How to make the perfect pastry

Samosas are traditionally made from a fairly sturdy pastry, presumably because, like the British pasty, this eminently portable snack was designed to travel well – they’re thought to have come to India from Central Asia in the saddlebags of Muslim merchants. Most people use plain flour, although Simon Daley, author of a book called Cooking with My Indian Mother-in-Law, makes his even more robust with strong white flour of the kind used for baking.

Madhur Jaffrey, Vivek Singh and Raghavan Iyer all work fat into the dough – the first two in the form of vegetable oil; the last, butter – while Daley relies on water alone to bring his pastry together, which makes his chewier than the others, though not unpleasantly so.

The butter version turns out more like a shortcrust than the crisp, flaky pastries produced by the oil, though this may also have something to do with the method: Iyer makes hers in the food processor, while Jaffrey and Singh gently rub the fat in by hand in the traditional way, which coats the proteins with fat while minimising gluten formation. It is then kneaded to partially develop the gluten, creating an elastic but still tender shell that is strong enough to withstand the pressures of stuffing and deep-frying, but soft enough to crumble obligingly in the mouth. With this end in mind, plain flour seems the better choice.

Despite Daley’s strict instructions to his readers to “Accept no substitutes!”, Meera Sodha’s book Made in India uses two layers of filo pastry, brushed with melted butter, for her “magic triangles”. This works surprisingly well, and is wonderfully quick though, as she observes, the results are lighter and crisper than the classic version.

Singh works nigella seeds into his pastry, which not only looks smart, but tastes delicious.

Sugared ligonberries Rårörda lingon (Sweden)

Lingonberries contain a lot of naturally occurring benzoic acid, something that industry adds to many preserves and jams to help them keep. The levels are so high that lingonberries just don’t go bad. Thanks to this, there is really no point in boiling them into jam and bottling them; you can just add some sugar for flavour and they will keep in a fairly clean jar at the back of your fridge for years. You can use fresh or frozen berries. It makes no difference to the end result.

Especially in northern Scandinavia and Finland, we eat sugared lingonberries on many things, sweet and savoury. They all seem to benefit from a good scoop of sweet and astringent ruby loveliness.

(makes 650–700g)
500g lingonberries
150–200g sugar

Place the lingonberries and sugar in a large bowl and mix with a spoon. Keep the bowl at room temperature and stir from time to time, until the sugar has dissolved. It should take a while for this to happen, at least overnight. Refrigerate when done.

Nigel Slater’s butternut squash with cappelletti and tomato recipe

The recipe

You will need 350g of butternut squash – that’s half a medium-sized squash. Scrape out the seeds and fibres from the middle and discard. Cut the flesh into long pieces, then into short, postage stamp-sized bits.

Warm 40g of butter and 4 tbsp of oil in a shallow pan then add the pieces of butternut, fry at a moderate heat for about 15 minutes or until they start to brown, basting them as they cook. Get a large, deep saucepan of water on to boil and salt it generously.

Roughly dice 200g of tomatoes then add them to the squash, with a couple of sage leaves, salt and pepper. Toast 1 tsp of cumin seeds in a dry frying pan for a couple of minutes then tip into the tomato and butternut together with a half tsp or less of dried chilli flakes and a half tsp of ground sweet paprika.

Add 125g of cappelletti to the boiling water, stirring as you do so, and cook for about 9 minutes until the pasta is al dente. Drain and toss with the butternut and tomato mixture. Serve with a good helping of grated parmesan. Serves 2.
The trick

It is often not necessary to peel butternut squash unless you intend to mash it. However, check the thickness of the peel first. If it is very shiny and thick, then best remove it with a potato peeler before you chop it into cubes and fry it.
The twist

Courgettes, marrows and white-fleshed summer squashes are good here, too, but will need a shorter cooking time than the butternut. Baste regularly with the butter and oil as they cook. Introduce herbs instead of the spices if you prefer. Tarragon and basil are wonderful with both the tomato and squash.

Autumn pudding with blackberries and bay

It is hard to describe just how intensely pure and fruity this variation on summer pudding is. It’s best made with sliced white bread, preferably slightly stale, and is as tasty on day three or four as it is on day one. You will need a 1.5-litre pudding bowl. Serves six to eight.

