Lunchtime oysters in the Gambia

Stosie Madi, chef-patron of The Parkers Arms, Lancashire

In the Gambia, where I grew up, there would always be people on the roads selling food – fresh coconuts, grilled sweetcorn, toasted nuts – to passing cars. What I really loved were smoked mangrove oysters. They grow on the roots of the mangrove trees along the River Gambia. Hard-working women would wade through the swamps picking the oysters with their hands. Then they’d smoke them in big barrels over smouldering mangrove wood. The gentle heat would pop the oysters open. Then the women would open them properly with hands that were calloused from years of shucking.

They would measure out the oysters in old tomato tins and wrap them in old newspaper to take home. But my father used to love the oysters fresh. It would be a lunchtime treat. He would go and pick up a hot baguette on the way out of town, with a nice bottle of white wine cooling in the icebox.

I will never forget the memory of sitting under the mangrove trees with a breeze wafting off the river and the aroma of smoked shellfish everywhere, and watching these women popping open the oysters. You’d put them in your mouth and be hit with sweet, saline, smoky, unrivalled flavours.

Smoked mangrove oysters are a luxury now and they cost quite a lot, which they should, because they’re extremely labour intensive. But I would cut my arm off to get to eat them again, my goodness.

The lunch that inspired a move to China

Fuchsia Dunlop, cookery writer. Her most recent book is The Food of Sichuan

It was my second trip to China. On the way home, I spent a few days in Chengdu with a musician friend and his wife, who took me eating around the city. We went out for lunch at a very ordinary-looking restaurant near the bus station and had an absolutely delicious meal of typical Sichuanese dishes. One of them was a pretty, colourful dish with frilly little morsels in it. The musician asked me to guess what I was eating. I had no idea. It turned out it was pork kidney. It had been cut and cross-hatched very finely so you had these beautiful, dark-pink bites, which had been stir-fried with celery, pepper, ginger and garlic. The dish was called huo bao yao hua, which means “fire-exploded kidney flowers”.

It was a quite unassuming restaurant, but this dish showed the most beautiful knifework and the radical transformation of an ingredient that most westerners would throw away into something delicious and delicate. It was one of several experiences on that trip that made me decide to go and live in Chengdu. The following year, I got a British Council scholarship to go back to China – and that was the beginning of my unexpected food-writing career.

My 21st birthday dinner

Jeremy Lee, chef-proprietor of Quo Vadis, London, and author of Cooking

My mother and I shared a birthday. Poor Mum – of all the things, to have to go into labour on your birthday and end up with me! But our celebrations were always very special. We would blow out each other’s candles and all that kind of thing. The dishes she cooked were always memorable, but none so much as the boeuf à la mode she made for my 21st.

I’d just moved to London, having completed my apprenticeship in Scotland, and was starting a new life down south. I came back up to Dundee for the birthday do. Mum poured everything into that dinner. I remember it simmering in the pot, the great trinity of beef, wine and herbs. Then the dish appeared, the beef set in limpid jelly, studded with carrots. It came with parsley potatoes, salad, and bowls of mustard and horseradish. She served the beef on an ancient pewter plate with “Let him do what he can” on its rim. I’ve done my best to live up to that motto ever since.

Mum had an elegant, natural way with food. Every now and again, she pulled out all the stops and cooked these extraordinary things. I miss her terribly, but I feel very lucky to have those memories.

Our ‘moving in together’ pasta sauce

Itamar Srulovich, chef-patron of Honey & Co, London

It was the first summer Sarit [Packer, co-owner of Honey & Co] and I were living together. Somehow we managed to get a nice one-bedroom garden flat in the centre of Tel Aviv. Summers there get so hot and we only had aircon in the bedroom – we were always out in the garden.

We were living on salads. I’d make avocado and cucumber salad, seasoning it with soy sauce, sesame oil and sesame seeds, and we’d have it on melba toast – the cheap ones you buy from the shop. Then I’d make a cold pasta sauce with grated tomatoes. You put garlic and herbs in it, maybe anchovies and capers, and lots of olive oil and vinegar, and season it really high, then leave it in the fridge so it’s cold, cold, cold. At the table, you scoop the cold sauce on to the hot pasta. Immediately, as the sauce heats up, you start to smell the garlic and tomatoes and herbs, and it’s just the most incredible thing.

That was our dish that summer – and we’ve never had it since. It’s very particular to that time. We were just getting to know each other so it was very exciting.

