My 20 years in the Telegraph kitchen
For two decades, Xanthe Clay has shared her recipes and insights – and has learned a lot from her readers too
I was a chef in a West Country restaurant with a baby, a toddler, no mobile phone and no computer
From chardonnay to sharing plates, Xanthe Clay charts the changing tastes of Telegraph readers
Twenty years ago, a little column launched quietly in the bottom corner of an inside page of The Telegraph’s
Weekend section. “Readers’ Recipes” was written by us – you, the readers, and me, in my first foray into food writing.
It ran for seven glorious years, before I moved on to writing recipes and food features, and even the occasional nerve-racking commission for a comment piece for the main newspaper.
Two decades on, here I am, still part of my beloved Team Telegraph. And if a year is a long time in politics, 20 has been aeons in food. Back in 1999, the Twin Towers were still standing and British food was the laughing stock of the world. Worse, an EU ban on the export of British beef had been in place since 1996 (and wasn’t lifted until 2006) after the outbreak of BSE.
As a nation, we were in thrall to heavily processed food. Supermarket fridges were filled with “healthier” margarine but mostly just two kinds of butter, own brand and Lurpak.
I was a chef in a West Country restaurant with a baby and a toddler, no mobile phone and – until the column was commissioned – no computer, let alone internet, at home. For the first year, I faxed my copy to my editor every week, and readers posted their recipes to me,
handwritten, some on stiff headed writing paper, others on pages ripped from ring-bound notebooks, or photocopied from precious family cookbooks.
Pundits, meanwhile, banged on about the loss of culinary skills and the crisis in British food. But here was proof that home cooking was not just alive and well in kitchens from Penzance to Peterhead, but thriving.
The letters from older readers were particular treasures. One gentleman sent in his grandmother’s pig’s trotter recipe, with recollections of being sent to the butchers in the Thirties to buy a trotter for sixpence. There was also the lady whose grandmother, in service before the First World War, cooked peas by popping a pea pod smeared in honey and mustard in the pan as flavouring.
A reader aged 15 and working in her first job near London’s Liverpool Street during the Second World War would cringe with embarrassment when her mother sent her to buy Stuffed Monkey, a kind of cake, from the Jewish bakers in the East End.
Recipes for using a glut of courgettes, plums, apples or strawberries stacked up in my kitchen awaiting testing: long before allotments became trendy, Telegraph readers were growing their own.
Rummaging through my boxes of letters – I have kept every one – there were questions, too, such as “where can I buy chorizo like the stuff I get in Spain”, reminding me of the days when the spicy sausage wasn’t in every supermarket. Some put me right. A recipe for cheesecake with no cheese that I’d postulated might have been wartime had too much dried fruit to have been made in those austere times, one reader reminded me, while another pointed out that it is caster, not castor, sugar.
These days, you tend to get in contact by email or Twitter, querying a recipe, or with the sort of specific question I love, sending me scurrying to my library of more than 2,000 food and cookery reference books. Questions such as: “just how much salt is equivalent to 2.4g of sodium”, the daily recommended maximum (it’s one level teaspoon). Or, “why is my recipe for Yorkshire pudding not working” (it needed another egg).
In 1999, Italian was challenging French for culinary dominance, thanks to The River Cafe Cook Book and Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef. I made my own pesto – and still do, although now it’s as likely to be made with carrot tops or parsley as a classic basil – and experimented with focaccia (nowadays I buy it from artisan bakers such as Hart’s in Bristol).
But within a few years, Spanish food – both tapas and the “molecular gastronomy” foams and bubbles inspired by the Catalan restaurant El Bulli – caught the food world’s attention.
Back then, I bought a cream gun – the must-have gadget to make those professional-style foams – which now sits dustily at the back of the cupboard, reminding me not to get swept up in fads. Other gadgets were more successful. The Japanese spiral slicer, a novelty when I wrote about it in 2003, has never been out of use. By 2014 it was renamed a spiraliser.
By then, the influence of Copenhagen’s Noma restaurant, which, like El Bulli before it, was voted number one in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants (I now chair the UK and Ireland voting panel) brought Scandinavian cooking and Danish
hygge to the fore. So I wrote about cinnamon buns, pickling and how to cure your own fish.
Wellness became the mantra as social media brought health-obsessed (but not necessarily medically or nutritionally educated) bloggers to prominence, and avocado sales soared. Meat-focused restaurants dominated the early years of this decade, before the vegan backlash started to take over in the past few years.