750g damsons or plums
125g caster sugar, plus extra to taste
Peel of 1 orange
1 vanilla pod, split in half
2 bay leaves
500g blackberries
250g raspberries
60g softened butter
About 12 slices of sliced white bread, ideally stale, crusts removed
Creme fraiche or thick cream, to serve

Stone the damsons or plums and cut into blackberry-sized chunks. Put the sugar, orange peel, vanilla pod, bay and 100ml water in a large, deep pan and bring to a boil. Add the damsons, turn down the heat and simmer gently for six to eight minutes, until the fruit is soft. Add the blackberries and raspberries, and taste the syrup: add a little more sugar if you think it could do with extra sweetness. Bring back up to a simmer and, as soon as a few of the berries have burst, take off the heat, discard the vanilla, bay and orange peel, and leave to cool.

Butter the pudding bowl and generously butter the bread slices. Line the bowl with two-thirds of the bread slices, laying them in butter side up. Tear a slice or two of bread into the required shapes to patch up any gaps, then pour the fruit into the bread-lined basin, gently pressing it down with a spoon. Top with the remaining slices of bread, trimming them as necessary, then cover tightly with clingfilm and put a saucer or small plate on top (ideally, one that fits neatly inside the bowl). Weigh down the plate and refrigerate the pudding overnight.

The next day, remove the weights and saucer. Run a thin blade all around the edge of the pudding, gently to loosen it from the sides, then put a large plate on top and flip it out. Serve with lots of sharp creme fraiche or rich, thick cream.

The good-looking dessert: Plum and salted almond ripple ice-cream

This is a really easy way to achieve a delicious “iced cream” without a machine or eggs. Its texture is almost identical to ice-cream and you save yourself a lot of fuss. Use regular snacking almonds in this, or forgo them altogether if you wish – we think they add a lovely crunch and their saltiness offsets the sweet plums beautifully.

Plum and salted almond ripple ice-cream. Photograph: Yuki Sugiura for The Guardian

Makes a small tub
300g roasted plums
1 litre double cream
1 x 397g tin sweetened condensed milk
200g roasted salted almonds, crushed
A squeeze of lemon juice

1 Put the plums in a sieve to strain out any excess juices (keeping any juices for a cocktail later).

2 In a large clean bowl with an electric whisk, whip the cream until you have soft peaks. Pour the condensed milk into a separate bowl and stir in 2 tbsp whipped cream (to lighten it) before folding it into the rest of the cream. Transfer to your freezer container and freeze. After an hour, remove this from the freezer and whisk up the mixture using a fork. Return it to the freezer, repeating this whisking after another hour.

3 Meanwhile, roughly chop the plums. Once the cream has thickened, scatter the chopped plums and almonds on top of the cream, then swirl the handle of the spoon through the mix – try not to over-mix as you want to achieve distinct ripples. Cover and return to the freezer until set (about another hour).

Skinny Chinese Pan-Fried Fish

This is an unknown dish for most readers outside China. I have not heard of it until I met my husband and his family. In Chinese, we name it as 糍粑鱼, with the English translation glutinous rice cake fish. Surely we will fail to find any glutinous rice cake in the dish. We use this term to describe that similar pan-frying process.

Pan-Fried Fish

I am using a grass carp, which is the most popular and inexpensive edible fish in China. This dish is originated from Chinese Hubei province. I get the recipe from my mother in law. You can replace it with other fishes, just choose fat ones.

Hubei province is known as Chinese fish and rice fields. Fat grass carps are harvested every year. It is a custom for people to dry some grass carps naturally to enjoy in cold winter days. Traditionally, this recipes calls for dried fish. I find out a easy version by using it, you can make yummy, skinny pan-fried fish with marinated fresh fish chunks.

Cook Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

One grass carp around 1000g, remove head and tail (you can ask your batcher to help)
4 dried chili pepper
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 stalk scallion, minced
1/4 teaspoon white sesame seeds
1 tablespoon cooking oil
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon sesame oil
1/8 teaspoon sugar
Marinating sauce
2 tablespoons cooking wine
1/4 teaspoon whole Sichuan peppercorn seeds (optional)
1 and 1/2 teaspoon salt
2 stalks scallion, minced
1 thumb ginger, minced

Instructions

Cut the fish into large chunks around 3-4 cm thick. And then add all the marinating sauce. Mix well and then transfer to an airtight bag, refrigerate for around 2 days.

