Flora Shedden - Supper: Recipes Worth Staying in For

For James I look forward to eating many more feasts with you

and

For Gramps who was one of my favourite people to feed

Supper, Dinner, Tea, Feast Frankly, who cares what you call it? We all end our day with a meal.

All these words have so many different connotations and associations. Supper translates in my mind as a more relaxed evening meal. This is partly to do with the rise of supper clubs hosted in peoples houses, using whatever plates, chairs and cutlery they can get their hands on. I see it as an event that can happen daily with little pressure or fuss. Dinner is its formal equivalent, the sort that involves hosting and entertaining and maybe even bringing out the fancy glasses. For many people, dinner can also mean lunch, something that will always wholly confuse me. Tea is what we ate at home as kids. A very monotone chorus of whats for tea? would start in our house at around 4 p.m., when we got back from school, and probably didnt stop until we were faced with a plate of pasta a few hours later. So, what do you call the in-between? The sort of meal you have spent time over, no matter how much or how little. A meal that is enjoyed at your kitchen table with candles and perhaps maybe even a napkin, but with no formalities or logistics to consider. Just those you spend most of your time with. I settled for supper, which I think finds the perfect balance of casual and considered dining. Supper to me is the most pleasurable and relaxed form of eating. But in a world where lunch can be called dinner, you should by all means name it what you like.

Ultimately, it doesnt really matter what you name your evening meal. In our unbelievably busy lives, the work-life balancing act and constant demands of day-to-day, dinners are getting harder and harder to find time and energy for. These days, we have access to amazing (and lots of not-so-amazing) meals right at our fingertips, many that will be brought right to our door. When motivation is lacking, all too often the temptations of modern-day life take over. Dinners and the art of dining in can easily be lost among the hustle and bustle. I have been hugely guilty of this myself. Convenience (and sadly often highly processed) food after an exceptionally long day of cooking for other people is horribly easy to fall back on.

For me, cooking should be something to look forward to at the end of the day a reward or a tasty form of compensation for making it through a particularly difficult one, or a celebration of a day well spent.

During various lockdowns in recent years, the world became a little quieter. We stayed at home, tried to look after ourselves as best we could and became inventive with what we could cook, now that takeaways and ready meals felt unnecessary and unaffordable for many. This wave of quiet made me fall in love with dining in all over again.

I have long been a fan of entertaining and cooking for crowds. I cook for and serve hundreds of people daily in my bakery and even wrote a book on cooking for big gatherings. But with both of those things out of the question in lockdown I returned to cooking, and taking my time over cooking, for those I loved the most. This is how I started spending time in the kitchen, and how I first came to adore it. I cooked for my siblings and my parents the people I spent most of my days with. It was a gentle form of therapy to return to doing this again after some very hectic years. What, when and how we eat can completely turn our days and our mindset around.

The aim of this book is to spark or reignite our love of cooking at home. I hope it is an approachable and helpful guide to dining at home, no matter the day, the occasion or the meal.

Eating supper happens 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. We do this to look after ourselves and those we love. It is essential. And yet so often the effort and pleasure that come from taking the time to cook and sitting down to eat at a table is reserved for formal occasions, reasons to celebrate or hosting people. The rest of the time there is often a sense of the mundane about evening meals. I hope this book encourages you to dedicate the time to slicing some garlic, looking out for serving platters and nice glasses, and rummaging through cupboards for forgotten ingredients. Even if you only have 20 minutes, use them to cook and then take the time again to eat deadlines can wait. There are recipes both fast and slow in here, some more effortless than others, but all of them taste a heck of a lot better when eaten at a table with those you love. And who cares if the table is covered with letters, stray belongings and other signs of life?

Eating around a table is something I grew up with. I didnt take it for granted but it really surprised me how hard it is to maintain for two people. Before I moved in with my partner James, I was used to five people around a table noisily chatting, often arguing, sometimes wolfing down food, and sometimes pushing it around the plate. When there are just two of you, it becomes easy to eat standing up in the kitchen, or with a plate balanced on your crossed legs in front of the telly. We do still do this from time to time, but our aim is to spend more nights of the week at a table than eating in a pool of blue television light. To combat this, we started a weekly dinner where we would cook, talk, and most importantly eat at the table.

I cant quite remember the exact process of planning our first menu. I think I went into a shop with a list of ingredients and failed to source any of them. The resulting menu wasnt quite what I had in mind, but I was excited all the same. We started with gin and tonics while cooking, nearly set off the smoke alarm crisping up some duck, ate plenty of dauphinois potatoes, fried cavolo nero with a green sauce and some hazelnuts, drank lots of wine, played a game of chess, and then tucked into a chocolate cremaux with brandy-soaked cherries. I had set the table with a stripy blue-and-white tablecloth, used some little blue-and-gold drinking glasses I inherited from my granny, white linen napkins I had bought for a supper club hosted some years ago (un-ironed, always, much to my mothers horror), and plenty of candles from my excessive and until-now unused collection. We didnt have any flowers because Scotland in January is not famed for its blooms. I was quite drunk by the time we went to bed and left almost all the clearing up for the morning. It was heaven, despite the fact that I was so chronically terrible at chess. I think at some point during the evening I said we should do it every week, before waking up six hours later with a headache only red wine can cause.

Surprisingly, we did do it every week, in one form or another, and it became our Friday Feast.

As time went on, Friday Feast has changed and altered. Life became busy again and occasionally it would take the form of a takeaway, but this time sat at the table, plates, cutlery and napkins all set out, candles lit and flowers arranged. Our quick go-to midweek meals started to become occasions in themselves, too. We would sit at the table, still half covered with the chaos and clutter that accompanies life, and perhaps we would even light a candle leftover from a weekend feast before. And, of course, there are still TV dinners and meals eaten straight from the pan, from time to time, but for the most part we have returned to our dining table.

Until lockdown, it hadnt even dawned on me to make as much of an effort for eating at home as I would if I was entertaining. I would never have set the table with tealights, multiple glasses and napkins for just the two of us before. But I did and I have loved it ever since. When I do go all out and set the table fully, it feels like a private party. We eat when and how we want, wearing what we want and still it feels sociable and special. I have sat down to a candlelit dinner in my pyjamas on numerous occasions. This flexibility is what makes me enjoy dining at home more than anything else. You need to be flexible to cook well. Supper will be ready when its good and done and your stress levels will be all the better for it.