Beatrice Dorothy (Bee) Wilson
United Kingdom
I write about food. And other things. Books inc Consider the Fork, First Bite. Founder of @TastEdFeed: taste education. Next: a cookbook. THE SECRET OF COOKING
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Articles by Beatrice Dorothy (Bee) Wilson
The Magic of Cooking With QR Codes
Does anyone actually learn to cook from TikTok? Maybe I am just too old for it, but the “food hacks” that go viral on the video app seem designed more to make you gasp than to cook better. Snickles! (A dill pickle with a candy bar inside). Twisted bacon! (Just like regular bacon but twirled up like a ribbon). Pancake cereal! (A multitude of tiny pancakes put in a bowl for no apparent reason). TikTok food videos can seem pointless at best (Oreo sushi, anyone?) and actively misleading at worst.
It’s the season for blood oranges. Here’s how to make the most of them
Blood oranges can take you by surprise.
Of Cabbages & Kimchi — the fizzy pleasure of fermented food
Lady Dai, aka Xin Zhui, a Chinese noblewoman whose tomb dates to 168BC, is known for being one of the best-preserved mummies ever found...
‘Adults and kids pushed each other to grab as many bottles as they could’: how the world got hopped up on energy drinks
A 13-year-old I know (whose identity I am thinly veiling to preserve his privacy) came back from school the other day and told me that there was a year 9 kid “dealing Prime” at the back of the class. Apparently, this boy was sourcing the Prime from a supplier in London for £2 a unit before selling it on to children who didn’t know any better for eight quid. “Prime” isn’t, as I first thought, a drug but a sports drink in bright plastic bottles promoted by the YouTube stars KSI and Logan Paul.
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Dried mint, the unsung hero of herbs
“Because sometimes dried is better than fresh,” says the website for the Peckham food shop Persepolis, next to a listing for dried mint.
Deep-Fried Artichokes and Other Healthy Foods
By Bee Wilson Feb. 9, 2023 11:55 am ET The best thing I’ve eaten so far in 2023 was a deep-fried globe artichoke. I was in Rome in early January at a restaurant in the Jewish quarter called Giggetto al Portico d’Ottavia, which specializes in this dish to such an extent that there is a man sitting on a chair by the entrance meticulously prepping dozens of artichokes. If you’ve never had one, a deep-fried artichoke is a glorious thing.
The World of Gingerbread
When you think about it, gingerbread is an odd word. It isn’t a bread, and it often contains no ginger. Cinnamon rather than ginger is now the dominant spice in many modern versions of gingerbread cookies, as well as in the gingerbread flavored lattes sold by chain coffee shops. The ingredients list for a Pret a Manger gingerbread latte includes “ground sweet cinnamon” and “natural cinnamon” but makes no mention of ginger.
Ping! How I learned to stop worrying and love the microwave
In 2020, Nigella Lawson almost broke the internet just by saying the word “microwave”. The food writer was heating milk for mashed potatoes on her TV series Cook, Eat, Repeat when she commented that she liked to heat the milk in a mee-crow-waa-vay, as if it were some kind of obscure yet deeply sophisticated European food gadget. It was a joke, clearly, but some people didn’t understand this and Nigella was forced to explain that she did actually know how microwave was normally pronounced.
The price of ‘sugar free’: are sweeteners as harmless as we thought?
The rise of sweeteners is, in part, a sign of the spectacular success of sugar taxes, which have been introduced in more than 40 countries since 2010. In the UK, the soft drinks industry levy was announced in 2016 and fully implemented in 2018, as part of a plan to “tackle childhood obesity”. The tax charged manufacturers 24p a litre for any drink with 8g or more of added sugar per 100ml.
Like a Bar of Soap
If there was one thing Maria Montessori hated, it was play. She also disapproved of toys, fairy tales and fantasy. This came as a surprise to me. I had the impression – from the hippyish reputation of modern Montessori schools – that the essence of the Montessori method was ‘learning through play’. Indeed, this is the way her philosophy is often summarised, including by her admirers.
How the US became turkey nation
This year’s Thanksgiving will test just how attached Americans are to eating turkey. The turkey industry has been hit hard by avian flu, which has led to the culling of entire flocks. Around 80% of fresh whole turkey sales typically happen in November, but prices are nearly twice as high as last year, and certain sizes of bird are becoming scarce.
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
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How the U.S. Became Turkey Nation
If you want to understand the sheer extent of the American relationship with turkey, consider the TV dinner. In 1952, Swanson was the largest turkey grower in the world and had a lot of unsold turkeys left over after Thanksgiving and Christmas. To deal with some of the unwanted poultry, the company created the first turkey TV dinners, including cornbread stuffing and a sweet potato.