Transfer the fish out. Remove the ginger and scallion attached; drain the fish chunks with kitchen paper.

Heat up cooking oil in a pan, place the fish chunks in. Do not turn them over at the beginning, turn over to fry the next side one side becomes slightly golden brown.
Add garlic, dried pepper, scallion and garlic. Fry for another half minute until fragrance. Add soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar and white sesame seeds. Mix well and enjoy, possibly with a cup of beer.

Nigel Slater’s sausages with avocado and feta recipe

Feta accompli: Nigel Slater’s sausages with avocado and feta recipe. Photograph: Jonathan Lovekin for the Observer

The recipe

Warm a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a nonstick frying pan then add four plump, lightly spicy sausages (about 300g), such as the fennel-seed freckled Italian salsiccia, and let them cook for 20 minutes over a low to moderate heat. Keep an eye on their progress and turn the sausages regularly so that they colour evenly.

Peel, halve and stone two perfectly ripe avocados. Put the flesh in a mixing bowl, then, using a spoon or fork, roughly crush to a coarse and lumpy texture. Chop a small handful each of coriander and parsley leaves (you need about 2 tbsp of each) and add to the avocado. Halve and finely chop a jalapeño or other moderately hot chilli then add to the herbs and avocado.

Coarsely crumble 200g of feta into the bowl, then gently fold the cheese, chillies, herbs and avocado together. Pour 3 tbsp of olive oil over it and divide between two plates. When the sausages are cooked, cut them into thick slices and add to the avocado and feta cream. Enough for 2.

The trick

Cook your sausages slowly. This way they will brown evenly and their skins won’t split. If you want, use a spoonful of the hot sausage fat from the pan as a further dressing for the avocado cream. This is a dish to eat as soon as it is made, but if you need to keep the avocado cream for more than a few minutes, add a dash of lemon juice to stop it discolouring.

The twist

The choice of sausage is up to you, but a fairly spicy one is good with the cooling avocado. Chorizo is particularly good if you yearn for something more spicy. You could add tomatoes, cored and diced.

Email Nigel at nigel.slater@observer.co.uk

Nigel Slater’s open sandwich recipe

In the open: Nigel Slater’s open sandwich recipe. Photograph: Jonathan Lovekin for the Observer

The recipe

Cut a ciabatta loaf in half horizontally. Toast the bread on the cut side. Put four heaped tablespoons of good mayonnaise in a mixing bowl, season it with black pepper and with the finely grated zest of a small lemon. Reserve the lemon. Finely slice four large radishes and put them in a mixing bowl. Trim three spring onions, discarding the tough, darker stalks, then cut the rest into small pieces and add to the radishes. Drain 100g of crayfish tails or prawns and roughly chop them. Wash a handful of watercress, discard any tough stalks, then add to the radishes together with a trickle of olive oil and a little sea salt and toss the mixture gently. Cut each half of the ciabatta into two. Spread the lemon mayonnaise over it, then divide the crayfish salad between them. Serves 2.

The trick

There is no second slice of bread under which to hide your filling. An open sandwich needs to be made at the last minute if it is to tempt. Keep the flavours light and fresh, and pick out only the most perfect of young salad leaves and herbs.

The twist

What you need on the toasted bread is a mixture of fresh seasonal salad and shellfish, and something to hold them in place. Use a classic mayonnaise or one seasoned with crushed, roasted garlic; or maybe a herb mayonnaise scented with tarragon or basil. Keep some crunch in the salad with radishes and spring onions, but also include cubed cucumber, coarsely grated celeriac or kohlrabi. Use cooked mussels from their shells, boiled brown shrimps or crab in place of the prawns.

New York deli-style lunch ideas

If there’s one country that knows how to make a sandwich, it’s the US of A. New York is the sandwich capital of the world, and while many New Yorkers may not take much of a lunch break, they do know a thing or two about a lunchtime takeaway. With this in mind, here are a few NYC deli-inspired lunches.
• Make yourself some speedy, healthier, pizza slices. Try chickpea-flour bases: gradually whisk an equal volume of water into gram flour. Add a pinch of salt and any herbs you wish, then leave to stand. Then fry in butter on both sides in a nonstick pan until golden. Finish with any toppings you wish – pesto, roasted or raw veg, ham and creme fraiche... and grill.

