This month sees the seventh annual OFM 50, plus Madhur Jaffrey’s classic cookbook and recipes for tarts and crumbles
Here at Observer Food Monthly we have compiled a list of things we love. It wasn’t difficult. There is so much happening in the food world right now. The result is a list of 50 cracking places, people, restaurants, initiatives and things to eat that we want to celebrate. The list is as varied as it is long. From contemporary Russian cooking and mountain wines to slow-grown poultry and Scottish bagels. We have stir-fried fiddlehead ferns and smoked potato skins; the slow-rise of Japanese cooking in Paris and collections of historical orange wrappers at the V&A. (Yes, those beautifully illustrated pieces of tissue that used to appear in boxes of citrus fruit.) Basically, a long list of everything and everyone we have our eye on right now.
Of course, we have been celebrating higher animal welfare and the rise of conscious eating for years. And we were there at the start of the modern craze for foraging, preserving and charcoal cooking (and that is all in our list again this year), but there’s something new to celebrate, something slightly less tangible. There have always been professional kitchens run by people who care about those who cook with them, and chefs and owners who look after the welfare of their staff. The problem is that there were too few of them. What we are seeing now, and never more so than this year, is a sea change in our industry, a long-overdue concern for the wellbeing of those who work in kitchens. It is a heartfelt cry for professional kitchens to be places of healing rather than harm, spaces of nurture and safety, havens of diversity and equality. It is happening now and we want to shout about it.
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