SMOKED SPICE

You’ll often see ingredients repeated in Lawson’s books, and the reason for that is quite simple: “I don’t like to send people to the shops.” But she says one ingredient that we should all have in our armoury is smoked paprika. “I prefer sweet smoked paprika, perhaps because you can get heat from many different sources, but sweet smoked paprika, I think, is a wonderful way of giving a lot of depth to food and complexity of flavour by adding just one ingredient. I think that can be very interesting, because once people start using it they feel at ease with it. It’s one of those ingredients that can seem quite frightening, but it does convey so much ... even just a small amount of it.”