Ros Rants
Our founder, Rosalind, has been at the forefront of Cookery School thinking since its inception in 2003. With 75 years of life experience, she has a lifetime of knowledge, memories and opinion that she shares under ‘Ros Rants!’
Rosalind’s Cake Baking Round Up
Cookery School founder, Rosalind Rathouse talks about her annual Christmas cake as well as her favourite cake recipes that she grew up with, the importance of great ingredients and what to look for when dining out on cake.
The Christmas cake
Historically, the Christmas cake is associated with eating a large fruit cake to celebrate the Twelfth Night or Epiphany on the 5th of January, which at that time was a bigger feast-day than Christmas.
Category
How To Ingredients Ros Rants
Ros Rants: To Drink or Not To Drink
Is it safe to drink and cook? I was motivated to write a post after a corporate event called to cancel today. Last week we met an agent and his client, who used the word ‘perfect’ to describe what we had to offer. Cookery School is really small and beautiful. We do all that we can to give the best possible teaching experiences to students coming in to learn to cook and to those doing corporate events.
Ros Rants : Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and Cooking!
It has become more and more obvious to me that learning to cook at school is as important to living a decent life as are learning to read, write and do arithmetic!
So many ills of society would be hugely diminished if the bulk of the population knew how to cook. Once upon a time fifty years ago cooking used to be handed down through the generations but this no longer happens.
Category
Ros Rants
Ros Rants: World Food Day
October 16 is World Food Day and with its passing, I have had time to reflect on the changes we’ve seen in consumer eating habits over the last 17 years.
Thousands of people come through the doors of Cookery School at Little Portland Street each year. With good home cooking skills lost over the generations, we aim to arm people with confidence in the kitchen, knowing they can go home and replicate the food that they have learnt during their time with us.
Category
Ros Rants
Ros Rants: Forget fusion, simplicity is key
In some restaurants and cookbooks, there is a feeling that any ingredient goes with any other ingredient. That is definitely not the case. Fusion cooking introduces lots of room for error and can often result in culinary disasters.
In order to guide you when cooking, I suggest following this rule: ‘what grows together goes together’.
Category
Ros Rants
Ros Rants: The value of good teaching
Good home cooking, along with sustainability, is at the heart of all that we do at Cookery School. We try to pass this message onto everyone who visits, as we want them to feel they can go away to cook on their own with confidence.
With cooking no longer being taught in schools and cooking no longer being passed down through the generations, we find an increasing number of people are turning to us to learn how to cook.
Category
Ros Rants
Ros Rants: why is there plastic on our TV screens?
There’s no debating that food television programmes have exploded in the last decade, with the likes of Masterchef, Great British Bake Off, Saturday Kitchen and Chef’s Table occupying the minds and hearts of millions of viewers all over the UK.
However, in the last five years or so, there has been a shift from education to entertainment, with many tuning in to follow the excitement and pressure of a cooking challenge,
Category
Ros Rants
Ros Rants: What oils should you be using when cooking?
Oil may seem like a simple issue to some, but at Cookery School, what we choose to cook with is the result of many discussions and dilemmas!
First things first, we do not buy our oil in plastic bottles. Obviously, we are a plastic-free kitchen so that would betray our ethos! However, it goes beyond this. There is a theory that plastic (particularly softer plastics) contain BDA and phthalates and these molecules,
Category
Ros Rants
Ros Rants: The lost art of home cooking
When I first came to live in London, the only ‘fast’ food available were fish and chips, pie and mash or jellied eels. Anything else required some cooking. Even when eating a tin of bully beef, you had to put it into a pan to melt the fat in which the beef was surrounded. Everything was cooked from scratch!
However, with convenience becoming priority number one, home cooking has fallen to the wayside,
Category
Ros Rants
Ros Rants: My journey to being plastic-free
I am 75 years old and it is during my lifetime that plastics have evolved. It is hard to believe that over a mere 50-year period, plastics could be responsible for systematically polluting our environment and our bodies. This trend has to be urgently reversed and it can only be done by us, the people that so willingly embraced all things plastic over the past half century.
It is not hard to understand why we did this,
Category
Ros Rants
Ros Rants: The ethics of chocolate
I am an utter chocoholic and love the stuff but I always have one huge proviso – it has to be 100% slave free. The chocolate that I devour and that we use at Cookery School is always ethical.
In our chocolate making class, taught by the wonderful Jon Hogan from Rococo, we start the day with a tasting of a range of different ethical chocolates. Our students are always shocked to learn that the chocolates that they eat all the time aren’t free of controversy and ought to be given an enormously wide berth.
Category
Ingredients Ros Rants Sustainability
Ros Rants: A sprinkle of salt
Salt is magic for me. Of all the ingredients that can be used to enhance the flavour of food, salt is the most effective when correctly used. The emphasis being on correct! I loathe food that is over-salted. It kills the taste of any dish, so it’s essential to find the right balance.
There is a hysteria surrounding the use of salt. It is not unfounded if one is a fast food or ready meal addict.
Category
Ingredients Ros Rants
What teaching through lockdown teaches us about teaching!
These are surreal times. Three months ago, I had no idea that Cookery School at Little Portland Street would have been closed and in lockdown for three months with no knowledge of when, in the foreseeable future, we will open, with all of our staff furloughed and very few bookings being made.
Our classes are all hands on which necessitates students standing alongside one another with no chance of correct social distancing because of the space issue … This started a new thought process of how best we could work in this interim period before the pandemic is under control.
Category
Ros Rants
Ros Rants: Are TV chefs doing more harm than good?
Food programmes are here to stay. Everyone enjoys the entertainment value of watching people cook, and the figures can prove it. 7.5 million viewers tuned in to watch the Great British Chefs final last year and 3.3 million viewers watched the MasterChef final this year. While I can appreciate the inspiration these shows bring to those looking to cook at home, I do have a bit of a rant on the role that chefs play in doing television programmes.
Category
Ros Rants
Ros Rants: On the subject of sugar
I am no stranger to a sweet treat – in fact, I love them! From pieces of Original Beans Pura Malingas Peruvian 75% chocolate to snack on, to gorgeous fruit crumbles, there isn’t much I don’t like.
The one thing that all diets have in common is that sugar is the baddie. However, when humans first started cooking, sugar was viewed as a treat, mainly because it was so hard to come by.
Ros Rants: Don’t Sweat the Onions
Cookery School at Little Portland Street founder Rosalind Rathouse occasionally reads, hears or sees something that gets her attention and inspires her to have a say. We call this Ros’s Rants…
Last week I was alerted to a tweet that stated the author felt deceived by the cooking community after he had read a 2012 article on Slate.com about how long it really takes to caramelise an onion (35-40 minutes) versus what a recipe typically says (5-8 minutes).
Category
How To Ingredients Ros Rants
Rosalind’s sustainability journey
Rosalind Rathouse founded Cookery School in 2003. Here, she shares her journey to sustainability, a key part of the Cookery School ethos.
The Cookery School sustainability journey really started before the school began. My daughter, Kathryn, had encouraged me from early days to buy as much organic food as I was able to afford as organic produce was considered an expensive luxury. She maintained that if everyone bought only a small amount,
Category
Ros Rants Sustainability
Why We Are Different
It’s been nearly a decade since I first opened Cookery School at Little Portland Street in London and my what an exciting, busy and delicious decade it’s been. As we enter into 2012, I’ve been reflecting on the qualities of Cookery School that have kept it going so well over the years. These are the things that keep new students coming in, and old students coming back. I hope to keep these strengths alive for many years to come.