The last time I visited my parents’ house in Ukraine

Olia Hercules, cookery writer. Her most recent book is Home Food

August 2021 was the last time that we went to my parents’ house in Kakhovka, in the Kherson region of Ukraine. We spent a lot of time in their summer kitchen, which is a little one-room house in the garden, right next to the orchard and the vegetable patch. By that time, Wilfred, my younger son, was eating solid food, so we would pick a tomato or a peach, or a whole bowl of them, and bring them over to eat. The tomatoes were so sweet and juicy that we’d end up eating them like fruit, without slicing or salt. I came across the pictures the other day. He’s just covered in juice. They’re the most delicious tomatoes in the universe.

I don’t know much about what’s happening with our garden now. A part of the house is destroyed and there are reportedly Russians squatting in the summer kitchen as there is a wood burner there. I often worry that they are chopping our fruit trees down for fuel.

Graduation dinner without my parents

Mayukh Sen, author of Taste Makers

In June 2014 I was 22 and about to finish my undergraduate studies at Stanford. Earlier that year, my dad, who lived across the country in New Jersey with my mum, had been diagnosed with lung cancer – the disease that would kill him three years later. By the time graduation rolled around, it seemed pretty clear that my dad wouldn’t be well enough to board a plane and my mum had to stay home to take care of him. I was devastated.

Graduation weekend at Stanford was family oriented: you’d attend ceremonies and go out for meals with parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles and siblings. I cried constantly because I felt so alone.

Taking pity on me, a friend and his family invited me for dinner at a fancy Greek restaurant called Evvia Estiatorio. My concept of upmarket dining was chain restaurants like Cheesecake Factory, so I had no idea how to behave, but this family made sure I felt at ease.

We had saganaki, a salty and springy fried cheese, and chargrilled octopus dressed with lemon, olive oil and herbs. But the star of the meal was smoky lamb chops, remarkably tender and succulent. They came with divine roast potatoes tossed with herbs. For pudding, we had beautifully syrupy baklava.

I will always remember this meal, not least because I felt so loved and taken care of by this family. My friend’s parents barely knew who I was but accepted me as one of their own children for a night.

Poached bone marrow and a life devoted to French food

Simon Hopkinson, cookery writer and author of Roast Chicken and Other Stories

I’ve enjoyed French food since childhood. For my last holiday with my parents, just the three of us, we went to France – partly camping, partly staying in small hotels. I was 16. And we ate really well. They were very generous to me in that respect. If there was something they knew I was really desperate to have, they’d let me have it. My first hollandaise sauce, my first beurre blanc, my first stuffed goose’s neck, for heaven’s sake. Dad said they’d named me the “en supplément kid” because I’d always go for the dish on the table d’hote or prix fixe that would have a supplement. I had to have frog’s legs, that sort of thing.

As an adult, a meal at L’Esperance was a pinnacle. It was 23 years ago when my friend and colleague Jason Lowe and I were motoring up to Paris from Toulon in the south, where I had attended a memorial dinner for the late cookery writer Richard Olney. It seemed only respectful that we should celebrate Olney’s unique culinary life by breaking our journey somewhere excellent to eat. L’Esperance in northern Burgundy was the choice. The chef, Marc Meneau, who died in 2020, was then considered to be at the very top of his profession. We were not to be disappointed.

One of the dishes in that magical dinner was unforgettable. It was simple: a 9-10cm length of poached bone marrow served warm and wobbling with, precisely arranged along its entire length, a thick line of chilled Beluga caviar. It was a feat of culinary engineering to get the length of marrow out of the bone and then poach it without damaging it, and then arrange the caviar on top without detaching en route to table. The temperature contrast was exquisite. Meneau’s idea to put together those two ingredients, the lowly with the super-luxe, was astonishing.

Falling in love with my husband over spaghetti with cabbage

Margot Henderson, chef-patron of Rochelle Canteen, London

I met Fergus [Henderson, co-owner of St John] in 1991 when he had a pop-up at 17 Mercer Street and I remember thinking: this guy is so cool. We met again a year later at the Eagle in Farringdon, where I was working. A few days later, he called me and said, “Why don’t you come around to my flat? I’ll cook dinner.”

Fergus’s sister Annabelle and her future husband Stephen were there, and they were falling head-over-heels in love as well. It was all quite giddy. We sat in the tiny kitchen, sipping on wine while Fergus made spaghetti with cabbage and truffle oil. I thought it sounded really boring but it’s a surprisingly wonderful dish.

The ingredients are very fond of each other. You add the thinly sliced cabbage to the pasta just before it’s cooked, then drain it and toss in some good olive oil and black pepper, grating lots of fantastic parmesan over the top and drizzling over the truffle oil. I know a lot of people pooh-pooh truffle oil, but in this dish it really works.

