The Forgotten Pantry

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The Forgotten Pantry

The Forgotten Pantry is a collection of frugal food stories from my slow travels around the world.

Stories from grandmothers and homecooks that teach us how to cook, eat and enjoy our food in a more waste-free way.

15/10/2022

🍂 Today is maybe a day for pancakes with chestnut flour in them and maybe even blackberries, and maybe maybe the surreally brilliant Valeria Luiselli's novel, Faces in the Crowd 🍂

"Perhaps he thought that by bringing examples of everyday objects to the house, his blind brother would be able to hold onto a notion of the things that foolishly supported the world: a fork, a radio, a rag doll. Maybe the successive addition of shadows would end by shoring up the thing-in-itself and Homer would be saved from the void which was gradually making its way through his head."

28/04/2022

Pwdin reis was once eaten for Sunday dinner all over Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿Slow-cooked overnight to make use of a hot oven after baking bread.

These clever tricks to save energy are becoming more important than ever ♻️. In the post-war mining valleys of south Wales they were just second nature. Does anyone know more of these old ways?

Find this rice pudding recipe and Dee, the 80 year old woman who inspired it, on blog (link in bio). It's so so simple. A proper spoonful of nostalgia✌️

14/03/2021

Happy Mother's Day to this legend 💓 Still doorstep drinking, still going to festivals, still swimming in Welsh winter seas, still roughing it and living it all at 67 ☀️

01/03/2021

Happy St David's Day 💛 Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus everyone! Bake yourself some of 82yo Winnie's welshcakes. These are her savoury versions with leeks and Caerphilly cheese. I'm all for the trad ones though, all sugar and spice. Link in bio for both recipes ☺️

26/02/2021

Continuing the theme of 'ugly food' is this Brazilian black bean feijoada which our Brazilian made with farofa (fried ground cassava), sliced oranges, spring greens and fried plantain. Very filling, and more types of meat in one pan than I've eaten in a long time! Feijoada is eaten almost everyday in Brazil and of course has there are as many versions as there are cooks.

Anthony's stepmum provided the recipe via about 10 WhatsApp messages and a voicenote in Portuguese. It was less a recipe exactly but more a series of tips and instructions that didn't quite follow one from the other. For her, making feijoada is as obvious and everyday as scrambling an egg, I guess.

Her instructions were things like 'make sure to boil the bacon 4 times in fresh water' or 'remove the sausage skin' before you cook it. Details that for someone whose made this dish a thousand times are the crucial steps that we'd need to know. The basics for her were too obvious to mention.

When we think about recipes, they are so often formalised instructions we get from books or online, shared by people skilled at writing them clearly. What about those recipes that are buried in the habits and hands of the homecooks who would never think to write them down succinctly. I loved reading her instructions and actually maybe there's a beauty in the gaps in-between that are left for the next person to interpret and work out for themselves. Some things are only learned by doing...

21/02/2021

S U N D A Y R E A D I N G (and cooking) // Recipes and stories of grandmothers from eight east African countries. So many simple, delicious, resourceful recipes, I've basically bookmarked every page.

Interesting as ever to see how universal our grandmothers' cooking is. Always recipes for using up bread, for stretching meat into delicious stews, for making the most of leafy greens, for clever use of spices and herbs to revive the most basic of ingredients... yet despite these patterns, the results are always different, always specific to the person, the place and time.

Universal Not Uniform! A reminder I have on my desk, and why true home-cooking is something to be celebrated. This is joining my desk favourites immediately ✍️

14/02/2021

BEANS 'ON' TOAST // What your beans say about you... so accurate 😂 With handmade mug 💓

13/02/2021

Welsh hills, big skies, old trees, raging rivers, sweeping shadows 🌳

08/02/2021

Sunday's Sardinian fregola. Fregola is a typical Sardinian pasta, made from durum wheat. It's a bit like giant couscous. After lots of food research into Sardinia recently, I by chance came across a pack of the stuff at nearby . With pancetta, chickpeas, saffron and pecorino, it's got all the Sardinian flavours and tastes even better the next day ☀️

07/02/2021

UGLY FOOD // This is not a pretty picture and I'm ok with it 🧐 So often I don't post here because the photo is too crap, the light is too dark or the food is too brown, or I ate the food in question before I remembered to picture the bloody thing. Anyone relate?

This is a sad thing. Recently I made this Bkeila stew. It’s a Jewish-Tunisian recipe made by slow-cooking spinach and fresh mint and coriander in plenty of olive oil and spices until it’s almost grey and carbonated. It’s a classic dish, and a simple and frugal one at that and it is so delicious. It doesn’t look good though. In fact, bkeila is reknowned for looking terrible.

This is an recipe (from his Flavour cookbook, which is really very good), but which according to the woman who introduced me to it in the first place, is not how it should look.

Dea is a Tunisian-Italian Jewish woman who lives in Paris. Her daughter, Anouk (who lives in Israel) introduced me to her recently. The power of technology! Before I got to speak to Dea, Anouk sent over her mum’s recipe in French. It should be drier, she said, not so soupy. I still have not managed to decipher the writing.

A few days ago, I spoke to Dea on Whatsapp for well over an hour. She’s nearly 80 and almost blind but still cooks most days. She shared so many of her recipes with me, chiming out instructions as I madly scribbled them down.

