Food news antipasto

Renowned beer historian Martyn Cornell died at the beginning of June. His friend Steve McCubbin’s heartfelt obituary for Cornell was just published in The Guardian. McCubbin shares Cornell’s long and storied career, and recognized his salty character. The last post Cornell made before he died illustrates this: “If I read once more that porter got its name because it was ‘popular with the porters of Covent Garden, Smithfield and Billingsgate’, I am going to slap someone with a malt shovel,” he wrote.

Tasting Table has an…interesting, yeah, we’ll go with that…story on the best way to ensure that you will never lose your favorite online recipes. Their solution? The decidedly low-tech option of printing them out onto paper. What makes this interesting is that in the first sentence of the article they disparage cookbooks, saying that in the digital age “it’s rare to see physical cookbooks being used for anything but collecting dust on a shelf,” while going on to recommend that the best way to preserve recipes is to print them out and assemble them in a binder. The article also makes the astounding discovery that by doing this you could even organize them by meal type or cuisine or dietary restriction. If only there were a word to describe a collection of recipes that is printed on paper and organized in a logical way…

Dame Mary Berry turns 90 this year and to celebrate, she is partnering with Fortnum & Mason to create an afternoon tea hamper that will sell for £180. It features items that honor the “simple pleasure of a traditional cream tea”, such as scones, clotted cream, and Morello cherry and Cognac preserve. In case anyone wonders where Berry stands on the proper construction of a scone, she prefers to add jam first. Mary has a special book coming October 9th entitled Mary 90: Brand-New and Timeless Recipes from my New BBC Series.

Jacques Pépin is also celebrating his 90th birthday in 2025, and he recently talked to Food and Wine about the five ingredients he always keeps in his pantry along with his 90/90 campaign to raise money for his foundation, which aims to make culinary education more accessible. I would venture to guess that most EYB Members have all five of Pépin’s must-haves in their own kitchen. The Art of Jacques Pépin: Favorite Recipes and Paintings from my Life in the Kitchen will be released this September.

There’s a sweet article in the Independent featuring Jane Dunn, in which she talks about swapping high-stress commercial kitchens for her wildly successful baking blog. Dunn has a following of 2.2 million across various social media platforms and has written five cookbooks that have sold over half a million copies overall.