Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many

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Brush them with cream and put the tray in the fridge to rest for at least half an hour before baking. Decorate with golden sugared almonds and candied mint leaves, if using, and serve. 2 Little chocolate turnovers In his first book, Jeremy Lee welcomes you into the kitchen to rejoice in simple home cooking. Whether for a table set for one, or for the descending hordes, here you'll find over 150 recipes, bursting with ideas for good things to eat. I have often thought about a copper mould for making this lovely dish, as pleasing to look at as it is to eat. A wider, shallower cake shaped and cooked in a cast-iron skillet or frying pan is as delicious as those cooked in hatted moulds. It's not going to be a destination restaurant, just a bloody good pub” - Tom Kerridge on The Butcher's Tap Chelsea

To make the frangipane, put the butter and sugar in a bowl and beat for a minute. Add the egg, beat again for a minute then stir in the ground almonds. Food A-Z is the much anticipated first cook book from Jeremy Lee, celebrated head chef at London's Quo Vadis. Capturing all of Jeremy's favourite recipes and kitchen techniques, Food A-Z will cover everything from elevenses biscuits to warm salads and one pot dishes, at the same time giving advice on the best equipment for a home cook. Featuring beloved Scots recipes from his childhood, along with timeless tips and anecdotes, Food A-Z will be a charmingly unusual classic food book. Should the spirit be willing, making mincemeat is a lovely job done early on in December – you could even make a large batch, and keep any leftovers for next year. Make the pastry the night before you need the tart, or, alternatively, up to a week before and freeze it. A visit to the supermarket for golden sugared almonds and candied mint leaves is always worthwhile to jolly along a Christmas pie. You will need a 23cm-round tart tin. Jeremy Lee is an absolutely brilliant British chef . . . This cookbook is extraordinary, don't hesitate to buy it' Stanley Tucci Lee made his bones under Simon Hopkinson and Alastair Little, among the architects of the renaissance in modern British cooking. Alongside contemporaries such as Fergus Henderson, of St John, Lee takes as much credit as anyone for the extraordinary flourishing in our national cuisine over the past few decades.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

It’s impossible to not get on with Jeremy Lee. Anyone who has seen him chatting to diners at the tables in Quo Vadis knows what a warm, friendly personality he has. But it’s once you’ve tasted his cooking that you know you’ll be returning to his restaurant very soon.Lee’s father was an artist at the Scottish media company D.C. Thompson. ‘He was quite senior,’ says Lee, ‘so he could work at home. There were drawing boards everywhere, stuff scattered all over the place. It was part of daily life.’ The influence of these creative surroundings can be felt not just in Lee’s plates of food, but also in the way he designs the whole experience of eating – from a small vase of delicately arranged flowers to the right cutlery and beautiful glasses. ‘The devil’s in the detail,’ says Lee. After working for a few years in a Scottish country house hotel, Jeremy made the move down to London and landed a job at one of the most exciting restaurants of the 1980s. ‘Terence Conran was starting to take his restaurant business very seriously and had the brilliant idea to choose Simon Hopkinson as his head chef and partner at Bibendum, a restaurant on Fulham Road housed inside the old Michelin UK headquarters,’ explains Jeremy. ‘Cooking with Simon was a revelation; at the time, everyone was beginning to understand produce and we saw the birth of British cooking. After that I got to cook with Alistair Little, who worked in a very different style in a very different kitchen. He’s been a great friend ever since.’ The huge rise in interest in food in recent years has books appearing with such speed that keeping up with the new is in itself a great occupation. Photography changed the production of books dramatically. Now a book illustrated with a couple of ink drawings and the occasional frontispiece may well seem challenging beside a lavishly photographed volume. It is worth pausing to consider whether reading a recipe alongside a glorious colour photograph depicting the dish might diminish the imagination slightly? Subsequently possibly the writing is diminished too. Place the fillets of hake in a deep ovenproof dish, lightly season with salt and white pepper and lightly dress with a soup spoon of olive oil. Pour in enough cold water to cover the bottom of the dish. Given Scottish chef Jeremy Lee's culinary career - Simon Hopkinson and the recently departed Alistair Little both appear on his CV - and his obvious mastery of prose it’s a wonder why it has taken him so long to pen his first book. Yet, with all good things, it is worth the wait.

Lay a triangle of chocolate just inside one of the corners of the pastry square. Brush the edges of the pastry with a little cream. Fold the pastry in half diagonally over the chocolate, making a triangular turnover. Repeat with the remaining squares and arrange the turnovers on the prepared baking tray at least 3cm apart. This September, much to the cheer of his legion of fans, Lee is publishing his first cookbook, titled Cooking. Simply and well, for one or many. It may have taken a 40-year career and a pandemic to produce but soon everyone will be able to see what goes in to his subtle and delicious plates of food. Lee was born in Dundee and credits his mother and father with providing a table ‘laden with good things’. ‘They really made it their business to make sure every day was an adventure of some sort,’ he says, ‘and that we would eat well, always.’ Perhaps paradoxically, restaurants didn’t feature much: ‘Mum and Dad thought there were much more interesting things to do with their money than shell out for restaurants that they hated. That wasn’t their thing: they wanted their family around a table.’ Place on the baking sheet in the oven and bake for 45 minutes. Lift the lid and remove the foil. Press the cake down lightly with the bottom of a frying pan, then cook for a further 30 minutes, until the edges of the cake have coloured deep gold. To make the mincemeat, peel and core the apples, cut them into small randomly shaped pieces and toss in the lemon and orange juice to avoid browning. Combine with the remaining ingredients in a large bowl and mix well. Decant into a sealed container and keep until needed. The Cooking World is a team of professionals passionate about the world of food from diverse areas.So, in us, the likes of David had a following, but they didn’t get the wider attention they deserved until, perhaps, the 80s. At this point, great changes began in food, produce and restaurants; books began to appear with more frequency on every kind of cooking imaginable. As walls were being pulled down and boundaries blurred and as the classics lost their grip, restaurateurs started speaking of menus inspired by Elizabeth David. She, Jane Grigson and Julia Child were uttered by the lips of even staunch French chefs. A whole new generation of restaurants was opening, run and staffed by folk who devoured cookery books like thrillers. These books, written decades before, suddenly became, quite literally, the plat du jour. One vivid memory is of a great table of polished oak in our dining room, piled high with oranges and clementines, Mum being notorious for panic-buying citrus fruits. Another is the huge array of my mother’s extraordinary baking for the Christmas hols, surrounded by Christmas lights and candles and all manner of festive thingummyjigs. Especially cakes – and lots of them. One year I counted seven, and pointed out to Mum that we were only a family of six. Mum pointed to a cupboard where tins with more biscuits and cakes were piled high, and then, laughing merrily, pointed to the freezer, where she’d stashed even more “emergency rations for just in case”. It’s been a great adventure, but I underestimated entirely what it would take,” he admits. The pressures of writing daily menus and working in a busy kitchen meant that structuring a whole book seemed overwhelming. Lee hastens to add that at least it didn’t take 20 years to put together, like Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food.