Between Bites #2: The Art of Friday Night Dinner!
THE summer, toasts and Eleanor Steafel
Hello people!
Is this newsletter very very late? Yes. Am I going to beat myself up about it? No. You know why? Because maintaining a newsletter, I have found, is difficult. And just like many things in life, it is hard to stay motivated when you occasionally feel like you are talking into a void whilst not receiving financial or any other satisfaction out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good void. I love writing and when I do, it's not necessarily for anyone. However, similar to how Beyoncé says she wouldn’t be here without her fans, I don’t think it would hurt to have some readers once in a while. The tune is as sweet as the ears that hear it. The words that my fingers tap tap onto my keyboard gain some sort of meaning in the eyes of the beholder.
But anyway! E nough on that. I am currently writing this introduction at the Bodrum airport. While everyone is angry about a 45-minute delay, I am simply minding my own business. Why? Because I have decided that some things, like delays and flying on a plane, are out of my hands and all I can do is enjoy the ride. Oh sweet relief.
The reason why I am talking about the airport is because we usually associate these spaces with holidays and vacations. People parting and reuniting, suitcases being opened to redistribute weight and revealing a pair of neon pink underwear to the whole check-in line, (me), or a group of excited teens probably taking their first trip without a chaperone. Airports are interesting. People are more clueless than ever, angrier than ever, and more willing to pay for a coffee three times its average price than ever.
This month’s Between Bites is inspired by the memories we collect over the summer. And just like the only song I’ve ever listened to from My Morning Jacket, when the months filled with heat, cold beverages and little clothing go by, Only Memories Remain.
So with fork and knife in hand, I am starting this month’s Between Bites!
Enjoy!
Yasmin
Monthly Menu
Where Are We Going?: The art of a Friday night dinner, Princess Islands
Eavesdropping: This is THE summer
Sounds from the Kitchen: 7-Questions with journalist and cookbook author Eleanor Steafel
The Rundown: Thoughts, reviews and recommendations
Something I realized as I wrote the first newsletter of Between Bites is that sharing food is not limited to restaurants. I mean, of course it's not. It stems from the tables we grew up sitting around. Think of the family dinners at our grandparents’ that had the “children’s table” and the “adults’ table.” Or the casual dinners you had with your family after school. I grew up in a culture that had food-sharing at its core. During meals, plates of meze and hot dishes would be passed down. You would heap a nice spoonful of it on your plate before passing it to the person beside you and while doing so, you would grab another plate coming from the other side. It required coordination. You know what also requires coordination? Dancing.
I danced with my two friends Molly and Alabama in the south of France last summer. Stick with me now, this connection is going to make sense – maybe. With a research and language fund from our school, we decided to spend three weeks in Montpellier. We would improve our French and spend weekends exploring other villages. We stumbled into a number of village parties, bumping our small, sunburnt booties to classics like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and “Ai Se Eu Te Pego” by Michel Teló' while sipping on delicious 1€ wine.
On our last weekend there, we went to stay with Ellie (who you will meet shortly) in another lovely village in France and experienced both a rager-of-a-village-party and amazing food-sharing opportunities. She and her family fed us delicious food for breakfast, lunch and dinner and created an environment that was quite literally out of a delicious movie. Long tables were set with plates of food, baskets of bread, and bottles of wine. It truly was one of the best summer experiences of my life. So when Ellie wrote and published her cookbook The Art of Friday Night Dinner: Recipes for the Best Night of the Week, I was struck with the idea of including cookbooks, along with restaurants, in the newsletter.
Long story short, we are cooking from Ellie’s cookbook. I am notoriously bad at following instructions, so this was a fun ride for me. Where are we eating it? In one of the lovely Princess Islands in Istanbul of course! As a part-time resident of the island, this meal is shared with my boyfriend — who is a full-time resident of said island.
More on Ellie in a bit. For now, let's see what we talked about between bites.
This is THE summer.
