should contain minced onion, extra Dijon, capers (rough chopped), cornichons (fine chopped), dill parsley and chives. Chervil or tarragon optional. No lemon juice or vinegar, just the stuff the cornichons came in.

Finally, eat half a bag of Scampi Fries then run a rolling pin over what’s left. Stir this stuff into the tartare, sprinkle over the fishfingers as you’re cooking them and then ‘strew’ the rest over the top of the tartare during assembly. Unfortunately fishfingers don’t crisp up quite as well as they used to back when they contained radioactive isotopes and Agent Orange. You need the Scampi Dust.

Dry toast the inside of the bun/bread.

The Gibson is Beefeater, direct, Brutto-style.

Pickled onions just want to be with fishfingers.

Nunc Dimittis

I’m sure it started, as so many of these things do, with trauma in childhood. No, I was never thrashed with a bunch of dried parsley stalks by a pederastic choirmaster, I never watched a beloved relative choke to death on the stuff.

The dark ground in which my hatred germinated, was made fertile with boil-in-the bag cod. My Great Grandmother used to prepare it by hanging ‘the bag’ in her electric kettle, off a knitting needle. It saved fuel, I suppose. And after she’d slithered it out of the bag onto a plate, she would gum it with relish.

There were two kinds, if I can reexamine this psychological scar without re-opening that Great Wound: ‘Cod in Mornay Sauce’ which was the colour of teeth in a mug on a bedside table, managed to smell both fishy and cheesy simultaneously, a cocktail you’d usually encounter only in a corpse. ‘Cod in Parsley Sauce’ was additionally the colour of gangrene.

Later, I got my first kitchen job. I must have been around 14, a potwash of staggering ineptitude, paid - rarely - in small amounts of cash, but mainly food. Most of my work was too horrible to recall and has mercifully been excised from my mind, but a high point was ‘Doing the Garnitures’. The least repellent of the tasks.

I had to lay out three hotel pans before service. One was tinned pineapple and glace cherry, to go with the gammon. One was ‘salad’. A single leaf of lettuce, a weeping quarter of over or under-ripe tomato and a slice off a detumescent cucumber. The third was The Parsley (pronounced “PAAs-lay” with a soft S, by the chef Clive. A truly rum cove who’d been drummed out of the RAF for unspeakable crimes, went on to run a successful chain of sex shops, bought a small hotel in Bournemouth on the profits and became a Jehovah’s Witness.

I had to wash the parsley, shake it dry, throw away the rotted bits, bunch the sprigs in threes and lay them out for easy access. Christ alone knows what Clive’s training was, but he was a pretty good cook by the standards of the time and, as was the prevailing doctrine of those halcyon days, was congenitally incapable of letting anything over the pass lacking ‘a bit of green’.

It was bizarre. Nobody would tell me why.

It tasted like it had bolted in a suspiciously damp place behind the chemical toilet on a building site... or soap. It enhanced nothing. It provided no accent, no counterpoint, no surprise nor joy. It was just ‘a bit of green’.

The first time a girl took me out for dinner (her dad owned another hotel nearby. She was called Liz and looked like young Bacall in Key Largo. The words ‘above my pay grade’ seem inappropriate when I wasn’t getting paid enough to take her out for dinner... but it’s nonetheless true. She was radiant. I was scabrous. I was base and unwholesome. My motives were impure and my mind vile. Most shamefully, I was impolite) but there was parsley on the Steak Diane, so perhaps in some ineffable Freudian way, my loathing of parsley was finally cemented by sexual incompetence and humiliation.

I have hated parsley in way you mortals cannot conceive. It ruins a jambon de Paris as surely as a chine de Lincolnshire. It is horrid with fish meat or poultry. I’ve seen great shoals of it scraped into pig bins when self evidently, no punter knew what the hell to do with it either. I made a parsley soup once. It somehow gave me, bowel-tearing, near-terminal squits.

I loved Pogles Wood, Ivor the Engine and the Clangers but I could never watch anything with a lion in called ‘Parsley’. I’m sure Paul Simon was a lyricist without peer but the fucker was a Parsley apologist of the first rank and I cannot love him.

I reserve nothing but the profoundest respect for St. Rick Stein. I still can’t decide whether I admire him most for his cooking, his charming and easy manner, his erudition or his comprehensive misanthropy. I will die, unsuccesful in my attempts to match him in any of those four fields. But the man is unsound on parsley. He hurls that shit on everything. He strews it hither and yon like Cleopatra’s handmaidens with the bloody rose petals. He puts it in things, on things and I swear I once watched the man tuck it under something.

