I’m still thinking about ingredients as friends. Last month it was cabbage, a complex friend, one of those mates who challenge me yet still manage to keep delivering and delighting. This time it’s other old friends I’m thinking about: the friends I sometimes take for granted but who are always there, who have always been there. I see now, though, that I’m inadvertently cooking with them as well. I say inadvertently because the list of ingredients in this month’s recipe pretty much happens to be a roll call of my Top 10 all-time favorites.
Recipe: Cheese-and-Spinach Phyllo Rolls
They’re all there, as familiar as if they’ve turned up for an old-school reunion: the sumac and feta, as tangy as ever. The rich and grassy olive oil, and the buttery pine nuts. The ground cinnamon and pomegranate molasses — sweet and sour in equal measure — and the spinach, fresh mint and parsley that no one can ever get enough of. And the lemon juice, of course, brightening up everything.
All these old friends, all this nostalgia — I think it’s an age thing. Not mine, but the age of Team Ottolenghi, the company whose 20th birthday we are celebrating this month (around a year late, but with no less excitement). We opened our first deli on a small street in London’s Notting Hill just months after the first iPod was introduced. I tried to do the math on whether we have prepared more eggplants over the years than Apple sold iPods (about 450 million).
Not quite, but going back to the flavors that I’ve relied on from the beginning, the link between ingredients and friends comes in. When I think about sumac and feta and all the rest, I also think about my old pal Sami Tamimi, whose raw talent and quiet courage bonded us in our early food experiments. I think about Noam Bar, the entrepreneurial one, and Cornelia Staeubli, the hospitality sage and people person, and the chaos and confidence we all displayed in equal measure. We used to pile back to a small corner of the kitchen with a few other eager teammates, and taste recipes we thought would work in our first deli, in our first cookbook, for our first customers.
Twenty years on, things have changed, of course. We’ve been through, and continue to go through, all the life stages. From the supreme joy of seeing things come to light — another deli, another book, a restaurant, new dishes on menus, new chefs and colleagues — through the toddler tantrums to the confident double digits. On to the expanding, questioning, experimenting teenage years and now poised and excited for what the next chapters will bring.
In the meantime, though, what makes me so happy and proud is that the phyllo rolls I made this particular week could well have been what we shared in that kitchen corner two decades ago. There might have been more feta, or different quantities of herbs, or spinach. The ingredients might have all found one another in a big phyllo pie, rather than in individual rolls, but the elements remain essentially the same.
For all that everything changes, all the innovation, some things remain the same. I love this sort of cooking and the dishes it leads to. We all have our equivalent staples: those ingredients — those friends — whom we can bring together instinctively, without too much overthinking, where the end result always somehow tastes reassuringly familiar.