Crossing the Line Between Sweet and Savory
Some who tasted the strips of tender red flesh that night thought it was raw tuna. Others said it was roasted red pepper. But none of us guessed that those savory morsels nestling in lettuce leaves, served as part of an array of tapas, were actually watermelon. I was in Spain a couple of weeks ago and ate dinner at Hidden Factory Barcelona, an experimental venue in an old textile factory run by a chef called Xavier Morón.
The Year-Round Pleasures of Outdoor Meals
By Sept. 3, 2022 12:01 am ET When it comes to eating, the end of summer can feel bittersweet. The happy part is the arrival of all the beautiful autumn produce: bright sweet apples, dark green cabbages, glowing orange pumpkins and squashes. The sad part is saying goodbye to the carefree habit of eating outside. No more lunch-break picnics in the park or drinking your morning coffee with the sun on your face. No more barbecues or al fresco dinners with a glass of rosé.
Why Our Summer Corn Is Ever Sweeter
Few summer treats feel quite as timeless as a whole, sweet corn on the cob. It seems to belong to an older, simpler way of eating, in which no cutlery is required (unless you insist on using those tiny cute corn holders). You slowly rotate the cob in your hands and use your teeth to extract every sweet yellow morsel. Maize eating in Mexico goes back more than 7,000 years.
Why Our Summer Corn Is Ever Sweeter
Few summer treats feel quite as timeless as a whole, sweet corn on the cob. It seems to belong to an older, simpler way of eating, in which no cutlery is required (unless you insist on using those tiny cute corn holders). You slowly rotate the cob in your hands and use your teeth to extract every sweet yellow morsel. Maize eating in Mexico goes back more than 7,000 years.
Peaches are vastly underrated. Here’s how to choose the perfect one
When it comes to peaches I’m with Samuel Johnson, who was said by his close friend Mrs Thrale to eat seven or eight large peaches “of a...
The Infinite Variety of Salsa
By July 7, 2022 5:59 pm ET It is not exactly news that salsa is good to eat. In 1992, salsa outsold ketchup in the U.S. for the first time, thanks to a surge in the popularity of Mexican food. According to a report that year by market research firm Packaged Facts, sales of salsa reached $640 million, compared to $600 million for ketchup.
Bee Wilson and Thomas Jones
Bee Wilson talks to Tom about palm oil, which can be found in everything from pot noodles to shaving foam. In its purest state, squeezed from the fruit and kernels of the oil palm, it has a deep red colour and rich fragrance. By the time it reaches our supermarkets, in ultra-processed foods and cosmetics, it’s been refined, bleached, deodorised and relabelled, appearing in multiple different forms.
Garlic’s Long March From Foul to Fabulous
By June 9, 2022 6:06 pm ET There is more than one way to love a bulb of garlic. You can love it full-throttle, as in Spain, where alioli—a mayonnaise-like sauce—may contain enough raw garlic to slay a vampire. Or you can love garlic like a faithful spouse you take for granted, as in China, the source of more than 70% of the world’s garlic, where mountains of garlic are simply one of the basic seasonings of everyday life. It is also possible to love garlic in a more timid way, like a bashful lover.
Sardines: a definitive guide to the taste of summer
One of the great tests of whether it truly is summer is how appetising the prospect of cooking a fresh sardine sounds.
Watercress: the lush, fiery green you didn’t know you were missing
When you eat a truly fresh leaf of watercress, it activates something called the trigeminal nerve.
What Counts as Fresh Food?
To celebrate the spring in Rome, they sometimes eat a vegetable stew called vignarola. Like the summer succotash of the American South or the ratatouille of France, vignarola is a vegetable stew that, in its ideal form, is radiant with freshness. It is made from artichokes, tiny fresh fava beans and freshly shelled peas, all braised together with spring onions and white wine with fresh mint added at the end. Vignarola is a mellow mixture of all things green and new.
Alice’s Book by Karina Urbach — the recipes stolen by the Nazis
In the summer of 1949, Alice Urbach, an Austrian Jewish cookery teacher and writer, was walking through the streets of her native Vienna...
Why nutmeg is so precious
To hold a nutmeg in your hand — a tiny brown globe veined with mysterious patterns — is to be reminded how much our ideas of what is...
