Clement Ogbonnaya The pub prince of Peckham Historically, Clement Ogbonnaya considered pubs to be “very white, very British, very unwelcoming”. Even during his student days as an avid clubber he says he “didn’t have the balls” to walk into one. When he did start drinking in central London, Ogbonnaya loved the historical architecture of pubs but never felt that he “could come back again and again”. They still felt too overwhelmingly white for this Nigerian-born Londoner, who thought they were failing to reflect modern drinkers. “Twenty-first century British communities are so mixed,” says Ogbonnaya. “Not just black and white, old, young, but disabilities, physical and mental, the LGBTQ communities. I had this crazy idea: I want a pub that’s genuinely about the community it resides in.” The result was the Prince of Peckham, opening in 2017 just off Peckham High Street in south-east London. Over multiple rooms, it offers pub staples – live football, quiz nights, food (from White Men Can’t Jerk) – and, at the same time, hosts Haitian konpa dance, Black history lectures and people-of-colour-orientated wine tastings. Ogbonnaya, who grew-up in the area, mixes ticketed and free events with grassroots outreach. “Yes, it’s £4.90 for an Amstel. It’s £6.30 for Neck Oil. We also give away spaces to local Ghanaian aunties, over-60s tango, knitting groups. I want everyone to feel involved, at least once a week.” The 41-year-old’s second pub, Queen of the South in Tulse Hill, is due to open this month and will offer community grants of up to £500. Having appointed Eva Arnaiz, the former head of charities and communities at the Breakfast Club chain, as managing director of his new Village People Pub Group, Ogbonnaya wants his pubs to produce “quantifiable data” that demonstrates “how serious we are about investing in the community”. Tony Naylor Prince of Peckham London Natalia Middleton Teaching food skills in prison In 2021, a job was advertised on Instagram for a development chef role at Food Behind Bars (FBB), a charity working to improve food in prisons. “I sent them a message: ‘This is my dream job; I will get this job’,” says Natalia Middleton, now the charity’s head of food education. Her remit is vast: “I lead all our projects, write lesson plans, teach classes in prisons and after release, and work to help prison leavers gain employment. We want people in prison to eat healthy food made with care and thought, and to feel a sense of comfort. Food is the thing they look forward to daily, so if it brings them joy, we are on to a winner.” Prisons serve three meals daily, spending an average of £2.29 per prisoner per day, according to Ministry of Justice figures published in Inside Time magazine. In the past, many prisons had working farms (there were 23 until numbers were drastically reduced in the early 2000s) with produce shared around the entire estate. Middleton tells me of wasted outdoor space: “That land could be for fruit and vegetables. That would be my dream.” She also wants to see a development chef in every prison kitchen. Last September, FBB began a year-long project with HMP East Sutton Park, training female prisoners to become butchers in the prison’s in-house butchery using its own livestock. The cuts are sold in its farm shop. The women have even visited Smithfield market in London and been offered jobs. “They feel empowered; they are learning new skills,” she says. “It is really positive.” Nicola Miller Food Behind Bars Joseph Otway Manchester’s most creative chef For 18 months, Joseph Otway has been creating arguably the most exciting food in Manchester using only a toaster, a sandwich grill, one induction hob and an electric pressure-cooker. Cooking in the basic kitchen at natural wine bar Flawd forced Otway to streamline his “rustic” use of seasonal, heritage ingredients in deft plates of whipped split-pea dip or yellow beans, goat’s curd, garlic dressing and breadcrumbs. “If you don’t want to compromise, you get creative,” says the 33-year-old. Flawd spin-off restaurant Higher Ground has just opened and Otway is marvelling at the possibilities: “Suddenly I’ll have whole pigs and a charcoal oven.” But his menu will continue to hinge on ingredients from Cinderwood Market Garden. He cofounded Cinderwood in 2020, to supply his and other Manchester restaurants with high-end organic produce. Wary of getting “preachy” about regenerative farming, he prefers to cook “fun, approachable” food, surprising diners with, for example, a terrific turnip caesar salad. “Selling turnips without the caesar is difficult,” he says. “It’s not a sexy vegetable.” Tony Naylor