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Rachel Roddy’s Anglo-Italian cottage pie recipe | A Kitchen in Rome
A recipe that couldn’t be more British, but – like nearly all British dishes – with ingredients that have origins far from British shores
If it wasn’t so big, or if I had a stunning 18th-century Chippendale walnut desk with traditional leather top and gadrooned edge, Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food would always be open. Before you roll your eyes at what probably sounds like heavyweight food-writer virtue signalling, I should admit that it is, but not only. My wish to have a 3kg book spreadeagled at all times is because, yes, it is the best food reference ever to appear in the English language – a 900-page A-Z looking at a multiplicity of foodstuffs, also food literature, science, history and food habits from all over the world – but also because it is a delightful book.
It’s a serious work, astonishing in its breadth and detail, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. This is thanks to Davidson, the mastermind of this companionable matrix and author of a vast number of the entries. He is a brilliant writer – sharp, exacting, graceful – but also a humorous one. In a revised edition of the companion, Tom Jaine describes the impish humour that pervades Davidson’s work: the paradox of pink blancmange, Goan food-ways, why the London stock exchange is like gorgonzola, how oncom is fermented in Indonesia, why Chinese mooncakes caused a revolution – every entry, even the most detailed and dense, seems to wriggle with the delight of it all.