Field Notes - Supper

The Pantry That Makes Dinner Possible

Delphine Roy — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Almost every recipe on this site assumes a shelf. Not a well-stocked one in the aspirational sense — no saffron, no truffle paste, nothing in a jar with a wax seal — but a specific and quite short list of things that turn “there is nothing in” into dinner in twenty minutes.

Here is what is actually on mine, and why each one earns its space.

Tinned whole tomatoes

Whole peeled, never chopped. Chopped tins are treated with calcium chloride to keep the pieces intact, which is exactly what you do not want: it stops them breaking down into a sauce. Buy six at a time. The fifteen-minute pasta is entirely built on two of them.

Two kinds of olive oil

One for cooking, in a large tin, chosen for being decent and cheap. One for finishing, in a dark bottle, chosen for tasting of something. Using the good one in a hot pan wastes it — the aromatics you paid for are volatile and leave. The longer version of this argument is elsewhere.

This is the finishing bottle being used correctly: off the heat, over the food, at the end.Ahmet Koç

Anchovies in oil

The most useful savoury ingredient there is, and the one most people are wrong about. Four fillets melted into butter or oil disappear entirely and leave depth behind. Nobody tastes fish. See the broccoli.

Tinned beans, and dried ones

Tins for a Tuesday, dried for a Sunday. They are genuinely different ingredients — a pot cooked from dried is creamier and comes with a litre of broth — but a tin is twenty minutes from dinner and that matters more often.

Capers, and something pickled

Acid and salt in a jar that never goes off. Capers crisped in butter, cornichons chopped into anything fatty, pickled shallots on everything. When a dish tastes flat and more salt does not fix it, the answer is almost always acid.

Chilli crisp

The one condiment that has genuinely changed how I cook in the last decade. Crunch, chilli, fried garlic, and savour in one spoon. Get a jar with visible sediment and use the bottom of it.

Tahini

Half a jar of tahini is a dressing, a sauce, a dip, and — thinned with lemon and water — the thing that goes over any roasted vegetable. It is also in the cookies.

Good salt, in two grades

Fine salt for water and doughs, where it has to dissolve and be measured. Flaky salt for finishing, where the point is the crunch and the burst. Buying only one means doing one of those jobs badly.

Whole spices

Cumin, coriander, fennel seeds, black peppercorns. Whole spices keep their aromatics for a year or more; ground ones are noticeably duller after three months. Crushing a teaspoon in a mortar takes fifteen seconds.

Honey and a sharp vinegar

Between them they season almost everything. Sweet and sour in small amounts is what makes a dressing taste finished, and honey warmed with chilli is half a dish on its own.

Dried pasta, and one grain

Five hundred grams of rigatoni and a bag of rice or farro. Between them they turn any sauce, any pan of vegetables, and any leftover into a meal that fills people up.

Parmesan, and its rind

The wedge for grating, the rinds in a bag in the freezer for dropping into anything that simmers. Free savour, and you have already paid for it.

What is not on the list

Stock cubes, which mostly taste of salt and yeast extract. Garlic paste, which tastes of the jar. Dried herbs other than oregano and bay, which are the only two that survive drying. Pre-grated cheese, for the same reason as pre-crumbled feta: the starch.

None of this is expensive and none of it goes off quickly. It is a one-time shop and then a slow rotation, and it is the difference between cooking and ordering.

How to Buy Olive Oil Without Being Fooled

Delphine Roy — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Olive oil is the ingredient this site uses most and the one that is easiest to get wrong, because the labelling is a mixture of legal definitions, meaningless flourishes, and outright noise.

You do not need to become an expert. You need to know which four things on the bottle are load-bearing.

1. A harvest date, not a best-before

This is the single most useful thing on a label, and most bottles do not have one. Olive oil is a fruit juice and it degrades from the day it is pressed — its polyphenols and aromatics fall off steadily, and by eighteen months a good oil tastes like a mediocre one.

A best-before date tells you when the producer estimates it will be unpleasant. A harvest date tells you how old it actually is. Look for one within the last year, and treat its absence as a mild warning sign.

2. Dark glass or a tin

Light degrades olive oil faster than anything except heat. Clear glass on a lit supermarket shelf is a bottle that has been slowly ruined in front of you. Dark green glass or a metal tin means somebody in the supply chain was paying attention.

Which also means: decant nothing into a clear cruet by the hob. That is the worst place in the kitchen for it.