Higher Ground Manchester Holly Loftus The hobbyist knifemaker turned pro “There are no easy routes into professional knifemaking in the UK,” says Holly Loftus, who set up her own studio in south-east London after a decade of dead ends, diversions and graft. A meeting with a hobbyist knifemaker in the US in 2010 sparked her interest, and, following a one-day class, she quit her job in community work, helping pensioners and homeless people, to learn the craft. Unable to find a professional way into the trade, Loftus enrolled in a six-month City & Guilds course for farriers in Scotland, later landing a job at the prestigious knifemaker Blenheim Forge, where she worked for three years. In 2020, Loftus won the Newby Trust craft excellence award, which gave her studio space with subsidised rent at Cockpit Studios in Deptford. Now she makes beautiful Japanese-style chef’s knives with handles from storm-damaged London trees. Producing about 12 knives a month, they sell out within minutes via her website (prices range from £220 to £460). Many of her customers are women. “Knifemaking, and metalwork in general, is so male dominated,” she says. “I really feel that women need more help getting into these fields.” Killian Fox Loftus Knives London Gurdeep Loyal A kitchen journey that spans cuisines “I’m not just looking at Punjabi food, or at British food, I’m looking at the whole of me,” says Gurdeep Loyal, author of Mother Tongue, his outstanding debut cookbook published next month. Loyal is the Leicester-born child of Punjabi parents and the book pays homage to the “lineage of mothers” who immersed him in their culinary heritage and taught him how to cook. But there’s more to his story than his origins: Loyal was marketing manager for Harrods’ food halls and head of food trends at Marks & Spencer. Travelling the world for work broadened his cooking repertoire. “The more you taste, the more adventurous you’ll be in the kitchen,” he says. At first glance, Mother Tongue is a Punjabi cookbook with an exuberant British twist. Here is a cheese toastie with stilton and tamarind; there is a passionfruit and raspberry-rose victoria sponge. Look closer and you’ll see other culinary influences spilling out: Mexican and Turkish in the keema nachos with tangy tomato ezme; Italian and Middle Eastern in the salted cardamom peaches with burrata and saffron; south-east Asian in the roast chicken with lemongrass. “The whole Thai principle of balancing sweet and savoury with umami and salt is something I do a lot,” he says. He takes ideas of cultural ownership seriously but dislikes “the thought of people feeling like they can’t approach a culinary culture because they’re worried about appropriating something”. The key, he says, is “thinking about what your intention is, having a genuine interest in the culture you’re taking food from, and being respectful. But I absolutely want people to play with their pantries.” Killian Fox Gurdeep Loyal Nathaniel Mortley A chef exploring his Caribbean culture As a teenager, Nathaniel Mortley was often in trouble, and was stabbed when he was 16. His mum threatened to send him to live with his uncle in the Caribbean to keep him away from crime. Instead, he found work in high-end kitchens and initially “loved it”. Progressing through various fine-dining restaurants, he noticed he was often the only Black chef. “There would be cheeky comments,” he says, “and I lost my love for cooking.” He went off the rails again and, in 2016, he was arrested on drugs charges, for which he was jailed in 2019. On his release, determined to turn his life around, he set about celebrating West Indian food, building a following on social media with dishes such as his take on curry mutton featuring mutton belly stuffed with curry farce, cassava paola and callaloo emulsion. A supper club he launched last summer sold out, as has every event since then. “I refine food,” he explains. “Not that the original isn’t good because West Indian is my favourite food. But fine dining is always French or modern British food. I never saw West Indian food celebrated like that. There was a space for fine-dining food with Caribbean ingredients.” Mortley’s food is inspired, demonstrating that fine dining doesn’t have to come with hushed tones and straight faces. Melissa Thompson Nathaniel Mortley Helen Evans London’s fave baker goes solo “We sold more than 1,000 pastries and a half a ton of bread in almost three hours,” says Helen Evans, a couple of days after her final shift as head baker at Flor, the much-missed south London bakery. “It was quite epic and very emotional.” Evans grew up in