Mildred's: The Cookbook
Delicious vegetarian recipes for simply everyone
Amazing news! London’s epically successful Mildred’s is expanding. On 29 August, the restaurant is adding a Dalston branch to the three existing locations (Soho, Kings Cross, and Camden). Mildred's, Manna, and The Gate are inarguably the best classic vegetarian restaurants going in London, and they've been going for a long time now.
For two weeks, Dalston diners will get a 50% discount on food. See details here.
Which gives us an excuse to talk about Mildred’s: The Cookbook (Octopus Publishing, 2015)
It’s a treasure of a cookbook, a culinary I Ching
with the tricks to slake your secret, sacred longings. And if you only
bothered to use one recipe out of Mildred's: The Cookbook, what of it?
You'd have one spectacular staple on the dinner table that causes your
guest's heads to swivel 360 degrees. Watch them swoon and slide off
their seats. Nearly all the recipes in this vegetarian gourmet
bible are like that.
What's the part of dinner vegetarians rarely get and miss most?
Well, it ain't Yotam Ottoboring's excruciatingly latest iteration of chick peas with chick peas. Please, somebody tell this tin-tastebudded creature there's more to life than living on beans in a culinary dungeon.
No, what we cry for, especially on grey Sunday
afternoons, is brilliant, smothering, scintillating, comforting,
shimmering motherly gravy.
Here is a little recipe for Port Gravy in the back on page 236. Oh my.
This sauce takes you more than 30 minutes to prepare, but you can plonk it onto a portobello, baked potato, mashed potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, nut roast, any kind of veggie TV dinner Waitrose frozen thingie you want to tart up. It doesn't matter. Mildred's recipes are so scrummy you may just get by with one.
The recipes do take a bit of work, yeah? But the food's so deeply satisfying, you might find yourself making two of these recipes.
Imagine what making a whole Mildred's meal might do to shake the world. You might need a week to recover.
Lazy sluts that we are, we'd rather slink down to Soho, get a takeaway and scarf it standing outside on Lexington Street. Think you're going to get a table at lunchtime? Dream on. For food this complex yet comforting, there can be no shame eating cauliflower with your fingers in the rain. Why cook?
The recipe ingredient lists are longish. We'll see you at Mildred’s, slobbering down the front of our trenches, on their notorious Bubble and Squeak Cakes Filled With Welsh Rarebit. Not even going to try making that. Won’t stop eating it, though. Unless you get there first. Ha.
Chefs Daniel Acevedo and Sarah Wasserman wrote the recipes and the photographs are by Jonathan Gregson.
For more information about the restaurant, click here. For more information about the book, click here.