• Nothing beats a good bagel and nowadays, brands like the New York Bakery Co are ubiquitous. Prepare and toast a bagel at work, ideally. Otherwise, pack it ready-to-eat tightly in Tupperware rather than foil or clingfilm. Cream cheese is a classic starting point, but needs some robust flavours to counter all that creamy sweetness: try topping with capers, thinly sliced red onion, tomato and lots of freshly ground black pepper. Or try our friend Olivia’s delicious and simple mackerel paté: mash cream cheese with smoked mackerel, a squeeze of lemon juice and zest, chopped parsley and lots of pepper. Pack into a small Tupperware, and refrigerate when you get to work, unless you want to incur your colleagues’ wrath. Spread on your – preferably warm – bagel at lunch. A couple of slices of dill pickle would not go amiss.
• You may not have access to a store like Satriale’s, but you can still make an Italian sub (or “hoagie”) that Tony Soprano wouldn’t sniff at. Whisk together 1 tsp olive oil, 1 tsp red wine vinegar, ½ tsp dijon mustard and a pinch of dried oregano. Split a submarine roll, discard any excess crumbs (keep for breadcrumbs) and sprinkle the dressing over both halves. Lay a couple of slices of gouda or emmental on the bottom, then top with a selection of sliced cured meat (mortadella and salami are our faves, but go wild with whatever you can find in the sliced meat aisle). Whatever you choose, be generous. Top with shredded iceberg, thinly sliced red onion, and sliced jarred sweet peppers or olives. Close and wrap in a tight bodybag of greaseproof paper secured with a couple of elastic bands.
• If you work carefully and finish the assembly at work, a luxury hotdog will make you the envy of your colleagues. Cook a baguette in a hot oven alongside your sausages. Meanwhile mix plenty of mustard and paprika into the contents of half a tin of beans, then pack in a small microwaveable container. When the baguette is cooked, take out some of the middle, spread with a layer of mayonnaise and pop in your sausages for safekeeping until lunch (wrap the whole thing in foil). Thinly slice some spring onion and red chilli. Pack in a container. Come lunchtime, place your hotdog baguette folded open on a plate, and heat the beans in a microwave until piping hot. Pour over your sandwich and finish with the spring onion and chilli.