3. One country of origin, ideally one region

“Packed in Italy” is not an origin. Neither is “a blend of EU and non-EU olive oils”, which appears on a great deal of what is sold as Italian and means the contents could be from four countries. It is not necessarily bad oil, but nobody is standing behind it.

A single country is better. A named region, estate, or cultivar is better still, because at that point somebody’s name is on it.

4. “Extra virgin” and nothing else

Extra virgin is a legal grade with defined chemistry — free acidity below 0.8%, no refining, no heat, no solvents. It is the only grade worth buying for anything, including cooking.

Everything after those words is decoration. “Cold pressed” is redundant: extra virgin is by definition mechanically extracted at low temperature. “First press” is meaningless with modern centrifuges — there is only one press. “Pure”, “light”, and “extra light” all denote refined oil, which is a lower grade despite sounding like an upgrade.

What the taste should do

Open a good bottle and it should smell green — cut grass, tomato leaf, artichoke, sometimes banana or almond. Taste a spoonful and there should be bitterness in the middle of your tongue and a peppery catch at the back of your throat, sometimes enough to make you cough.

That pepper is oleocanthal, and it is a direct signal of polyphenol content. It fades with age. An oil with no bitterness and no catch is either old, refined, or from olives picked very ripe — and it will contribute nothing to a dish beyond fat.

Two bottles, not one

The practical conclusion is to stop looking for one oil that does everything. Buy a large tin of decent, inexpensive extra virgin for the pan, where heat will drive off the delicate aromatics regardless of what you paid. And buy one good bottle, with a harvest date on it, for finishing — over beans, over bread, over a tomato salad, where you will actually taste it.

The good bottle should feel slightly extravagant and it should be finished within three months. A bottle of expensive oil kept for special occasions is a bottle of expensive oil going stale.

A Knife, a Board, and One Heavy Pan

Delphine Roy — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kitchen shops sell solutions to problems most people do not have. The genuine list of things you need to cook everything on this site is three items long, and two of them are worth spending real money on.

The knife

One chef’s knife, 20cm, and it should be the most expensive thing in your kitchen after the pan. Not a set — a block of six knives at the price of one good one is six knives you will not enjoy using.

What matters is that it is comfortable in your hand and that you keep it sharp. A cheap knife kept sharp outperforms an expensive one that is blunt, every time, which means the honing rod and the occasional whetstone or sharpening service are part of the purchase rather than accessories to it.

A blunt knife is also the more dangerous one. It requires force, force slips, and it crushes rather than cuts — which is why bruised, blackening herbs are usually a sharpening problem rather than a technique problem.

The board

Wood or a thick composite, and as large as your counter will take. The most common mistake is a board too small to work on, which turns every prep job into a series of clearing operations.

Not glass. Not stone. Both destroy an edge in a handful of uses, and both are why some people believe good knives do not stay sharp.

The pan

One heavy, oven-safe frying pan, 28 to 30cm, in cast iron or thick carbon steel. Weight is the point. Charred broccoli, seared cabbage, and blistered peppers all depend on the pan holding its temperature when cold food lands in it, and a thin pan simply cannot. It drops to a temperature at which food steams and stays there.

Oven-safe matters because half of the useful things you can do involve starting on the hob and finishing in the oven.

If you buy a second pan, make it a non-stick 24cm for eggs, and accept that it is a consumable that will need replacing every few years.

Then, in order

A digital scale. Baking without one is guesswork, and the sourdough and the cakes are written in grams for a reason. Twelve pounds, and it makes you a better baker the day it arrives.

A heavy casserole with a lid, for braises, beans, and bread. Enamelled cast iron if the budget allows; a plain lidded cast-iron pot if not.

A rimmed sheet pan, or two. Rimmed, so the fat stays on it.

A box grater and a microplane. Between them: butter for scones, garlic to a paste, citrus zest, parmesan.

A mortar and pestle, for whole spices. Small, heavy, unglazed inside.

Things I have given away

A garlic press, which produces harsh, uneven garlic and eleven small holes to clean. An avocado tool. A herb stripper. An egg slicer. A mango splitter. A banana slicer, received as a gift and given onwards without ceremony.

An electric spiraliser. A milk frother. A stand mixer, which I used for two years and replaced with a bowl and a spoon for everything except meringue, and I do not make meringue.

A set of nesting measuring cups, once I started weighing things.

The pattern

Almost every gadget replaces a knife with something that does one job worse. The exceptions are the ones that do something a knife genuinely cannot — a microplane, a mandoline, a scale — and those are the ones still in the drawer.

