It is a cool, coppery early autumn morning in south-east London, and chef Ben Lippett is baking fig leaves, slowly crisping them in his oven to expedite the dryness that inevitably follows their late summer bloom.
Ben is cooking for me, but the fig leaves are not going to feature in our meal. Sometimes, without designs on using a particular ingredient for his hugely successful Substack newsletter, How I Cook: A Chef’s Guide to Really Good Home Cooking, he will start a kitchen project for his own amusement. This week, he put a call-out on Instagram to ask if anyone local to his Nunhead home – which he shares with his wife, Lou – had a fig tree. “A guy got in touch and, after a cup of tea at his house, I picked some leaves from his garden,” he tells me. Half of these he is baking, ready to blitz up and sift into a powder “for dressings, sauces, to put through melted butter or meringue, or to dust over poached fish”; the rest he will blanch, blend with sunflower oil and filter for a “very pure, figgy” elixir. “It’s quite cheffy,” says Ben, “not something you need every day, but a beautiful ingredient, and something I’ve done just for me.”
A restaurant chef turned content creator and, as of this month, author – his first cookbook, which goes by the same name as his Substack, has just been published – Ben’s everyday revolves around recipes: creating, writing, filming and broadcasting them. Work, for Ben, has always meant hospitality, be it potwashing at a sailing club in his hometown of Portsmouth, “pan shaking” at a cocktail bar during his university year abroad in New York, or cheffing at some of London’s most lauded restaurants, like Jackson Boxer’s Orasay in Notting Hill and Phil Howard’s Elystan Street. While working in professional kitchens, he had fostered an interest in writing; working for a food magazine was, he says, his “north star”. But it was only when the pandemic arrived and he was, to use a word that belongs to the Covid era, furloughed, that he mobilised. He started a WordPress blog but quickly became aware of a development on Instagram: “it was the dawn of reels,” he says, “and I remember thinking that it could be an interesting wave to ride.”
He started to make videos under the moniker @dinnerbyben, posting them to his small but eager following – “a strange experience, when you put something out there with almost no audience to watch it” – but the account gained traction, especially once he began working for the then start-up recipe platform, Mob, for which he made recipe content as sumptuous as it was achievable – quick chicken stew with fennel, olives and filo, red curry smoked mackerel fried rice, philly cheesesteaks. At Mob, Ben’s videos transitioned from being entirely focussed on the hob, countertop or bowl, to a combination of hands-on cooking and his speaking to camera. Often, they went viral. “Suddenly I was very visible,” he says of the public figure he became almost overnight; “I might only have been recognised by people inside the M25, but that still changes the way your brain works.”
Ben is determined to offer people something they might not be getting elsewhere. “I think they come to me for food that has one foot in the professional kitchen and one in home cooking,” he says, “for food that perhaps has a bit of an edge.” On the day we meet, his newsletter features Lasagne al Ragu – an involved project of a recipe, “it takes the best part of four hours but I like to say that the juice is worth the squeeze!” – and this week he will be filming a series on confit: confit cod, confit pork, confit tomatoes, confit garlic… It is elevated home-cooking, taught by an experienced and personable guide in Lippett, who breaks techniques down for the uninitiated.
You don’t have to spend long in Ben’s home kitchen to know he’s worked in restaurant kitchens. It is spotless, organised beyond my own wildest dreams. Everything has a place; the butter and parmesan, nutmeg and sage leaves, pancetta and polenta for the dish he is about to make from his book; an army of six perfectly purple figs lined up (“to snack on”); the stainless steel section bin awaiting offcuts and food waste. His experience as a jobbing chef has made all the difference to his success, he thinks. It gives, he says, “a level of fluidity” to the way he moves around the kitchen – how he holds a knife, stirs a pan, chops a shallot.