Does he own shares in Big Parsley? Is he like that bloke Hellman, and his covert cabal of mayonnaise billionaires, who secretly own Pret a Manger so they can push the slop within 300m of schools.

St. Rick’s Herb!

WT actual F is the man’s Agenda?

Quite early on, one of the culinary myths of the construction trade was shattered for me. Early projects I worked on usually had Eastern European crews and later Aussie or Kiwi teams. None of them seemed interested in fry-ups. 

Since Brexit, almost everyone in a hardhat is a Brit and, though I had high hopes, they were shattered when I realised that most young tradespeople these days go to the gym or run bloody marathons and are as likely to feature avocado and quinoa in their lunchboxes as the architects or interior designers.

Today, though, I had to go to TLC, an electrical supply company, to pick up a couple of spools of CAT6 cable, and I realised, to my utter delight, that The Soup had returned.

All trades are different in the way they get their supplies. Carpenters and brick/block layers will get their stuff delivered to site on a ‘Hiab’, one of those flatbed trucks with a built-in crane. Plumbers write long shopping lists, visit the suppliers once a week and keep stocks of parts ‘on-the-van’. Plasterers are a law unto themselves. But electricians will often nip off at the beginning of each day to pick up a component they’ve discovered they’ll need.

As a result, TLC, one of the better supply shops, on a small industrial estate near the bakery, is a positive social hub of a morning. You very often run into a ‘sparks’ you know from another job, and there’s always time to stop and chat. They’re also incredibly helpful with advice.

A while back, the suppliers caught on to this unanticipated social aspect of the electrical trade, and some began to supply food or drink. Initially, it was a pot of sweets on the counter, bars of chocolate, then someone started putting out boxes of doughnuts, but after a while, things really escalated. The day that Edmundsen’s, in a little industrial estate right over the other side of town, started giving away pies.

The news passed through the trade like a shock. Every other store emptied, and there was a queue for the carpark at Edmundsens. The staff had dreamed up the scheme themselves. They picked up a ‘Piequarium’ on eBay and organised a rota to pick up a flat of frozen pies from the Cash and Carry over the road every morning.

TLC, my local and favourite, struggled to compete. All they had was ‘The Machine’. It dispensed free tea and coffee but also mirabile dictu, Knorr Vegetable Soup.

I don’t know if you’ve ever come across KVS. I’m not sure many civilians ever would. Some of the electricians were scathing about it... one of the guys behind the counter said it was ‘like runny sick’, a phrase so apposite it should make any working restaurant critic’s eyes bleed with envy - but I bloody love it.

The soup is stored in the bottom of a cup in the body of the machine. The only ‘seal’ that protects it from the air is the next cup up in the stack. Stock is replenished ‘when it runs out’ which, as far as I can tell from the guys behind the counter, is ‘maybe once a month’ for the less popular menu items.

The machine takes 15 seconds from selection to service, so in that time, the dessicated ingredients need to have entirely dissolved or reconstituted - no lumps - in water cool enough to avoid any burn risk. It’s a technical miracle.

The broth is fascinating. It really tastes strongly of both salt and chicken, though it appears, from the ingredient list on the machine bulkhead, to contain neither. That means quantities of dietary yeast and MSG at the very least. Much like methamphetamine, it’s designed to be delicious, and by God, it is. 

They’ve obviously moved on from the French inspired dried veg ‘Macedoines’ of the glorious old-school Cup-a-Soups and instead leaned into the freeze-dry technologies of Japanese *kappu men* (カップ麺). No longer the chewy cubes of carrot that would remain stubbornly unsoaked in the time it took the soup to congeal. No longer the mystery flakes of unidentifiable root veg. Today there is a fine dusting of chive, perhaps an evanescent hint of dried onion flake and, O Sweet Baby Jesus... croutons.

And no ordinary croutons at that. Dolly little micro-croutons, in mathematical 2mm dice, fried to ‘Trump-Skin Caramel’ (Farrow & Ball FB4879) and shattering crisp throughout.

Oh yes. I loved the soup.