Tapioca: the hated school pudding makes a culinary comeback

Fish eyes, frogspawn or eyeball pudding – synonyms for Britain’s most hated school pudding, tapioca. Loathed by the older generation, and largely unknown by the younger, milky tapioca pudding’s bad rep, and the dish itself, has all but faded into obscurity. “Lots of people associate tapioca with boarding school or school dinners,” says Brett Graham, head chef at The Ledbury, “but that tends to be the older generation, so things are changing”.
Graham, who grew up in Australia, is just one of a growing cohort of celebrated chefs elevating tapioca beyond bowls of milky gloop. It turns up in sweet and savoury forms at his two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Notting Hill. He’s far from alone - chefs around the world love it. At The French Laundry in California, Thomas Keller serves it with oysters, the small pearls suspended in an oyster-infused sabayon; Michel Roux Jr cooks tapioca in squid ink and teams it with calamari and garlic butter at Le Gavroche. In his São Paulo restaurant, DOM, Brazilian chef Alex Atala serves tapioca pearls in a sharp manioc-root extract tucupi with giant river fish pirarucu. Heston Blumenthal used tapioca flour, masquerading as sand, in his seafood ensemble Sound of the Sea.
But it’s not just the preserve of michelin-starred chefs. Tapioca starch, extracted from manioc (cassava), is sold in a number of guises, from flour to flakes, pearls of varying sizes, and precooked “instant” tapioca. It’s cheap, too – around £1 for a 500g bag of pearl – and it’s a staple in many cuisines. In Brazil, it’s an everyday ingredient, savoured in bite-sized cheese breads (pão de queijo), as puffed biscoito globo crisps, boiled up with red wine, sugar, clove and cinnamon as sagu de tapioca, or melted into crepes (beiju) that are stuffed with everything from sun-dried beef, to coconut and condensed milk.
As Atala points out, tapioca is used a lot in Asia, “and so Europeans know it as an Asian ingredient,” having made its way east from Brazil with the Portuguese in the Age of Discovery. In India, sabudana (tapioca pearls) are boiled up with sweetened milk in a pudding that was perhaps the precursor to our milk pudding. Or mixed with potatoes, peanuts and spices in sabudana vada (fried dumplings) or sabudana ni khichdi – a popular sautéed dish on fast days in Gujarat and other Northern Indian states. Tapioca flour is also used to make crispy papad and coconut rolls (puttu) in Malayali cuisine.
“In Thailand, tapioca is used for thickening sauces, and to make a few desserts,’” says Thai chef Yui Sriyabhaya, who describes a handful of desserts all made with coconut milk, palm-sugar syrup and tapioca in varying forms, such as the fat worms of boiled tapioca dough in krong kraeng, or the green (dyed with pandan leaves) tapioca jelly matchsticks in lod chong Singapore.
Marina Pipatpan, Thai chef-owner of São Paulo restaurant Tian, remembers growing up in Thailand with similar desserts that mix saku (tapoioca pearls), syrup and coconut milk with black beans (saku tua dtam) or crunchy corn kernels (saku kao pod). “My favourite is an ancient dish that’s still popular to this day – saku sai moo. We cook ground pork with sugar and add peanuts and make a ball that we then wrap in tapioca pearls and steam,” she enthuses. Similar dumplings and desserts can be found in other Southeast Asian cuisines, including Korea, Indonesia and China. Not to mention Taiwan, the country that started the craze for bubble tea in the 1980s, with western youth en masse slurping up shiny tapioca pearls through fat straws, and franchises making or breaking based on their ability to cook the pearls to perfection, between bouncy and chewy.
Tapioca is the perfect blank canvas; its capacity to hold colour, to absorb and release a burst of flavour (my favourite is tapioca pearls cooked in soy), and its versatile texture are exactly why chefs love it.
So how to get it right at home? “Cook it till you have just the tiniest pinprick of white left in the centre,” says chef Alyn Williams. “Tapioca pearls should be soft and silky.” For Brett Graham, the secret is in soaking the pearls in milk or stock first (the former for sweet and the latter for savoury), then rinsing them and cooking them in plenty of milk or stock, and rinsing again afterwards to remove any excess starch. Do you dare have a go? It’s time for tapioca’s domestic comeback.

Supermarket pizza hacks: what do you put on yours?

In adherence with the – *cough*, it all happens in my kitchen – strict laboratory conditions under which the Guardian’s Supermarket Sweep taste tests are conducted, I was obliged to eat a recent lineup of margherita pizzas in their unadorned, au naturel state. But as became apparent BTL, many of us never eat plain supermarket pizza.
At Naylor Towers, for instance, it is almost unheard of for a supermarket pizza to pass through the kitchen without it being tricked-out and turned into something genuinely indulgent by the addition of extra ingredients. This is necessary to compensate for the, shall we say, more judicious application of toppings that takes place in the factories where these things are made. (Apologies if you thought it was all done in a farmhouse in Tuscany by a crack team of nonnas. It isn’t.) But, like anything in cooking – or, in this case, assembly – there is an art to transforming your supermarket pie.

Cheese

If you are going to whack a load of extra cheese on there, it is wise to first remove any meat or vegetables. After you have retro-fitted the cheese, place them back on top. Otherwise, they will be hidden under a blanket of dairy, which may prevent the heat penetrating sufficiently to cook them through. What cheese you add (grated, of course) is a matter of taste, but there are some broad rules worth observing. Ignore them and you may well end up with a soggy base and/or a pizza swimming in grease:
1) You don’t need half as much cheese as you might imagine. It is going to melt and spread, remember. Don’t go overboard.
2) Hard cheeses, such as cheddar, readily sweat off fat and moisture when heated. Add too much and, well …
3) Beware “wet” cheeses such as good-quality buffalo mozzarella and, worse, burrata. Unlike a wood-fired pizza oven, where any moisture would quickly evaporate, your domestic oven is not that hot. Any watery excess will likely soak into your (limp, disintegrating) base.