The Dumplings We All Need Right Now
Varenyky are a kind of Ukrainian dumpling. They are made from a simple wheat dough, rolled and shaped into half-moons, and stuffed with various fillings before being boiled and served with lashings of melted butter and sour cream. I first read about varenyky in a wonderful 2015 cookbook called “Mamushka” by the Ukrainian food writer Olia Hercules.
Too Specific and Too Vague
‘Give me an English one!’ Matty Robinson said after tasting her first Indian curries in Bombay in 1858. She was 29, the eldest child of a Gloucestershire rector, and had gone to India as the wife of a British army officer, her cousin. As a third-generation Anglo-Indian, she was familiar with spicy food.
The Meat Paradox by Rob Percival — carnivore confusion
If you had to be reincarnated as a chicken, would you prefer to be born on a farm supplying KFC as opposed to any other intensive chicken...
The Raw and the Cooked
Have you noticed that roasted red grapes have become a thing? Until a few years ago, I would have thought it crazy to cook them. To roast a grape rather than eating it in its luscious natural state would have felt as eccentric to me as trying to eat a raw potato. But now, cooked red grapes feature in many cookbooks, and I am a convert.
寻味全球家常菜
发现和学习不同饮食文化中的家常菜，像是在领悟一门有关手指和鼻子的学问。风味之中，自有修行与惬意。 更新于2022年2月12日 08:25 Bee Wilson 来自FT中文网的温馨提示：如您对FT中文网的内容感兴趣，请在苹果应用商店或华为应用市场搜索“FT中文网”，下载FT中文网的官方应用，付费订阅。祝您使用愉快！ 屋外的空气中带着一丝寒意，厨房里却弥漫着温暖的甜香气味：肉桂、茴香、肉蔻皮、丁香还有生姜。我正在烘制德国姜饼（也叫圣诞小饼干），它们闻起来就像冬季的市集那么宜人。烘焙姜饼的感觉就如同是在温和地抗拒厨房外那个严酷的世界，在疫情的第二个年头，这种感觉比以往任何时候都更为强烈。 与那种在超市里可以成袋买到、经过工业化生产、裹着巧克力糖衣的桃心甜点不同（虽然那种点心我觉得也不错），我正在做的姜饼是长方形的，每个姜饼上都点缀了一个糖衣樱桃加四个白杏仁（每个角各一个）。据说，在格林童话《汉塞尔与格蕾特》原著中，巫婆家的墙壁和屋顶就是用这种饼干做的。这是一个非常非常古老的配方，恐怕只能从某位老祖母那儿得来。...
Goodbye to Plastic Food Packaging?
In the kitchen, as elsewhere, our cultural values evolve in fits and starts. A particular way of doing something can look normal for so long until suddenly, it looks completely wrong. Take plastic wrap—or rather, don’t. For years, I used plastic wrap (which I call clingfilm, because I am British) without a moment’s doubt every time I put leftovers away after a meal.
In search of the world’s best home cooks
There’s a chill in the air but my kitchen is filling with the warm scent of honey and spice: cinnamon, anise, mace, cloves and ginger.
Pumpkin Spice Lattes and the Ghosts of Thanksgivings Past
What drives anyone to drink a pumpkin spice latte? This orange-tinted coffee has come to embody late autumn for many people, even though it’s only been around since 2003. The blast of nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves in the sweet milky coffee transports you to the warmth of sitting around a Thanksgiving table sharing pie with friends and family—when really you are chained to your desk with only a disposable coffee cup for company.
Tricked Out as a Virgin
Was Lydia Harvey ‘respectable’ or wasn’t she? This was a question on which a surprising number of people had a view in the summer of 1910, including the prime minister of New Zealand. Earlier that year, Harvey, then sixteen, had been working as a photographer’s assistant in Wellington when she suddenly left her boarding house. She wrote to her mother in Oamaru to explain that she had got a job as a nursemaid for a rich married couple who were going to take her on their travels.
The Charm of Making Foods You Usually Buy
One of the most romantic moments I ever witnessed happened in a supermarket in the ready-made sauces aisle. It was before the pandemic, when grocery shopping could be a fun date rather than something done masked and alone. A young woman and man paused to look at the shelves of bottled sauces: pasta sauces, Thai green curry sauce and the like.
The pear is the prince of fruits. You just need to know when to eat them
To enjoy a pear in its prime — not rock hard but not too mushy either — is to feel that you are seizing not just the day but the whole...
The Accidental Chef
Lee Kum Sheung invented oyster sauce, a salty brown condiment that is now a staple in millions of homes, in 1888, when he was a 26-year-old street-food vendor in Hong Kong. He’d left a pot of oysters to simmer for too long, then tasted the brown sticky mess and found, to his surprise, that it was delicious. He began making the burned oyster sauce deliberately and selling it in ceramic jars under the Lee Kum Kee brand.