But then disaster struck Edmundsen’s. The EHO dropped in and pointed out that if they were serving (or even giving away) food to people (or even electricians), they’d need a compliant kitchen in a separate room, with washable walls, a handwash station, an accident book, first aid training and an annual inspection to award them stars.

Perhaps it’s something to do with a job in which a simple, unforced error can blow your customer to ratshit that makes Sparkies different. There is no trade more schooled in compliance and as assiduous in voluntary self-enforcement.

The next day the pies were gone, and with them died The Electrical Pie Wars of 2023.

With no-one to vie with, my beloved TLC sadly lost all competitive drive, and next time the soup ran out, someone put an X over the button in red insulating tape. I alone mourned its passing.

But then, this morning, for no reason I can adequately explain, The Soup had returned. Not only that, but the next button along bruited a lurid fire-engine red “Knorr Spicy Tomato Soup (with Croutons)”.

I drank the veg one like, man starved for years. I ‘forgot’ the cable clips, so I’ll just have to come back tomorrow for a quick chat and a pass at the Spicy Tomato one... but, as soon as I’ve thumbed this in, I’m driving over to Edmundsen’s.

I’m going to tell them.

...and then I’m going to sit back and pray for escalation.

I often batch cook at weekend. Often things that will freeze well and do for fast lunches during the week. Because I have to please but myself with these things, they’re often dredged from the great canon of US diner cooking. Which is why, as my appendages froze a few weekends ago, I made a pot of black bean soup.

Black bean and pea & ham are the two standard soups in the repertoire. But to assume that they are like other soups - a nice stock, thickened with something delicious, balanced with vegetables and perhaps enriched with dairy - would be a mistake.

Soups made with dried peas or beans are miraculously cheap. If you’re using ham or bacon in your diner, then fat, trimmings and even the water it was boiled in, create a by-product of ridiculously over flavoured, salty smokey fluid which can be thickened to deliciousness with an Imperial shit-ton of split peas for about 50¢. That’s not cooking; it’s economics. But pea and ham soup, lovely as it is, is merely the sum of its delicious parts.

Black bean soup is something, most definitely, else.

In making it, it’s very important that you don’t get clever. That you get yourself into the mindset of a struggling and parsimonious owner-operator in the middle of the Depression. Think Nick Papadakis in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Or, come to think of it, Mildred Pierce herself (Why do I love James M. Cain so much? Why did he so love diners?)

You start with a big, ugly onion, a big ugly carrot and three cloves of garlic. Smash the garlic and chop the veg into robust dice. Put them in a big pot with about half a mug of oil and fry them gently until the onions take colour and there’s a possibility of sticking. Pour in half a mug of red or white wine vinegar and reduce by half. Pour in the liquid from a small can of chipotles in adobo followed immediately by a pound of dried black beans, and enough water to cover them by about an inch. You’ll need a palm-sized pile of Mexican oregano then bring it to the boil and drop back to a simmer. Don’t even think about messing with it now. No bay leaves, or parsley, or anything else more fancy. Just forget about it. Walk away. Go check how Cora’s getting on with that handsome young drifter that came looking for odd jobs.

It takes a couple of hours if you picked up your beans in the same place the Mexicans buy theirs. If, like mine, yours have languished since Suez on a high shelf in an English whole food shop... it might take up to a day. But you just keep the simmer low and, every half an hour or so, you go back and give it a listless stir. If the beans show any signs of drying on the surface, pour on more water, again to a depth of about an inch.

And that’s how the magic occurs. The beans cook infinitely slowly... sometimes it feels like they’ll never give up... and then suddenly some break down. The carrots and onions provide just enough sweetness. The vinegar works as a gastrique. The chipotle juice brings cumin, smokey pepper and a really subtle tomato sourness. But it’s all almost homeopathic. The bean slurry takes on a flavour somewhere between a rich game gravy and melted dark chocolate. Totally sui generis. The texture is satin.

And it’s dark. God, it’s dark. It can suck the light out of a room. Even the carrot chunks have taken on sombre depth. Still keeping some texture, still sweet but something of the night about them.

And then there’s the salt. You mortals cannot comprehend how much salt this stuff can take on. But it’s the only condiment you need. And it’s the cheapest. (If salt terrifies you, use MSG).

But the real wonder is the unique way you’ve created something out of nothing. By letting the beans be themselves. By the simplest, cheapest interventions and the magic of time.

This size batch makes about ten single servings, but the incredible thing is that it just keeps getting thicker, so every time you serve it, you end up letting it down with more water... and it somehow never suffers. 

