What you can learn from Sally Abe

The head chef at London’s only Michelin-starred pub, The Harwood Arms, shares her insider knowledge

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The most simple but impressive dish has to be roast chicken. I use Sutton Hoo chickens – they’re raised slowly and you can really taste the difference – but any organic, free-range chicken will do. I stuff mine with lemon and thyme, then put baby Charlotte potatoes in the tray to cook in the chicken juices. 2

I would recommend getting a stick blender. You can do so much with it! With a standard one, you need to have a large amount of whatever you want to blend which isn’t always practical, especially in the home kitchen. I use a hand blender for quickly puréeing soups, making pesto and chopping and blending herbs and spices. 3

I use artisan English butter instead of the run-of-the-mill kind you get in shops. The fat content is higher and it doesn’t have additives, except salt. It’s flavourful and creamier, which helps 4 make sauces silkier.

My go-to four-ingredient recipe would be mackerel pâté. Smoky, oily mackerel folds beautifully through crème fraîche, and everything is lifted by hot horseradish and tangy lemon juice. Serve it with radishes, watercress and crusty sourdough. 5 There’s nothing wrong with frozen peas. Peas start to lose their sweetness the moment they’re picked, but frozen ones are frozen straight from the field, so they’re consistently sweet. 6 My go-to veggie main is spinach & mushroom pithivier. My mum and sister are both vegetarians, so I make them this at Christmastime. It’s a great ‘occasion’ piece. I bind spinach and mushrooms with a bit of egg and cover with lovely puff pastry, and they don’t feel they’re missing out. 7 If you’re cooking a meal for lots of people, blanche all your veg ahead. You can do it in the morning, and as long as you cool them, they’ll be fine for the evening. Just reheat quickly in boiling water before serving. 8

To cut down on food waste, use the whole ingredient. Take beetroots, for example – in the restaurant, we use the stalks and leaves as well as the root. We pickle the stems and cook down the leaves the same way you would spinach or rainbow chard, then serve them with the beetroot – they keep for ages. We’ve also got a compost bin for all our food waste, which can be used to grow more ingredients in the next year. 9 To fix split mayonnaise, tip everything out of the bowl, add another egg yolk, then drizzle everything back into the first bowl while whisking constantly. 10

I hope game becomes more popular. It’s been an integral part of what we do at The Harwood Arms, and game – deer especially – is a very sustainable meat. Some breeds, like Muntjac, are pests – they eat crops, so there’s agricultural damage that adversely affects farmers. They breed year-round so it’s important that they’re managed. The game in shops often comes from New Zealand, which boggles my mind as we have so much of it here!