The thing is Malou, she said in French, we learn by watching, not by reading recipes (as my supposed failed attempt at a proper Bkeila will testify). Regardless, I will do my best with her instructions and however it looks in the photos, I will endeavour to share it with you here 📸

03/01/2021

Seeing in 2021 with a squinty sun-filled Sunday, breakfast sarnies and all the food chats with the wonder that is Kurdish cooking genius Melek. Always a joy me dear 😙

30/12/2020

Chicken & buttery pilau rice // Trying to stay (in imagination at least) in Istanbul after finishing Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul.

You have to love a fiction that themes every chapter with food, but also that fills it with colourful strong female characters and bolder historical storytelling. This book landed her in the Turkish courts for telling the tale of two families, one Armenian and the other Turkish, and their shared history in the 1915 Armenian genocide. She talks about it on TED Radio Hour and the power of telling stories in our divided times, which is soo worth a listen ✍️

29/12/2020

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive or not". Joan Didion spouting some insightful thoughts on why keeping notebooks is so useful. I agree.

I've spent much of this break rereading 20 years-worth of notebooks and journals. It is like finding letters from the past. Circa 2001 is the cringiest (mainly because I fancy a different boy every month at age 14) but this one is the most enlightening, starting 8 years ago after my first year in London.

It is too tempting for me to think of the last 10 years as one of extreme upheaval and change, all the new and old friendships, loves and heartbreaks, job quitting and house moves. And yes I suppose I have changed amidst all of that. But amongst all of that, there is a continuity that is very comforting and which makes seemingly random/out-the-box 2020 choices, ideals and ambitions make a whole lot more sense.

Joan D went on to say, "it is a good idea then to keep in touch and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. We are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves. Your notebook will never help me, nor mine you". Cheers Joan. This is a good reminder ✍️

28/12/2020

🐑 ☁️

20/12/2020

"I’ve had three heart attacks, love, and I’m still here", Ella singsongs down the phone. "No point in being miserable". Welsh grandmothers say it like it is // new blog post up on The Forgotten Pantry ☝🏽

There’s nothing quite like a Welsh woman of 92 to put this lockdown into perspective. I've spent much of the past few months calling up Welsh grandmothers, all in the name of food research. I spoke to Ella and Eirwen, Winnie and Lena, Nia and Myfi all with own stories to tell. Most spoke Welsh as their first language.

They rattled off their Welshcake recipes by rote and always by ounces, which is what got me to make these more unusual savoury versions (thanks to Winnie) with leeks and Caerphilly cheese. You can find the recipe along with the more traditional sweet welshcakes recipe, and Ella's story at the link in profile 😊

If you subscribed to my newsletter, you'll have got it there too, along with some of my fave links. Not least to the wonderful ☀️ Happy longest-night-of-the-year y'allx

19/12/2020

Gone a bit east with me pancakes today 🌍 with milk kefir instead of regular milk for extra fluff (a la Russia/Ukraine), with a bit of Middle East on the side w/ yoghurt, Palestinian medjool dates and tahini, whisked as I've seen in Israel with water and lemon 🍋

Feat: .kefir really delicious milk kefir made in Sussex, a mix of incredible organic spelt flour and plain flour, Palestinian dates and homemade blackcurrant jam yeeeah 🥞

12/12/2020

Jessica Darling, my acupuncturist and all-round legend pouring me some of her sour cream + onion soup (inspired by borscht she says and the times she'd take the transiberian to China) along with her homemade flaxseed buns before our session.

Jessica is 72 and grew up in China. She is British but speaks Chinese fluently and it was there she learned Chinese medicine. I always leave with some Chinese potion or a recipe or an ingredient or two and it always blows my mind how she can tell my general mental state by the three pulses she reads on my wrist. 'Your liver pulse is thin today' she'll say, or deep or bouncy. The Chinese way of describing the body, and how it is interconneced with mind and spirit is often like a mythical story in itself.

Jessica works as part of the Pathways Trust in Bethnal Green. They operate like a cooperative and you pay on a sliding scale so it's affordable for everyone. The care and attention you get is like nowhere else ✌️

11/12/2020

C R E A T I V I T Y // Words of wisdom from Bjork this morn, courtesy of . Where is yours showing up?

"I think creativity always lives somewhere in everyone but its nature is quite pranksterish and slippery and every time you grab its tail it's found a new corner to thrive in. Perhaps the trick is not to force it and put it up against a wall, and want it to be in a particular area.

But, rather, with a lot of kindness, sniff it out and wonder where it has gone to this time around. If it's in sauce recipes, writing theatre plays, paper mache improv with nephews, discovering new hiking routes or simply trying to figure out a family member's sense of humour.

I definitely don't succeed in this all the time but feel, overall, things have been more fertile when I trust this creature's instincts and follow it rather than me willfully reforming it into a circus animal colouring by numbers...As much as you'd like to ignore this animal you have to attend it because if you don't...dark times turn up."

Photo taken in Wales, among what mum calls the Disco Trees, a whole wood of them, their branches bent and curved and angled, growing out and around each other in wonderfully haphazard ways 🌳

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