You can swirl in some cream soured with lime if you’re terrified by brown food, but please, God, no ‘fresh torn cilantro’, no crumbled feta... nothing you could misconstrew. No those are ‘chilli fixin’s’ and that’s a whole ‘nother thing.

Just let it be what it is. Black Bean Soup. A time-forged, fully-evolved pinnacle of the grill-man’s thrift and ingenuity. BBS on the ticket.

I’m obviously aware of the Terrible History of foodwriters doing a piece on ‘How to boil water’ or something similarly facile and their subsequent running out of town by a torch-bearing mob. But I’m sorry... I’ve got to get something off my chest.

I’m very lucky. I own a bakery. I’ve got our drivers on speed-dial and, if I hit the button, someone will drop a sourdough, hot from the oven, at my door in under half an hour. That’s what you call privilege and I don’t just recognise it, I embrace it. But it means I get to experience fresh bread on the reg and it’s left me with opinions. It frankly terrifies me how badly most other people treat the loaves they buy.

Sourdough stales slower than regular bread, though quicker than the crap from the supermarket which is laden with preservatives and will go mouldy before it ever goes hard. So unless you have a family of six teenagers, a large sourdough loaf would probably stale before you finished it.

Storing

If you wrap the loaf tightly in cling-film, it will go a weird texture where it loses any crispness while building up a rubbery chewiness. If you wrap it in a clean tea-towel it will keep crisp longer but it will still go hard within three days. That weird waxed cloth gives results half way between the two that please no-one. A thick canvas ‘bag-for-life’ gives you the best of all worlds... but all of this is tinkering. Why TF are we bothering? We can keep it fresh forever by the simple expedient of slicing it the minute we get it home, sealing it in a Ziploc and chucking it in the freezer.

Bread freezes beautifully and loses none of its qualities in the process. Frozen slices pop easily apart... the furthest you’ll ever have to go is slipping in the tip of a palette knife and twisting. They’ll then defrost completely in less than ten minutes. Frozen slices can go straight into the toaster.

So yes. £4.50 seems steep for ‘just a loaf of bread’ that stales faster than the Living Dead supermarket loaf at £1.50. But it’s not a lot to pay for two slices of perfect fresh sourdough toast, every morning for 10 days.

Slicing.

The loaf should be sliced and frozen as fast as humanly possible - I’m lucky, I can do it while it’s still warm - but you won’t be much later if you have to cycle home from the bakery. Of course, everybody knows that fresh bread is difficult to cut and gets easier when it stales, which is why I’m going to tell you that owning a good breadknife is the best investment in your own mental health that you could possibly make. I use a Wüsthof Classic Precision Double Serrated Bread Knife because a) I’m obviously a professional and b) they sent me one. They cost about £145. It’s the best breadknife I’ve ever owned and it goes through warm fresh bread like a light sabre.

You could also look for a Tojiro breadknife from Japan. It’s an absolute endless adventure trying to find one online. They used to be £20 on Amazon but they no longer stock them. Now you can find them in weird back corners of the web for under £30, or more expensive than the Wüsthof when curated and sold back to you by hipsters.

It would be great if we could all, easily get great breadknives for under £30 because the inconvenient truth is that breadknives, being serrated, can’t be resharpened. So you will be needing a new one in a few years, however much you spend.

OK. Now the irritating bit. I’m going to tell you how to slice bread.

It might be that you like regular machine-style slices but I find that, if I’m taking them out of the freezer only as needed, it’s better to have a variety of thicknesses and sizes. So these are the steps.

1. Cut the loaf cleanly across the middle and remove 3 or four full-width slices from each side. These are easy cuts, even when the bread is fresh, because you can get a good grip. Because of the long oval shape of the loaf, these slices will be, near as damnit, the same size and shape. Premium ‘show-slices’. Ideal for photogenic, showoff sandwiches. I also make sure four slices are thick and four are thin. One doesn’t always need a full doorstep. If you vary thicknesses, remember to do an even number of each. It’s a simple courtesy.

2. You’ll now have two hemispherical ends to work on. The smaller ends are a mare to slice accurately, and worse when fresh. So turn each onto its cut face and slice downwards. It’s much easier to control the cuts this way so you should, again, be able to do some thick, some thin. These are D-shaped ‘half-slices’ and less absolutely regular in size.

