🪄 Table Talk #66: Magical Cookbooks 📚

TABLE TALK #66

As you likely well know by now, we enjoy our food here at Table Talk. And our wine. And our friends. In fact, we like all three so much that we genuinely believe that there’s little better than gathering your nearest and dearest, cooking a meal and sitting down to break bread.

There are those, however, that are filled with dread when the notion of hosting and having to cook for others is tabled. For us, that’s where cookbooks and the magical array of recipes kept within their pages come to the rescue. Let’s consider today an ode to the cookbook.

🍡 AMUSE-BOUCHES 🍡

Love: Wasted Wine Club source beautiful wines with sustainability at their core. What’s not to admire?
Read: A New Yorker has eaten at 18 restaurants in 24 hours.
Reflect: Christian Roberts and his love affair with Barbados.

🍝 MAIN COURSE 🍝

Going Old School

At risk of sounding old fashioned, the advent of the internet has proved the death knell for lots of things that were once commonplace in our lives. Maps. Taxis. Ringing someone with an actual telephone. The list goes on…

For a long time, it felt that cookbooks were destined for a similar fate - to be consigned to history and your grandma’s kitchen, replaced by super simple online recipes or 30 second social media shorts. Now that’s not to say that we don’t love skimming through recipes online or discovering delicious sausage ragu recipes on Instagram, but this is an acknowledgement that the tide is reversing somewhat.

Whilst it’s undoubtedly powerful to have every recipe under the sun at our very fingertips, it can also be disconcerting and difficult to navigate. The paradox of choice is that that very choice can become overwhelming. Finding the perfect recipe for the six friends you’re hosting this weekend can become like finding a film you and your partner both want to watch on Netflix - borderline impossible in spite of the infinite array of options.

Unearth the beauty that lies within.

And this, my friends, is where owning a small array of cookbooks comes in handy. Pulling them down from the shelf, dusting them off and flicking through their pages is to enter a world whereby all of a sudden, cooking for those six friends seems doable. Admittedly, finding something you want to eat when you’re already hungry and still need to do the weekly shop is another beast entirely, but if you have the time and the inclination, finding a great recipe the old school way can be enchanting.

These books have often been willed into life by people who have spent a good chunk of their lives experimenting with food and flavours (shout outs to Bre Graham and Gemma Ogston), working out how to coax the best from only a few humble ingredients, so that you don’t have to.

In surrendering to a cookbook, you’re allowing yourself to take on a different persona for an afternoon or an evening - often pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone in honour of your guests. This is not us advocating for you to slave away in the kitchen for hours on end, tearing your hair out and not getting the chance to chat with those same people you’re about to serve; this is us giving you a gentle reminder that all these cookbooks exist and are popular for a reason and what a joyous reason that is.

 

🍮 SWEET ENDINGS 🍮

NTS curates the very best from a raft of different genres with their Infinite Mixtapes radio streams. Slow Focus if you’re on a deadline, Island Time to escape the cold momentarily and 4 To The Floor when you want to dial things up a notch.

 
Radio mixtapes

🍷 WHAT'S NEW
FROM
WEDNESDAY'S DOMAINE? 🍷

Mission Get Our Wines In Your Hands continues apace, with our wines being served at Bre Graham’s book launch at The Standard last Thursday, Salad Project x Max La Manna’s launch party last week and Soho House’s Yumlicious event with Gemma Ogston last night.

If you’re running an event or know someone who is, and you’re on the hunt for a delicious alcohol free option, just get in touch and we’ll take care of the rest.