Meat

Raw meat (for instance, if you want to double up on spicy ground lamb), may need to be cooked or partially cooked first, depending on how long the pizza will be in the oven and how dry you like your meat. Bacon will cook in the 10-20 minutes it takes to heat up a fresh/frozen pizza, but, sitting amid all that moisture, it won’t necessarily go crispy. Better to pan-fry it and scatter it over near the end. Indeed, generally – it is a matter of taste versus convenience, of course – I would only add cured meats to a pizza. Parma ham, salami or chorizo work on a pizza in a way in which peking duck or chunks of pork belly simply don’t. Pizzas were designed to topped with thinly sliced ingredients.

Vegetables

Vegetables are more problematic, which is just one of the reasons why nobody ever says: “Hey, let’s go mad and throw some extra fennel on that pizza!” Not only do they need to be finely sliced, but many vegetables also need significant prep. Unless they are softened in a little garlicky butter first, extra mushrooms and leeks end up shrivelled and dehydrated. Onions need sweating or they will emerge from the oven hot but oddly raw in texture. Likewise, bitter bell peppers with their tough, plasticky skins – to be made in any way pleasantly edible, they first need to be roasted and skinned, and who has time for that, to top a supermarket pizza? Sliced tomato, despite its water content, works reasonably well as a pizza addition – although it is hardly going to set your pulse racing in excitement.

Extras

There is far more enjoyment to be derived by titivating your pizza with what are essentially seasonings, rather than vegetables. Rubbing olive oil into the exposed rim (in Naples, cornicione) softens up the often inedible edge of a drier, breadier base. Similarly, swirling a few spoonfuls of pesto over a pizza is almost never a bad thing. Chilli is a useful addition in the right circumstances but, personally, I avoid adding anchovies. Even if you blitz them to a pulp, distributing them correctly – that is, sparingly and not in great clumps of salty, abrasiveness fishiness – is an art I have yet to master. It goes without saying that dried herbs are a foul abomination on a pizza and that any fresh ones should only be added as it is served.
So how do you jazz up your pizza? And is that the only ready meal that you augment, or are there tricks that you can share to ramp up bought-in moussaka, fish pie or lasagne?

Why 'best-restaurant' lists are nothing of the sort

Best-restaurant lists are something of a love/hate thing for me. I basically hate them but love being included in them, for the same reason I liked being on the art wall in school (even though I knew it was because I’d sucked up all year to get there). Recognition in any form for hard work is always appreciated. I have no problem with lists existing. But I wonder whether they ever actually tell us anything useful.

This weekend we saw a new list of Yelp’s 100 best UK restaurants. Number 1 was taken by Dishoom, an upmarket Indian concept with three big sites in London. Dishoom has members of the Tilda rice family and, therefore, significant funding behind it. It also has excellent customer service, the food is faultless and all the sites have a great vibe going on so it’s not necessarily an unworthy winner. There are a lot of my favourite places in the list too. Patty and Bun makes No 9 for serving great burgers. Barrafina also makes the top 10 and Hawksmoor is at No 22.
It’s a nice list, and I’m pleased for everyone in it, but, as with as a lot of such user-generated content, it’s also a very weird list. In at No 6 is a place in Edinburgh called the Hula Juice Bar and Gallery. I spent 25 years of my life in Edinburgh and I’ve seen it flourish into one of the best cities in the county for eating out. I haven’t been to Hula Juice Bar, but I think it’s fair to ask: is a cafe that sells juice, bagels, cakes and hot wraps, really likely to be the best restaurant in Edinburgh, much less the 6th best in the UK? Is it even a restaurant at all?

On the other end of the scale you have lists such as the “world’s 50 best” which are about as far from user-generated as you can get. These lists for fine-dining places only. Chefs, food writers and restaurateurs admire the level of skill in the kitchen, and the attention to detail put into in every aspect of the customer experience. Just because I know more people who have enjoyed dining at a Street Feast event or Meat Liquor more than have enjoyed dining at El Celler de Can Roca doesn’t mean I think either should rank higher in any list. The truth is stark: neither list is genuinely about finding the best. It is extremely subjective. User-generated lists are simply about meeting our daily expectations and the world’s 50 best is about innovation and industry influence. Which is fine.
A boundary-pushing restaurant which sells 23 dishes to a customer will have a much harder task of satisfying that customer’s expectation, especially when it has been told it’s one of the best in the world. On the other hand, a local cafe that delivers great food for less than a tenner can easily meet its customers’ expectations. That doesn’t mean it’s better or worse than the likes of Heston Blumenthals’ Fat Duck but its simply incomparable on almost every level. It’s like rating the best football team in the country by number of games won rather than by league. The winner might be some pub team from Kilmarnock that won 63 out of the 64 games it played that year. Doesn’t make it better than Man City though.