What do you, Telegraph readers, think of all this? Judging by your letters, tweets and emails, you’re a diverse bunch, but my sense is that, like me, you were already eating a lot of vegetables. After all, there are those awe-inspiring allotments and vegetable plots.
And while I’m not sure a huge
number of us have gone vegan, we are eating less meat, and plenty of meals with no meat at all – which makes us flexitarian, I guess. Yes, I’m rolling my eyes, too. Let’s just pretend I never used the F-word.
If you are confused by the rollercoaster of food trends, you’re not alone. This multifaceted food world – where meat and veganism, rustic food and hyper-technical cooking all coexist – is down to the effect of the digital revolution on food, and the huge breadth of information now at our fingertips.
Lulu Grimes, food editor at BBC Good Food magazine, which celebrates its 30th birthday this year, says the growth of the web has revolutionised recipes. “Before the internet, you were restricted to your recipe books, newspapers and magazines, or people you spoke to… but once you put something on a website and there are comments underneath, it becomes a conversation about the recipe, moving it on. Recipes have become more fluid.”
In 1999, London was the beating heart of the British restaurant scene. That’s changing now, thankfully. The capital may still have a share of the best food but, squeezed out by high rents and massive business rates, combined with the spiralling price of living in the capital keeping staff costs high, many chefs are heading out of town, often happy to be closer to farmers and producers. Bristol and
Edinburgh were among the first to emerge as a food hubs, but when Simon Rogan opened L’Enclume in the Cumbrian village of Cartmel in 2002, it was an outlier. Now we have the likes of The Black Swan in North Yorkshire, as farm-to-table as it gets (chef Tommy Banks is a farmer’s son and the kitchen garden is a sizeable smallholding), or Where the Light Gets In in Stockport, which takes homemade to the next level with home-cured meats strung in front of the staff room window.
Twenty years ago, a meal out meant three courses. Now it might be five, or just a spread of dishes for the table – although I suspect the backlash to sharing plates may be about to start. Am I alone in sometimes yearning for a dish of food that is mine, all mine?
Farmers have learnt to adapt to tough times by diversifying, with everything from B&B businesses to ice-cream production. Pubs have changed too. Faced with falling beer sales, boozers needed to start producing decent pub grub, and by 2003 the movement was well enough established for my Telegraph colleague Diana Henry to write The Gastropub Cookbook. When Marks & Spencer launched a gastropub ready-meals range, including the likes of braised lamb shanks, the following year, it was clearly here to stay.
The organic food movement had yet to go mainstream in 1999, when only tiny sections were allocated in supermarkets. There was no hint that it would grow to a market predicted to hit £2.5 billion by next year. Nor had we discovered a passion for buying local food, says food campaigner Henrietta Green. “Things like breed, feed, local distinctiveness, all the things dear to me, were not generally talked about.” The first farmers’ market launched in Bath only in 1998, but with Green’s impetus they were soon popping up all over the country.
Bread has seen one of the most remarkable transformations. My standard loaf used to be a yeasted beer bread (a recipe from Leiths Cookery Bible) but now there is generally a note on my fridge door reminding the family, on pain of banishment, not to put anything on top of the sourdough slowly proving inside.
Twenty years ago, it was all bog-standard white or brown, plus some industrially produced ciabatta if you were feeling fancy. Baker Dan Lepard remembers working at Baker & Spice, a pioneer artisan bakery that opened in 1997. “We sold lots of baguettes and garlic bread. But the rustic sourdoughs flummoxed people.” Now there are 4,500 small craft bakeries around the country.
There have been troubling issues over the past two decades, too. The foot and mouth crisis dealt a blow to farming that put many out of business. Food poverty returned, with food banks handing out 10 times more food parcels last year than in 2011. Plastic packaging became more prevalent, to the extent that in 2016 Whole Foods was selling a peeled orange in a plastic box, although it withdrew the product after a social media outcry. And there is concern over how we will feed the world’s growing population.
Yet I am optimistic about the next 20 years. Food is getting better, we are getting savvier about reading labels and understanding what matters – in terms of flavour, health and ethics. There are more smallscale artisans growing, curing, baking, turning out outstanding food. And the more we use their produce, the more that pushes big business to change for the better. Of everything I’ve learnt from all of you – home cooks, farmers, producers, chefs and shopkeepers – over the past 20 years, the most important is that we are in this together.
Back then a meal out was three courses. Now it might be five, or a spread of dishes for the table
There are now 4,500 small craft bakeries around the country