It was a magical moment. Fergus and I got married the following February.

Prawns, coconut, tamarind and tasting incredible food for the first time

Nuno Mendes, chef-patron of Lisboeta, London

When I was a child in the late 1970s and early 80s, and my grandparents were still alive, we used to go for lunch at a restaurant in Lisbon called Velha Goa. It was the first time I really paid attention to food. It wasn’t fancy – in the basement of an anonymous-looking building in Parque das Nações. You go down the stairs and find yourself in a small dining room with simple white tablecloths, lovely plates, good-quality linen napkins – a nice, normal family restaurant. But the food was outstanding. I vividly remember walking down stairs and smelling the fragrance of toasted spices.

As a kid, I particularly loved the prawn xeq xeq. The flavours were incredible. It had a coconut base, with tamarind for sourness and a little bit of chilli. It was really creamy and fragrant and I used to have it all the time.

Velha Goa has closed now and that whole side of my family has died. I realised that, through my continuing fascination with Goan cuisine, by cooking and eating that food, I’m keeping them present in my life, and perhaps that’s how I process my longing for that time.

My grandmother’s potted shrimps

Sheila Dillon, co-host of Radio 4’s The Food Programme

When I was young, growing up in Lancashire, my grandma would regularly make potted shrimps. Back then, people weren’t self-conscious about what they cooked – potted shrimp is now a great luxury but at the time it was considered fairly simple. My family were rural, working-class Methodists and my grandmother was rather stern and proper – I remember her talking about people in fish and chip shops as though they were already well on the way to a life of crime. They lived less than a quarter of a mile from our house so I would go over and eat with them a lot.

My grandma would buy Morecambe Bay brown shrimps from Preston market – she was a good shopper as well as a good cook. At home, she would clarify and spice the butter, and pot the shrimps. The scent of the spiced butter would drift out of the kitchen, which, when I was really small, had an open fire with an oven in it.

I sometimes pot shrimps myself. If you put mace and pepper into clarified butter as you warm it, it has a very particular aroma. For me it brings back memories of my grandma in the kitchen. Maybe it’s my memory misleading me, but my potted shrimps have never tasted as good as hers.

The pastry that kickstarted my food-writing career

Claudia Roden, cookery writer. Her most recent book is Med

Konafa à la creme is full of emotional baggage for me. It always brings back memories of my parents and our extended family in Egypt, where I grew up.

We would visit my aunt Latifa, who had a grand villa in Cairo. On Saturdays, the garden would be filled with people and there would be a constant flow of refreshments: coffee and pastries in the morning; arak, whisky or beer with meze at midday; and sherbets with sweetmeats and jams in the afternoon. Konafa was a speciality of the house.

It’s made with a thin, vermicelli-like pastry which is sold here as kadaifi. Throughout the Levant the filling is usually cheese, but my family, who came from Syria, made it with milk thickened with ground rice. It is baked and then a syrup flavoured with orange-blossom water and lemon juice is poured over it, along with chopped pistachios.

I still make konafa in the same round tray that my mother bought when she came to England as a refugee in 1956. We often cooked together, and I wrote down what she did, and that’s how I started writing about food. Now I make this pastry with my children and grandchildren. Disentangling the kadaifi threads and covering them with melted butter, by pulling them and turning them over, is something I love doing. These movements send me into a dream, a reverie of Egypt. It’s as though I’ve never left.

Crashing a christening

Ravinder Bhogal, chef-patron of Jikoni, London

It was my first ever trip to Sicily. My partner and I had a hideous, early-morning journey. When we finally arrived at the villa we were renting, we drove into the nearest town, Enna, in the hope of grabbing a bowl of pasta. It was 3pm and of course everything was shut.

Convinced I could smell cooking, I followed my nose to a trattoria. The door was slightly ajar. We went through to find people sitting around tables laden with food. The owner was an old man wearing an apron with a statue of Adonis on it – it was a private party for the christening of his granddaughter. We pleaded with him to let us eat something. He gestured towards a seat on the terrace and said, “You’ll have to eat what everyone else is eating.”

He brought us a bottle of Etna Rosso, a big wine perfumed like a Catholic church. Then came a banquet of dishes: sardines stuffed with breadcrumbs and raisins; caponata, big and bold in its flavours; pasta alla norma with ricotta salata grated over it. And finally a boozy ricotta cake with lots of fruit and nuts.

We chatted to a few people. I held the baby. I still have a photograph of the owner standing next to me in that apron. Following your nose is always a good thing. OFM