Six Dinners, One Shopping List

Delphine Roy — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Meal planning usually fails for the same reason diets do: it demands that Thursday-evening you behave like Sunday-morning you. Six recipes chosen on Sunday will be six recipes you do not feel like cooking by Wednesday, and then the vegetables rot and the whole thing feels like a failure.

The approach that has actually worked for me is to plan the shop, not the week. Buy a set of ingredients that overlap heavily, and decide what to cook on the night.

The overlap principle

Pick a handful of building blocks that appear in a lot of dishes, and buy those in quantity. Then buy two or three things that only go one way.

A week’s version of that looks like this:

Everything week: olive oil, onions, garlic, lemons, tinned tomatoes, a bag of dried or two tins of beans, parmesan, eggs, bread, yogurt, and a large bunch each of parsley and dill.

This week specifically: a whole chicken, 800g of carrots, a cabbage, a punnet of tomatoes, 500g of pasta, and a bag of rice.

That is one shop, no exotic single-use purchases, and everything on it goes at least two ways.

Where it leads

Sunday. Roast the chicken over torn potatoes. Eat half. Keep the carcass.

Monday. Chicken stock from the carcass while you make the bean stew — the dill and the lemon are already in.

Tuesday. Tomato butter pasta. Fifteen minutes, tins and an onion. Make double sauce.

Wednesday. The rest of the chicken, shredded, over rice, with charred cabbage on the side.

Thursday. Roast carrots with yogurt, and the leftover rice fried into a crust with eggs.

Friday. Tomato salad, bread, the second half of Tuesday’s sauce baked with pasta and parmesan, and nobody cooks properly on a Friday.

Six dinners, one shop, and no night where the plan was already decided for you.

Two rules that make it work

Cook once, eat twice, deliberately. Not “leftovers” as an accident, but a batch made on purpose: double the pasta sauce, cook the whole bag of beans, roast two trays of carrots instead of one. The second meal has to be a different dish, not the same plate again — that is the part that keeps it from feeling like penance.

Buy herbs in bunches and use them like vegetables. A supermarket packet of six dill sprigs is decoration. A large bunch, used by the fistful, is an ingredient — and a bunch of parsley and a bunch of dill between them will carry a week of otherwise unrelated dishes and make them taste intentional.

What to do with the last two carrots

Nothing formal. Grate them into a bowl with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and whatever herbs are left, and eat that beside anything. Every good cook I know has a version of this, and none of them would call it a recipe.

The Spices Worth Buying Whole

Delphine Roy — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ground spice is a countdown. The moment a seed is cracked open its aromatic oils start leaving, and a jar of ground cumin that smelled of something in the shop smells of dust within three months. Whole seeds keep for a year and often two, and grinding them takes less time than finding the jar did.

So this kitchen buys six things whole and grinds them as it goes. Everything else — paprika, turmeric, the chilli flakes — is bought ground because there is no sensible way to do otherwise, and bought small so it gets used before it fades.

The six

Cumin. The one that goes furthest. Toasted and cracked over a pot of chickpeas, rubbed on anything that is about to be roasted, stirred into yogurt.

Coriander seed. Sweeter and more citrus than the leaf, and the reason the dukkah on the carrots tastes of anything. Buy it whole or do not bother.

Fennel seed. For pork, for sausage meat, for a tray of roasting vegetables that has gone quiet. A small pinch in bread dough is a trick worth knowing.

Black pepper. The one everyone already grinds fresh, and the proof that the principle works: nobody who has tasted the difference goes back to the tin.

Cardamom. Green pods, cracked open, seeds ground. Rice, milky puddings, and the coffee. Pre-ground cardamom is the fastest-fading spice there is.

Chilli, dried whole. Not a seed, but the same logic. A dried chilli toasted for thirty seconds and crumbled has a depth the flakes in the jar never had.

The two-minute habit

Heat a small dry pan over medium heat. Add the seeds, shake the pan for a minute or so until they smell toasted and one or two start to pop, then tip them into a mortar or a cheap electric grinder. Grind, and use straight away.

That is the whole technique. It is the difference between a spice you can smell from across the room and one you have to lean into the jar to find, and it costs nothing but the pan being hot.

Storing them

Away from the stove. A rack over the hob looks right and is the worst place in the house for a spice, because heat is what the oils leave in response to. A drawer or a cupboard door, whole seeds in the jars they came in, and the date written on the lid so a two-year-old jar of coriander can be spotted and replaced.