Northamptonshire, working as a chef in London and Paris, before turning to baking in 2014. She had a formative experience at Loafer Bread, an artisan operation in Melbourne, then spent two-and-a-half years in Lima at a bakery that milled its own wheat. She returned to London in 2019 to work in the tiny basement bakery at Flor restaurant in Borough Market. During lockdown, increased demand for Evans’s superlative bread, croissants and buns prompted a move to a larger space in Bermondsey. Part of what made Flor’s baking so special, she says, was the obsessive focus on wheat. “We tried to source single varieties; we had first-hand relationships with the farmers,” she says. By the time Flor closed, Evans had found a place of her own in East Dulwich, which she hopes will be open by Easter. It will be called Eric’s, after her father who is backing the venture. “It’s a small space, and I won’t be doing any wholesale,” she says. “My biggest dream, alongside selling breads and pastries, is to have a small bakery school doing workshops in breads, viennoiserie, pasta and pizza – all of the wheat things.” Killian Fox Helen Evans Places Schofield’s Bar Classic cocktails by Bury brothers The creation of Bury-born bartending brothers Joe and Dan Schofield is the antithesis of the flashy modern cocktail bar, where gimmicks distract from average drinks. Inspired by the refinement of the Savoy’s American Bar, Schofield’s serves classic drinks – daiquiris, negronis, bellinis – that leave nowhere to hide. Every detail is correct, from the bloody mary spice mix to sharp, clear, extra-large ice cubes from specialist Black Ice. In 2022, Schofield’s became the first English bar outside London to make it on to the World’s 50 Best Bars long list, and this year the brothers will open their first restaurant, the Stock Market Grill. Tony Naylor Schofield’s Bar Manchester The menus of Meanwood Eating out in the Leeds suburb “I’ve lived in Meanwood my whole life,” says 22-year-old chef Cameron Sohel. “It’s crazy how much it’s changed from 10 years ago.” Leeds has always had suburban food hubs. “Before Meanwood it was Chapel Allerton,” explains Sohel. Now Meanwood is the city’s up-and-coming neighbourhood enjoying a post-pandemic boom in local socialising. The Leeds restaurateur, Dave Olejnik, who runs Sarto in the city centre, has been venturing out to Meanwood for years. He credits Italian restaurant Zucco and craft beer bar Alfred as “catalysts” of the “urban village” that has emerged where Stonegate Road meets Monk Bridge Road. That junction is a “self-contained ecosystem”, says Olejnik, a location newly energised by Sohel and his fellow Dijon Boys taking over the kitchen at the cocktail bar Number 8. Then there’s the opening of the Meanwood Tavern, home of Well Oiled’s Detroit-style pizza, and Braizin Squad’s Sunday residency at the Boot & Rally bar. According to Simon Fogal, founder of the Leeds Indie Food festival, Braizin Squad “can lay claim to one of Leeds’s best Sunday roasts”. Elsewhere in Meanwood, Fogal rates Culto pizza and the £150-a-head sushi bar Hanamatsuri, where chef-owner Kaoru Nakamura serves a handful of counter-dining guests an omakase menu. There are opportunities locally, says Sohel – Dijon Boys have run pop-ups at Alfred, Boot & Rally and Meanwood Brewery’s Terminus Tap, plus “a sense of community – that’s definitely a reason Meanwood is thriving”. Tony Naylor The East Neuk of Fife A thriving local food scene This stretch of villages has developed into one of Scotland’s culinary hotspots, with highlights ranging from the East Pier Smokehouse, fixing up fresh seafood at the water’s edge, to the Kinneuchar Inn, one of Scotland’s best new restaurants, plus independent businesses such as Æble, Scotland’s first cider bottle shop. The local Balcaskie estate is home to Bowhouse market, which hosts local producers including the excellent East Neuk Market Garden, the estate’s own in-house butchery, a micro-brewery and record shop called Futtle, and Scotland The Bread, which mills flour from ancient grains grown on fields just outside the front door. Ben Mervis Original Tasty Jerk Follow the crowd for smoky meat Located on an otherwise nondescript suburban road near Selhurst Park stadium in south-east London, the near-constant queue at the Original Tasty Jerk takeaway tells you all you need to know. Its pork is a must: tender belly slices chopped fresh from the grill, layered with smoky char on the outside. Jerk mutton is also good, as is the chicken. Buy a little extra because you will not resist the temptation to sneak a bite on the way home. Melissa Thompson 88 Whitehorse