3. A large loaf will now pack neatly into a Ziploc. The four small end crusts usually get frozen into another bag where I accumulate them for breadcrumbs or croutons.

4. Now the only thing that can go wrong is somebody putting the butter dish in the bloody fridge.

Sometimes amazing things clash in the notebook.

I was writing something about sourdough loaves, how basically, when you get a fresh one (obvs fairly regular for me) you slice it while it’s fresh and freeze it. It makes loads of sense.

I’ve just got this insane Wusthof knife that makes it possible to slice really fresh bread, really thinly, thus making the whole freezing thing much more effective. A slice is easy to peel off, it defrosts in minutes and is completely unharmed by freezing. It toasts brilliantly, straight from the freezer.

But, also... I don’t usually freeze the ‘Toppers’. The end pieces that aren’t that useful to keep and take up valuable freezer space.

(’Topper’ is a Bristol thing. When we were kids, we used to fight over the crust ends of the bread... well to be honest, we’d fight over anything.) So I’d made a note to think up something. It just said ‘Toppers’.

Then I’d made a note about the deep fried crab thermidor at Lilibet. An absolutely life changing starter where crab meat (much better than lobster) is bound with a traditional Thermidor sauce, packed back into a clean crab shell and then the whole bloody thing is deep fried.

I mean... if that isn’t one of the great ideas of all time, I don’t know what is.

But then I thought about Toppers, and Toast Toppers - which I think used to be made by Heinz. A kind of paste for smearing on toast) and it all sort of clicked into place. How about a Bread ‘Topper’ ‘shell’, packed with a posh lobster Thermidor ‘Toast Topper’ and deep fried.

I mean... c’mon.

So. Cut the toppers off your fresh @fitzbillies sourdough with your @Wusthof Bread Light Sabre. Pull out the crumb and let it stale somewhere quietly for breadcrumbs

You can use frozen lobster tails or the cheap precooked lobsters from the freezer section at the supermarket. The latter you should just strip, the former should be simmered for 3 mins and then stripped. Either way, save the shells and other crustacean wreckage.

Break up the wreckage as much as possible and put it in a baking dish with chopped carrot, onion, celery. Toss with a big dollop of tomato puree, a glug of olive oil and put it in a hot oven until it starts to really scorch and smell lovely. Then scrape everything into and deglaze the baking tray with hot water.

Pour brandy over the burnt wreckage and cook it off; then a can of Italian supermarket white and cook that off. Then add the deglazings from the baking tray and top up with water to barely cover the mess. At this point it’ll look like a fight scene in Aliens II. Mijote for 20 mins and strain off.

This is your stock.

For the sauce, clarify some chopped shallots 2tbs off butter, then add 2tbs of plain flour and a big dredge of paprika. Cook this roux till it smells biscuity then whisk in brandy and around a mugful of the lobster stock (the rest is enough for a small but delicious bisque). Whisk to keep it smooth and liquid. Remove from the heat

Now whisk in a big handful of grated gruyere. A pinch of freeze dried tarragon, black pepper and salt, then a tablespoon of dijon mustard and a huge glug of double cream. Bring the whole lot together, whisking to keep smooth, then scrape into a bowl, cover and refrigerate.

Chop your cooked, cooled lobster meat into small pieces and fold into the sauce. Pack this ‘Thermidor mix’ into the ‘Topper’ shells and refrigerate again.

To cook, heat neutral oil to 175ºc in a pan. Dip the top of the chilled, packed Topper into egg wash and then a mix of breadcrumbs, gruyere and parmesan…

….then slide gently, into the oil, cheesy top side down. Check after 3 mins and roll gently onto it’s back once it’s brown.

Do the other side for roughly the same time then lift out, drain and transfer to a 180ºc oven. Probe occasionally until the core reaches 75ºc then rest and serve.

Looking back at my notes, I realise I’ve also been writing about Jonathan Woolway and his amazing Welsh Rarebit Croquette at St John Marylebone and my first croquetta at the original Barrafina.

I can’t tell you how good this tastes... but it also wants me to fill it with everything... all the best bits of croquettas, pie filling, Toast Toppers, chicken Kiev, Steak Bakes, rarebits and ... Oh sweet Jesus...ARNOLD BENNET!

I’ve just made a note to myself to pick up puff pastry from the bakery tomorrow... I have spare Thermidor filling and fresh prawns. I feel the Call of the Vol-au-vent.

