House of Ho
A few years ago, I happened to be in an episode of Bobby Chinn’s World Cafe Asia when he was filming in Chengdu: you can watch…
Chinese feasts for the British PM – a few thoughts
Today, the Daily Telegraph published menus of the lunch and dinner served to the British Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday in Beijing. Lunch, apparently, was ‘hors…
Strange fruits
These extraordinary wild fruits, harvested in the Zhejiang countryside, taste rather like pear or jujube, although of course they have proportionally less flesh to skin, to…
Translation – any ideas?!
A friend of mine who is a big cheese in Chinese food circles (or should we say ‘a big tofu’ in these parts?) has asked me…
Fancy a buckwheat noodle enema?
I know it’s something of a cliche to giggle at Chinese menu mistranslations, but the menu I came across at lunchtime today was such a spectacular…
Pizzle puzzle
How to cook a stag penis? Not a question I’d ever seriously pondered, until I inadvertently acquired four of them, and had to find a way.…
New York Times recipe lab (+ a note on substitutions)
You can see Julia Moskin and three New York Times readers chatting with me about ‘Every Grain of Rice’ here: And the full article, focusing on…
News, tapas-style
READING: I’ve been gripped by Anya von Bremzen’s memoir of eating in the USSR, ‘Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking’. The story of three generations of…
Anyone for chop suey at the Chinese Delmonico?
Thanks to Cool Culinaria for sending me samples from their new collection of vintage Chinese restaurant menu prints, which date from the late nineteenth century to…
A Devon idyll of cakes, cooking and conversation
I’m just back home after a week of intensive teaching and eating in Devon, where writer, designer, cook, photographer and restaurateur Alastair Hendy and I were running…