Lane, SE25 6RQ London Sheffield’s bar and restaurant scene The UK’s most exciting food city? Readers may have noticed how often Sheffield cropped up in last year’s OFM Awards. This strong showing came as no surprise: there has been a steady increase in places to eat out in the city, despite the pandemic. Bench, The Orange Bird and Tonco took regional runners-up spots in the Best Restaurant category and all opened after 2020. To that trio of excellence you can add V or V, a vegetarian and vegan restaurant offering inventive small plates such as barbecued radish with seaweed bagna cauda, and cumin broccoli with pickled plum sauce. Just up the road, Native is a sister restaurant to traditional fishmonger JH Mann, opened by chef Christian Szurko in 2021. Both are in Kelham Island, a former industrial neighbourhood filled with bars, cafes and restaurants. Acclaimed bistro Juke & Loe has moved to new premises here and the owners of popular Sardinian restaurant Domo have opened a rooftop cocktail bar, Kelu, in the same building as the acclaimed Jöro – home to chef Luke French’s experimental tasting menus. Holly Williams The Food Museum A living history of how we eat Last year, Stowmarket’s Museum of East Anglian Life changed tack, becoming the UK’s first national food museum. When the change was mooted, staff realised just how many exhibits already fitted the bill. “Being able to taste food on a visit is key,” says director Jenny Cousins. “Nobody is doing what we are trying to do: grow, make, eat. We have so much land here that we can show the ‘grow’.” There’s a demo kitchen and, next year, the museum will host Meat The Future, an Oxford Natural History Museum exhibition about the environmental impact of livestock farming. In 2024, it plans to focus on school dinners. “A living history museum needs exhibits that relate to visitors’ lives,” says Cousins. Nicola Miller The Food Museum East Anglia Gaga and Julie’s Kopitiam, Glasgow Why chefs want to work for Julie Lin Staff shortages have been a dominant theme in hospitality. Yet in Glasgow, award-winning Scottish-Malaysian chef Julie Lin has been telling a different story. Lin has been inundated with job applications since launching her second restaurant, Gaga, in Partick in December 2021. This came after her tiny first restaurant, Julie’s Kopitiam, won rave reviews. “We get applications through constantly,” she says. It’s hardly typical for someone with no formal training running a kitchen the size of a cupboard, but “hardly typical” is Lin’s calling card. Her food is half Malay, half Scottish, bold flavours inspired by her mum’s home cooking combined with the fry-ups, stews and chips she grew up with in Glasgow. “Our prawn toast with kewpie mayo is a nod to Chinese takeaways. Our Taiwanese beef curry reflects my Scottish heritage, too.” Her approach to recruitment and training is also unconventional. “I think we have more, and more diverse, job applications because we’re more open to those who don’t have experience,” she says. Instead, Lin looks for instinctive knowledge. Everyone she recruits is taught the same way her mum and her previous employers, all women, taught her: through watching and tasting rather than written rules. It’s a method Malaysians call agak agak, which eschews timings and precise measurements in favour of intuition and practice. “My cousin describes it as seasoning the dish until you hear the ghost of your ancestors whispering in your ear to stop.” Clare Finney Julie’s Kopitiam Glasgow Food and Drink Gourmet indoor fungi Forget foraging, chefs are growing their own When Brett Graham reopened his Notting Hill restaurant, the Ledbury, last year he could have installed meat-ageing fridges or a lobster tank as a showpiece. Instead, the chef opted for cultivating mushrooms in a disused linen cupboard. Powered by an electric fan and around two litres of water a day, this “experiment” has enabled the restaurant to serve a regular meat-free mushroom course and, when time allows, invite diners to choose their own: shiitake poached in clarified butter with sherry vinegar and herbs, or grilled oyster mushrooms with koji oil. Indoor cultivation can be challenging. Hot weather is a killer. But Graham, who sources inoculated growing blocks of compressed bran from the Bristol Fungarium, is enjoying bumper crops of multiple varieties, such as rare lion’s mane. Rather than getting tired and spongy in transit, his just-harvested shiitake “have a beautiful fresh texture”. The simplicity of this sustainable, low-tech process means plenty of other restaurants are growing their own mushrooms. London’s Fallow and the