Of course food isn’t grim up north

 Solid stodge … toad-in-the-hole. Photograph: Colin Campbell for the Guardian
If you listened to the Today programme on Tuesday morning, you may have heard it (try to) revive that old saw about there being a distinct north-south divide in food. Inspired presumably by Christmas sales data from Amazon showing that while Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest cookbook, Plenty More, was the sixth-bestselling gift in London – it did not make the wider UK top 10 – the Today presenter Justin Webb asked: “Are we one nation when it comes to food, or do we have marked regional tastes, with the more exotic foods enjoyed in the wicked fleshpots of London perhaps and the rest of us sticking to steak ’n’ chips?”
If Webb sounded tentative, little wonder. Because never has this perceived taste gap between, say, Manchester and London, sounded more outdated. If not Ottolenghi’s chargrilled squash with brussels sprout salsa, home cooks up north – like many of the region’s chefs – are likely to be cooking something equally interesting for their tea tonight. In fact, referring to it as tea, not dinner, may be one of the few true north-south food divides that still exists.
Of course, there is a distinctive northern cooking tradition: a repertoire of dishes such as Lancashire hotpot and potted Morecambe Bay shrimps that grew out of a specific climate, the abundance of key ingredients and the physical demands put on an industrial workforce – what, in France, they would call terroir.
Poorly paid, hard graft demanded pie and mushy peas, black pudding, tripe, liver and onions, Cumberland sausage and plenty of cheap carbs on the table at every meal. That is why the north has such a range of subtly different breads: stotties, oven bottoms, barm cakes.
Naturally, you can still eat pease pudding in Newcastle, pasty and black peas in Bolton, dripping-cooked fish and chips in Yorkshire (tip: try 149 in Bridlington). These foods echo down the ages. Although, significantly, many such delicacies have needed to be revived from near extinction. Nigel Haworth, chef-owner of the Michelin-starred Northcote near Blackburn, whose Ribble Valley Inns group does a fine line in toad-in-the-hole and sticky toffee pudding (a Cumbrian invention), is one of a number of high-profile chefs who have helped the north rediscover its historic dishes.
Whatever their current popularity, however, those traditional northern dishes exist happily within a wider food culture that is as globalised and open to new ideas as any on the planet. Are exotic ingredients as readily available up north as they are in London, the Today programme asked Ottolenghi? As he pointed out, Tesco sells pomegranate seeds, so obviously they are. But in many different, fragmented ways, such cross-cultural pollination has been going on up north for decades. The Chinatowns in Manchester and Liverpool, the curry hotspots in Bradford and Rusholme, and the food shopping available around them, have always exerted a cosmopolitan influence on the region. I have a mate whose mum used to regularly cook okra curries in the 1980s. That was rare, but it was happening.
True, up until very recently, in terms of its dynamism, diversity and providing reliable quality, the northern restaurant scene lagged way behind London, and the capital still kickstarts trends in the way that the north is only just beginning to. However, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool are catching up fast. From the headline-generating Michelin ambitions of, for instance, Manchester House or the French, to superlative “dude food” (Honest Crust or Dough Boys’ pizzas; Patty Smith’s or Free State Kitchen’s burgers), we lack nothing, and are beginning to innovate concepts – most notably, the marriage of Gujarati food and craft beer at Leeds’ Bundobust – which are setting the bar nationally.
The reasons why are complex, but a new, knowledgeable and enthusiastic generation of diners up north is now fuelling a mini restaurant boom. Credible London independents are expanding northwards (Hawksmoor, Manchester; MeatLiquor, Leeds), and even in something as relatively niche as tapas – Lunya and Salt House in Liverpool, the forthcoming Iberica and El Gato Negro in Manchester – the region now has a choice of restaurants as authentic as anything in Soho.
In fact, rather than a north-south divide, the bigger issue may soon become one of bland repetition. Historically, pop culturally, Britain’s cities tended to have USPs – in music, the arts, football, nightlife – but increasingly they look like interchangeable, clean-cut hubs of bright, shiny consumption (usually of food and drink). We may be eating better, but in the process are we losing local colour?