My boyfriend and I cannot drink a beverage without toasting first. Even if we have become the driest of sultanas from our lack of hydration, a cheer and a toast is necessary. “To health” does not cut it for us. We need specialized ones for every occasion. That being said, over the winter, what we rose our glasses to the most was summer. We would look into each other's eyes, clink our glasses and say “this summer is going to be THE summer.” Was this summer THE summer? Maybe. Does it matter? Not really. Because it's the feeling that counts. The feeling of endless opportunities and potential.
But as I was driving through the coastal city of Bodrum, in the southwest of Turkey, I did look back on the many drinks we’d toasted to this exact moment. Then I asked myself, what makes summer, THE summer? Obviously, I made a list.
When the radio station switches between Greek and Turkish radio stations creating an interestingly organic mix of Sirtaki and Ediz’s summer banger Martılar.
When my shoulders get those freckles you get when you tan rather unintentionally, while swimming. This is followed by the ring tan that forms around your finger.
I experience at LEAST three late dinners with friends and family sitting around a table, laughing and stuffing our faces with delicious — yet light — dishes. While we enjoy delicious food, mosquitoes enjoy a delicious buffet of humans.
I go to the ‘belediye çay bahçesi’ or municipality’s tea garden, to have my double cheese panini with orange juice as I watch the sea.
The cicadas in my grandparent’s garden become so loud that we give up trying to shout over them. My grandfather attempts to quiet them by hitting one of the tree barks.
I don't wear anything except bikinis and a sarong.
Days become longer and lazier. Reading becomes a segue to an afternoon nap and the sea becomes my favorite cooling hug.
What was revealed to me through this list was that what makes a summer, THE summer, isn't the over-planned, over-expensive, over-complicated parts of summer vacation that people (including me) tend to fuss over. It is often the mundane and the familiar that holds the most value. It is the long nights that turn into early mornings on the shore with friends, it's a friendly game of backgammon with your uncle even though I’m convinced he cheats every time and it’s the initial chill of my toes touching the sea, the heat emanating from my cheeks after a long day at the beach, the tranquility that comes from not rushing from place to place or task to task. As I look back on the last three months, I am thankful to have experienced all these feelings and I am hopeful for September. And I’ll toast to that.
Eleanor Steafel is a journalist and cookbook author. She has been working at the Telegraph for eight years. Her column, “The Art of Friday Night Dinner” was one of the inspirations for her cookbook of the same title. Steafel was able to bring together her years of experience in writing others’ stories for the Telegraph with her authentic personal stories, creating a cookbook that is not only an ode to the “the special magic of a Friday night,” but also a collection of her delicious recipes.
1. I had the pleasure to personally taste not only your but your family’s cooking. How was it growing up with a family that not only loves to cook but also to host?
Hosting is a huge thing in my family, you’re absolutely right; we are borderline obsessive about it. Some of my earliest core memories are of how the house felt when we were getting ready to host a dinner or a party. Even if mum and dad were just having four people round to eat at the same kitchen table my siblings and I had eaten dinner at a couple of hours before, it was like that kitchen table became reborn. Something about candlelight and music that wasn’t just the low hum of Radio 2, and wine glasses and little bowls of olives and the anticipation of people arriving - it all had this fizzy magic to it. I think I’ve been chasing that feeling my whole adult life.
2. What’s the first thing you made for yourself?
I’m pretty sure it was carbonara. I’m also certain it was very, very bad. Scrambled egg, crème fraîche (I’d never dream of putting cream in my carbonara now), overcooked pasta. I have a picture in my mind, though, of managing to fry the bacon and the garlic just right, and knowing that the fat in the pan was going to make everything taste good. The foregone facts of cooking can be very reassuring - put this with that and it’ll taste good. I remember how satisfying that felt, how satisfying it still feels today.
3. What was the process of writing a cookbook like? And it is never just writing, it comes with a lot of decisions from fonts to colors to photos. How did that process work?