He brought this, and that promise to help elevate his readers’ home cooking, to his book, which he hopes sits somewhere between Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat and Kenji Lopez Alt’s encyclopaedic The Food Lab. That means a book which is both approachable and exacting, arming people with the knowledge and tools not just to make dinner, but to be a better cook. In its pages, long-time Lippett followers will be pleased to find a hefty proportion of new recipes, like one-pot mushroom bourguignon and cucumber, cherry and almond crunch salad, but also classics done really well – oeufs mayonnaise, French omelette – as well as a few simplified versions of dishes borrowed from elsewhere, like a home cook’s version of Phil Howard’s almond and garlic soup (“one of the best things to eat”).
But what do he and Lou make for a quick dinner? “Oh we’re a broken record,” he answers, “it’s pomodoro, pomodoro, pomodoro here – what I call Sunday sauce in the book.” He likes making his tomato sauce with anchovies and fennel seed, Lou loves to add lemon, “which I would never do, but we love”; he’s a fan of long pasta, she likes farfalle, bow ties. And then there are recipes like the one he’s making for us today: Perfect Polenta, with one of the three suggested toppings in How I Cook – polenta with pancetta, sage and nutmeg topping. It is, as Ben promised, as much a rubric for how to make polenta “without it being claggy or seizing up” as it is a guide for assembling flavours into a quick and toothsome meal. It’s a dish which screams autumn comfort; despite the ambiguous season today, eating this feels like a signpost to falling leaves and crisper mornings.
I ask Ben about his relationship with food now, given he spends all day handling it, tasting it, thinking about it. “It’s love/hate, definitely,” he answers, explaining that the antidote to food ennui is: “to make time to cook something I really enjoy cooking, just for myself, once a week.” This week, that ‘something’ is Nunhead fig leaves, whose rounded green perfume has permeated the kitchen, merging with the scent of the fried sage which now tops my polenta. One week later, I notice a surprise fig leaf frozen yoghurt on his Substack; a fitting farewell to summer, preserving it in the form of pudding for the months to come.
Perfect Polenta
Polenta is endlessly comforting. I absolutely love it and can put down bowl after bowl. Polenta is one of those things that is so often done badly, and I want to help rewrite the rulebook. This is a simple recipe on paper but it really delivers on texture and flavour. Once it’s made, you can steer the polenta down so many different roads.
Be mindful of the type of polenta you’re buying. A popular polenta is the quick-cook variety, but you want a proper coarse-ground cornmeal. The texture and flavour is miles better than the quick-cook stuff and is a lot more predictable.
Ingredients
600ml water
250ml whole milk
150g course cornmeal
30g unsalted butter
1/4 nutmeg
8-10 thin slices of pancetta
1 lemon
Handful of sage leaves
Olive oil
Fine sea salt
Black pepper
Recipe:
Pour the water into a pan with the milk and whisk in the cornmeal. Place over a medium heat and bring to the boil, whisking constantly until the pan is up to temperature.
Cook the cornmeal for 50–60 minutes, checking in on your polenta every 5–10 minutes to give it a good stir.
When the pan is approaching boiling point, the polenta will thicken considerably and start to plop and spit a little. Turn the heat down to low and let it tick over, stirring now and then to make sure nothing is sticking or scorching.
While the polenta cooks away, lay the pancetta in a cold frying pan with a glug of olive oil and place over a medium heat. Bring up to temperature and cook for 4–5 minutes until very crispy.
Remove from the pan then drop the sage into the hot fat. Let the leaves sizzle for about 1 minute until crisp – you’ll know they’re done when they stop bubbling and all the water has cooked out of them.
Remove the pan from the heat, allow it to cool slightly, then add the juice of the lemon to the pan and swirl it around the pancetta fat and olive oil.
Once the polenta had 45 minutes or so in the pan, finish by whisking in the butter. Adjust the texture of to your liking. If it’s too thick, add a little water or milk, too thin, keep cooking.
Season your cooked polenta with the grated nutmeg and a shedload of black pepper. Divide between warm bowls and top with crisp pancetta, sage leaves and plenty of the dressing.
Ben wears the Organic Cord Smock Popover Shirt, Frank Cotton Long Sleeve Tee and Cotton Canvas Project Apron. The Enamel Dinner Plate also features.
How I Cook by Ben Lippett is available now.
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