Thomas Wilson is North East England’s answer to Robbie Burns. Wilson’s most famous piece, The Pitman’s Pay, is written in Geordie dialect. It’s a reet canny poem, of course, but the interesting thing to me is that he refers to turbot as...
Scooby Doo taught me to cook. It’s true. (Kind of.) When I was a kid, I used to get Scooby’s comic. Each week, in between exposing dodgy geezers posing as ghosts in abandoned theme parks, Scooby would offer his readers...
I have a love-hate relationship with Instagram. It’s a bit like a cheap Chinese takeaway, in that it promises a lot but often leaves you deeply unsatisfied. But there are positives too. And serious ones at that. Seeing young people cooking - and...
Andaaz translates as 'estimation'. If the word sounds familiar, it might be because lots of Indian restaurants are called Andaaz, or Andaz. That’s because the idea of estimation is key to Indian cooking culture. I didn’t know this until last weekend. We were at...
This is Noam. With Yotam and Sami, he founded Ottolenghi. And I’m absolutely delighted to tell you that he’s now joining Wylde. Over the summer, Noam will be growing our network of artisanal producers to expand the breadth of what we can offer...
I once asked two Frenchmen whether duck was essential to a good cassoulet. Big mistake. Almost immediately, the dinner we were at took on a remarkably serious - and sour - tone. One was fervently of the view that duck was indeed a...
“All disease begins in the gut”. It’s amazing that Hippocrates, the father of medicine, knew this over two thousand years ago. Because it’s only relatively recently that we’ve really able to pin down why, and how.I briefly mentioned Tim Spector’s work in...
Txokos - pronounced ‘chocos’ - are Basque. They’re basically clubs where groups of blokes get together to talk about food, prepare food, cook food and eat food. No doubt the odd bevvy is taken too. I was thinking about txokos recently, as...
‘Cozzie Livs’, I’m reliably told, is what the cool kids call the cost of living crisis. It’s from the same Gen Z School of Abbreviation & Wordsmithery that last year gave us ‘Platty Joobs’ (ahem, Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee). Anyway, there...
Languages are gateways into cultures. They can really give you a sense of what matters to a particular group of people.And what doesn’t. In Spanish, for example, there’s not really an obvious or direct translation of the word deadline. Make of that...
One of our producers used to work for a potato farmer. Not anymore. On Friday, as I did my rounds down in the South West, he told me why. The farmer he worked for had made a deal with one of the UK’s...
All this coronation chat has me thinking revolutionary thoughts. What if the British ate more like the French? Keith Floyd set out the difference, years ago. The British, he said, will find their recipe and then go out to buy the...