There will be a small prize for the first person who mentions ‘Findus Crispy Pancake’ in the comments.

Of course, it’s just an absurdly posh Crispy Pancake!

...and your point is?

You can now buy countdown calendars for Hallow’e’n. Yep. Just as it sounds. An ‘advent’ calendar to further inflame your insane excitement during what we are now - according to several press releases in September - going to start calling ‘Spooky Season’.

I have already vomitted myself dry so you don’t have to.

It is, of course, an American idea, and you can sort of see how it works with their calendar. They have All Hallows Evening, then Thanksgiving, when families get together for bad poultry and recrimination and buy Christmas they’re pretty much celebrated out.

We start with halloween which has always been a bit crap. I think I was probably in my early 20s before I realised that the entire thing wasn’t a pagan thing specifically for fully grown women to dress as weirdly eroticised schoolgirls and drink themselves into A&E. I mean... I still don’t get that bit. All Hallow’s Eve? Is it something to do with St Trinian?

We do, of course, have bonfire night, where we celebrate torturing Catholics to death. That’s always been a bit of a hoolie and a sort of unofficial opening to the Office party season that culminates in the bilious debauch of ‘Christmas’. Now a seven day ritual in which an entire nation pauses to celebrate our national characteristics of obesity and drunkenness.

But, there is hope. Something happens to in the first days of October and we need to find a new way to mark it. It’s either the turning of the calendar page, the browning of the leaves, the subtle realisation that it’s already dark as you mix your first martini, the arrival of the first ‘named’ storm. But we go through our wardrobes. We ritually fold and store the warm weather gear and think, with genuine pleasure, about buying a new coat. For foodies, there’s a complete brain wipe. We start looking a big pots and genuinely using words like ‘hearty’ in conversation. There isn’t an English word for hygge, but we have enough Nordic left in what passes for our blood to feel an upswelling of something very like it, at least for a few days, until we get a grip and think about getting the boiler serviced.

I dig out stew-pots. For six months, the nearest I’ve got to braising anything was reusing a teabag. Until Mayday, no unbraised morsel will pass my lips....

I start making soup.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been keen on a Big Bowl of Soup. I don’t think that’s how its supposed to work. Ramen comes in a bloody huge bowl, sure enough. But under the broth there’s a proper dinner.

No. I’m firmly convinced that small, rich cream soups are the way to go. With loads of bread.

We have a cultural issue with soup here in England. We’ve somehow concluded that it’s disgusting to slurp it from the bowl and we therefore need an armoury of special utensils and a full suite of manners to deal with it. All that cack about which way you tilt the bowl, how you swing your ‘special’ spoon. Infinite byzantine rules designed to stop you dripping consomme down your dickie... none of which have the slightest relevance to the joy of consuming something hot, rich and thick. Combined, it conspires to put you off soup for life.

But I love it in the autumn. I often make soup recreationally, usually at weekends when the wind is rattling the windows. Like today when, having cycled back from the market, through a gale, with two great bunches of local Cambridgeshire celery, I was hit by the soup urge.

Its my double cream of celery soup. Dead simple. You chop up onions, whole bunches of celery and, where you’re supposed to add potatoes to thinken, you use celeriac. Simmer the lot in milk. Until it’s softened enough to go in the blender. Blitz smooth and add loads of cream.

It’s rich as hell. Of course it is. That’s the whole point. Because it has no spoon.

On Fridays Saturdays and Sundays, our bakers do a sourdough ‘porridge’ loaf. It’s unbelieveably good. Softer in taste and texture than regular white sourdough. Less risen. It’s got a malty sweetness. They sell out in seconds and we don’t even tell people we bake them. It’s bonkers. Still can’t work that one out. I pick up a loaf at the weekend tear it into quarters and freeze it.

The soup (also portioned and frozen) has to be rich because you only need a very small bowl, and there’s no spoon. Just the curving crusts of the porridge bread as you tear it up. It’s chewy, it takes a while to get through , but the curve fits the sides of the tiny little bowl so, with a bit of practice, you’re polishing the glaze with the last heel of the bread.

Cream of mushroom, cream of cauliflower, cream of onion, cream of chicken. Laden with dairy. Amply salted. Enough umami to bring down a drone at 1000m, just enough to paint a quarter loaf of porridge bread... and no bloody spoon.