Writing the cookbook was a series of Sunday recipe tests and early morning writing sessions before work. The writing sessions usually looked like me sitting in my knickers in the kitchen with a mug of coffee and an eye twitch willing myself to write another thousand words before running through the shower into clothes and to the office. Then came the baited breath for the edit, then the weeks of tweaking and retweaking, the long days cooking and shooting in my kitchen with the brilliant Sophie Davidson, who took all the pictures for the book. Then more tweaking, and then the best bit - getting to thank everyone in the acknowledgements, which I wrote in the Abbeville Road Gail’s (shout out) a matter of days before it was all sent off to the printers.
4. You talk about bringing people together around a table in your cookbook. Do you think this is something you learned to value more as you grew up? What is the importance and value of this gesture?
I think I’ve always known the value of getting people together around food - it just went in via osmosis growing up. It was a house where everything happened in the kitchen, where mealtimes were valued and having people over to eat was normal. That was a very lucky way to grow up in so many ways; it gave me (and my brother and sister) the confidence to cook for people and gifted us the ingrained understanding that sharing food is always going to be a good way to connect and show love and care.
5. What is the beauty/value of Friday nights spent alone?
Eating alone doesn’t come naturally to me, but I do think it’s worth getting good at it. Gifting yourself a beautiful night in with some great food is such a generous thing to do for yourself. It can be egg and chips or a jacket potato or something far more elaborate, it just needs to satisfy a craving. I can panic a bit if I find I have a night alone ahead of me, particularly a Friday night, but if I can quieten my brain enough to ask myself the question: “what do you want to do, and what do you want to eat?”, and then answer those questions and act on them, I’m onto a winner. The answers, incidentally, are always: make spaghetti, pour large glass of red wine, watch old West Wing episodes, have a bath, eat either some Lindt dark with sea salt or the purple Tony’s, read a bit, go to sleep.
6. What is one of your memorable Friday nights that you would like to share?
There isn’t one specific evening that springs to mind, but a regular Friday night occurrence growing up (and probably my most formative Friday night memory) was a little routine my mum and I used to have. She would put my younger brother and sister to bed and I would hide in the loo so as not to rouse suspicion that I was being allowed to stay up. Then when she came downstairs she’d get out Kettle Chips and guacamole, a wine for her, a lemonade for me, and we’d watch Top of the Pops, Ground Force and Gardener’s World. Heaven.
7. Let’s say you need to share a recipe from the cookbook as the perfect representation of what the cookbook is about. Which one would you choose?
The dish people have made the most is probably the Bloody Mary Rigatoni. It’s like everything you want from a simple tomato sauce but with all the savoury kick of a Bloody Mary (hot sauce, worcestershire, vodka, celery seeds etc) and a lick of cream. It’s pure comfort and you could just as easily make yourself a pan of personal Bloody Mary Rigatoni for a night on the sofa with only yourself to please, or get a bunch of people round and cook a vat of it. If you’re cooking it for a crowd, can I insist you buy some really crap (but actually insanely delicious) supermarket garlic baguettes to go with it? Give the people what they want - hot carbs.
The cookbook is not only a great collection of recipes, but also a great collection of stories. It was a pleasure to read through.
The recipes are all dishes I want to make. I found myself dog-earing many-a pages to remind myself to try them.
Her recipes for a variety of pickles are quick and delicious. Straight to the point.
I made the flatbreads! I am notoriously bad at baking. I tend to fail at anything and everything, but the flatbreads? They were edible and yummy despite my skills that were lacking to say the least.
I love the addition of the frozen After Eights. Simply because it is so true. They are delicious.
This is going to be random BUT the paper used in this cookbook is. so. satisfying. My compliments to the chef… for the paper…
My professional and not-biased-at-all opinion on this cookbook is that you should buy it and cook from it and then email me, and me all about it.
🫒 Thank you for tuning in! See you all next week. 🫒