hotel chain The Pig grow using spent coffee grounds. In Greater Manchester, Polyspore and Stockport Fungi supply indoor-cultivated mushrooms to the region’s best chefs. Underneath the restaurant Where The Light Gets In, Alex Williams, the founder of Stockport Fungi, built growing racks with recycled materials, and uses waste grains and sawdust as mediums. Demand is soaring for varieties such as her tarragon oysters. Rare in the wild, they “smell and taste of tarragon. It’s so weird and delicious.” In season, WTLGI still uses wild mushrooms but they are an unpredictable crop that must be carefully handled. By contrast, Stockport Fungi’s mushrooms are “clean, fresh, incredibly reliable”, says chef-owner Sam Buckley. Tony Naylor Butties are back UK’s sandwich game is strong It is a truism that in times of economic crisis people crave comfort food. That may explain the current surge in upmarket sandwich outlets, such as Leeds’ Don’t Feed The Dog or Things In Bread, Manchester’s Super Happy or vegan aces Banh Vi. If the £16 croissant-bun “royale” at London’s Fallow is a luxury, others are going back to basics. Manchester’s Caff is a new-wave butty shop, serving office workers sub-£4 baps, but from a shipping container with many vegan options. It’s all “very fresh, no faffing”, says co-owner, Jason Bailey. Sons + Daughters opened a second site at London’s Borough Market in September, but has reduced the size and price of its sandwiches. High-quality fillings are now served in £6.50 burger-sized buns. This winter, says co-owner James Ramsden, “we’re going to think twice about every penny we spend”. Tony Naylor Potato pavé A not-so humble spud What is the potato’s perfect form? You may answer mash or roasties, but after a revelation at Niall Keating’s Lunar near Stoke-on-Trent, OFM knows it is pavé. “Like a big chip, isn’t it?” says Keating, somewhat underselling these many-layered batons that combine the chip’s crisp exterior with dauphinoise’s creamy density. Their creation is labour intensive: wafer-thin slices of starchy potato, multi-layered with butter, garlic, thyme, salt and pepper, then baked, cooled, compressed, portioned and pan-fried. You don’t see pavé on menus too often (shout-out to Leith’s Heron and Torquay’s the Elephant). It should be everywhere. Tony Naylor Bare Bones chocolate Small-batch chocolate that shines Bare Bones is a micro-batch, bean-to-bar chocolate company and workshop based in a former railway arch in Glasgow’s city centre. Founded by Cameron Dixon and his partner, Lara Messer, in 2018, it began as a DIY operation in the couple’s kitchen, using a home oven and a chapati flour grinder, growing slowly through their combined skill set. Dixon is a mechanical engineer who built or modified much of the company’s machines. Messer is a food photographer who designed the brand’s minimalist identity and selected its recyclable packaging. The beans for all five of their single-origin bars come from cooperative farms, and quality is crucial. “[Chocolate making] starts with the farmer, and our job is to interfere as little as possible, and to keep the natural flavours – we just liven them up,” says Messer. The chocolates vary – from a rich and fruity 70% to a 59% dark milk chocolate made with lightly roasted coffee. “We want all the bars to be very different, so [someone can] really taste the difference between two origins,” says Dixon. In addition to its regular range, Bare Bones has created several collaborative products, including a pear and cacao nib jam with local provisions company Juno, and a sweet, chocolatey syrup made from cacao husks, ideal for everything from breakfast porridge to roast vegetables. Ben Mervis Bare Bones Doreen’s Jamaican homemade rum cake Baking a family legacy Rum cake is a traditional Caribbean cake, sometimes called black cake. Jackie Christian calls it an edible artefact of the sugar trade and Jamaican history, and of her own family. With her sister, Natalie Walker, she started making Jamaican rum cake using a recipe from her mother, Doreen. “If you make rum cake for someone,” says Christian, “you’ve got to have love for that person – it is not a cheap cake.” Dried fruit is soaked in Wray & Nephew rum, wine and port before being blended; more rum goes in the cake as it’s mixed, and it’s anointed with more still when it comes out the oven. Doreen’s Jamaican Homemade Rum Cake is a growing business but Christian still bakes the dense, sticky, rich cakes herself in east London. It’s a labour of love with each one sealed with a photograph of Doreen. Holly O’Neill Doreen’s Jamaican Homemade Rum Cake Chrystal’s Scottish