Throwing Away the Kitchen Timer
The late food writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor used to say that she could tell when fried chicken was done simply by listening to it. She could gauge exactly the moment that the chicken was crispy and golden from the particular sizzling sound it made in the oil. Sometimes, she once told an interviewer, people would say, “tell me something real, like, what is it? 15 minutes, 20 minutes, or whatever. And I say, you’ve got to listen to the sound of the grease.
Smash? Slingflip? We Just Call It a Cocktail
Bee Wilson Wall Street Journal July 27, 2021 Phil Mansfield/The Culinary Institute of America via AP My favorite thing to drink this summer has been a super refreshing cucumber-mint limeade. I first made it one hot evening when my 12-year-old son and I were getting ready to watch a Euro 2020 soccer match. We squeezed lots of limes, mixed the juice with a bit of sugar syrup and blitzed it together with a whole peeled cucumber until it was a beautiful pale green color.
The Long Evolution of the Cocktail
My favorite thing to drink this summer has been a super refreshing cucumber-mint limeade. I first made it one hot evening when my 12-year-old son and I were getting ready to watch a Euro 2020 soccer match. We squeezed lots of limes, mixed the juice with a bit of sugar syrup and blitzed it together with a whole peeled cucumber until it was a beautiful pale green color. Then we poured it into our prettiest glasses over ice, topped up with soda water and garnished with mint.
The Herb Revolution in American Cooking
Imagine cooking and eating without fresh herbs. It would be perfectly possible, but oh, it would be dull. Think of eating a piece of warm focaccia that lacked the uplift of rosemary. Or consider Mexican food without the grassy hit of cilantro, or a bowl of Vietnamese pho soup deprived of its essential mint. Cooking without herbs might still be nourishing, but half the pleasure would be gone. The rise of fresh herbs is one of the happiest stories of modern eating.
In Praise of Difficult Fruit
The other day, I bought a large bunch of delicious seeded black Muscat grapes. They reminded me of the grapes of my childhood, when grapes with seeds were normal and seedless grapes were still a luxury. But when I gave some to my 12-year-old son, I was startled to find that he actually gave up eating them halfway through, commenting that it was just too boring avoiding the seeds. This got me thinking about how different fruit is now from what it was in the past, even the recent past.
What Explains Our Mania for Mushrooms?
The most surprising thing about shiitake bacon is that it really does taste something like bacon. History does not record who was the first person to take sliced mushrooms, roast them and call it shiitake bacon.
Why spring onions deserve their name
Edna Lewis recalled that the first salad of spring during her Virginia childhood “consisted of scallions or young onion plants, before...
Traveling the World With the Power of Spices
When my mood turns anxious or just weary of these pandemic times, I lift my heavy granite mortar and pestle down from its shelf and grind up a new spice mix. It’s more exhilarating than a new bottle of perfume and far cheaper. It never ceases to amaze me how the whole atmosphere in the kitchen changes depending on subtle tweaks to the spice mix.
Cooking Alone by Kathleen Le Riche
You are browsing: Home Blog Cooking Alone by Kathleen Le Riche 12th January 2021 Cooking Alone was first published in 1954, and has been taken out of the archives and given a charming reissue by Faber. This is a delicious miniature compendium of tales inspired by a cast of eccentric solitary characters and brimming with entertaining anecdotes, recipes (rabbit with aubergine and prunes, anyone?) and top tips (ever wondered how to store ice cream in a bedsit?).
The Great American Salad Revolution
As 2021 begins, the dish I find myself craving the most, slightly to my surprise, is salad. The version I’ve been making most often lately is a concoction of raw Brussels sprouts, shredded finely and mixed with a Vietnamese-inspired dressing of garlic, mint leaves, chillies, fish sauce, rice vinegar, lime juice and cashew nuts. I don’t eat this salad because it is healthy—though it undoubtedly is—but because it wakes up my taste buds quicker than a double espresso.
How Our Food Vocabulary Reflects the Evolution of Taste
Not so long ago, if you had invited someone over for a meal of something charred, they would have assumed that you were apologizing for burning dinner. Yet now, “charred” is desirable. It signifies food that is robust, deeply flavored and cooked in a modern way, whether on a hot skillet or grill or roasted in an oven. Browsing cookbooks the other day, I noticed that many of the words we now use to praise dishes once would have been considered insults.
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