shortbread The biscuit’s perfect form A packet of shortbread brought home from a half-term holiday looked like standard tourist fare but turned out to be a superior biscuit: four ingredients; sandy in texture but crisp throughout, thanks to cornflour; sweet-fat-salt in perfect balance. Chrystal Mackinlay started her business (chrystalsshortbread.co.uk) as a home baker, and now has a small business, still using her family recipe. Find it in Edinburgh’s venerable grocer, Valvona & Crolla. Holly O’Neill Noilly Prat In praise of the classic vermouth In a decade when it feels as though everyone with a man bun and a spice drawer has been creating their own vermouth, in a small port in south-west France they’ve been carrying on much as they have for the past 160 years. Today, Noilly Prat makes four distinctive vermouths principally from local picpoul and clairette grapes. They are aged outside beneath the Mediterranean sun for a year in old whisky and cognac barrels, before being blended with mistelle and matured for a year in vats. Then the magic happens. The vermouths are infused with up to 30 botanicals for three weeks. Original dry is the bartender’s go-to for a classic martini; extra dry was created specifically for the American market; rounded, spicy rouge is great with charcuterie, and cocoa beans in its aromatics make it good with chocolate, too. Ambré has been the village’s best-kept secret. Its botanicals include rosebuds, coriander and cardamom, and it’s very good with cheese. Once only available from the distillery, some online sources, such as thewhiskyexchange.com and goodwines4u.co.uk, occasionally sell ambré mail order. Try a marseillanais, the local cocktail, a combination of two parts original dry to one part rouge, over ice with a twist of orange. Or take your inspiration from James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me: “Noilly Prat and tonic, with a squeeze of lime if you have it.” Debora Robertson Noilly Prat Marseillan, France Wine’s blurred colours Beyond red, white or rosé The most interesting wines have been blurring lines between red, white and rosé. These include pale reds that winemakers think of as “infusions”, deeply coloured rosés, and “macerated” whites made from grapes that have spent a long time fermenting with their skins and, in some cases, become orange. They are among the best and most versatile food pairings, offering the freshness and acidity of whites and the texture of reds. Try super-light French reds Château Vieux Moulin I Love You, Corbières 2020 (£20.20, amathusdrinks.com) and Catherine & Pierre Breton Grolleau, IGP Loire 2021 (£19.95, buonvino.co.uk). Also: the superlative Greek Thymiopoulos Rosé de Xinomavro 2021 (£17, shrinetothevine.co.uk); and the lightly macerated Italian white/orange wine, Antonio Camillo Procanico Toscano Bianco (£19.50, buonvino.co.uk). David Williams Media The Chinese-ish cookbook A celebration of culture and friendship Chinese-ish: Home Cooking, Not Quite Authentic, 100% Delicious is a joyous celebration of culture, cooking, family and friendship. During Melbourne’s pandemic lockdown Rosheen Kaul, one of the city’s hottest chefs, finally had time to write down her recipes and pass them to her friend, Joanna Hu, a self-taught illustrator. The result was The Isol(Asian) Cookbook. “We threw the first book together in about a week and a half, and only foresaw printing maybe a dozen or so copies for our friends,” says Hu. What was planned as a small ’zine turned into a series, and eventually a book deal. While the Isol(Asian) series had a goal to teach the fundamentals of Chinese cooking, Kaul says Chinese-ish needed to provide context as well: “Or the nuance and deviations from the ‘ish’ part wouldn’t make sense.” Hu was born in the Hunan province in China before moving to Australia as a child, and Kaul identifies as Australian-Singaporean-Chinese-Kashmiri-Peranakan-Filipino. The recipes and stories span their lives – from their mothers’ favourites to a less traditional, Sichuan-inspired cheese fondue. The Beijing hot chicken recipe is one Kaul often cooks for events, and a great example of how she fuses cooking styles. “It’s got a very Xinjiang-style flavour profile of heady cumin and chilli spicing,” says Kaul, but it was Beijing where she first ate fried chicken dusted with the spices. “I’ve taken the brining and preparation steps of Nashville hot chicken, but seasoned it with a very north-western Chinese spice mix, then slapped it into white bread with pickled chilli mayonnaise and cold lettuce to cool the burn.” Kaul says that she and Hu were never going to write a straight Chinese cookbook. “We haven’t grown up in a cultural vacuum, and there are many more cultures that influence how we cook, eat, perceive and communicate our relationship with food,” she says. “These recipes are 100% authentic to us.” Holly O’Neill Chinese-ish: Home Cooking, Not Quite Authentic, 100% Delicious The Gourmand’s Egg book Tribute to a perfect ingredient In her foreword to the gorgeous new hardback from magazine The Gourmand, published by Taschen, the American food writer Ruth Reichl celebrates the “alchemy” of eggs, the magic that enables their transformation into dishes as varied as zabaglione, omelette and soufflé. As this lavishly ovophilic work demonstrates, eggs are loaded with symbolic and metaphoric potential, and their hold on the artistic imagination, as well as our appetites, can be traced back through millennia. Beautiful photos and witty ruminations abound, though hungry readers will head for the recipes at the back. Killian Fox The Gourmand’s Egg The School of Artisan Food refugee scholarship An education in cuisine and community “As a refugee, it doesn’t matter how long you live in this country, maybe you don’t have the same opportunities,” says Marco Munoz, who came to Britain from Ecuador in 1999. Munoz was a trustee of Lewisham’s Refugee Cafe when a refugee scholarship at the School of Artisan Food (SAF) was offered to them. Money, language and family barriers were such that he could not find anyone capable of committing to the six months of full-time study in Nottinghamshire that was required. Instead, aged 62, Munoz took up the advanced artisan baking diploma himself. “It’s never too late to learn,” says the former teacher. After he finishes the course next month, he intends to train Lewisham refugees in the professional baking techniques and business skills taught at SAF. The founder of SAF, Alison Swan Parente, says the charity loves students such as Munoz who can act as a “multiplier”, extending the reach of a scholarship that, since 2017, has trained seven students from as far afield as Eritrea and Croatia. Scholarship students (their fees and living expenses funded by two charitable trusts) work alongside regular students. For Baneta Yelda, co-owner of Manchester’s Companio Bakery, SAF was life-changing. Then working part-time in clinical science, the refugee scholarship allowed her to pursue her passion for food and reacquaint herself with the “real food, community, locality” she loved in her native Iraq. With fellow SAF student Neil Large, Yelda now bakes for restaurants including the Michelin-starred Mana, but Companio’s focus is on feeding Ancoats’s residents with sourdough and viennoiserie. The pandemic turned Companio into a “neighbourhood bakery, where we knew everyone’s name”, she says. Tony Naylor School of Artisan Food Nottinghamshire Sonder & Salt podcast A conversation where nothing is off the table Listening to Malaika Malz and Harleigh Reid’s podcast Sonder & Salt is like hearing your friends chat, and sometimes argue, about their favourite food. In one episode, Controversial Food Opinions, Malz and Reid fall out over bully beef, a Jamaican classic made with corned beef. Malz is a fan, Reid is not, dismissing it as “slave food”. The ensuing exchange brings humour to a subject that has nothing to laugh about. “What do you think your corned beef is made from, the finest cuts?” she asks, as Malz hits back. “No. We already know that. And we’ve made peace with it because it tastes good.” The duo wanted to create a podcast that didn’t require its listeners to be “foodies”. They’ve achieved just that. All anyone needs to enjoy Sonder & Salt is to enjoy eating and talking about food. Melissa Thompson Sonder & Salt podcast Trans-national and trans-regional cookbooks Cuisine without borders We’re seeing more cookbooks with a broader geographical approach. Istria by Paola Bacchia focuses on the Adriatic peninsula that is part of Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. The region’s history has left its mark in Venetian stews, Viennese-style pastries, and flame-grilled skewers from the Balkans. “Istria’s story is my family’s story,” says Bacchia, whose grandfather was born in a part of the region that was then Austrian, lived there when it was Italian, and left when it became part of Yugoslavia. “The town of his birth is now in Croatia,” she says. Lerato Umah-Shaylor’s cookbook, Africana, subverts a too frequent narrative of Africa as a monolith by identifying where regions converge and diverge, and link between the continent and the rest of the world. “While African identity contains many diverse identities, the