My life on a plate... by Fay Maschler

The Evening Standard restaurant critic on her first reviewing job, simple fare and Indian food

  Fay with her husband, thriller writer Reg Gadney

What’s your earliest food memory?
My mother was an excellent baker. What I remember most vividly from my childhood is coming home from school to the smell of freshly made cake. It was so welcoming and comforting. When I think back, I realise what a good cook my mother was. Everything she made tasted truly of itself – something rare these days.

How often do you cook?
I cook in London one or two nights a week and, in the house that we have in a village in the Peloponnese in Greece, I cook nearly every evening. Restaurant meals in Greece quickly become monotonous, but the ingredients you can buy are mostly organic and a joy to prepare. I rather like the challenge imposed by strictly seasonal supplies.

What’s your favourite food?
Nearly everyone says they like simple food but – given the amount of fancy cooking that comes my way – I really do. I like dishes associated with home cooking, such as pies and stews, and I’m a keen advocate of boiled or poached food. I think you get truer, cleaner fl avours – and they’re a vehicle for interesting sauces. I like fi sh and seafood but I usually eat it in restaurants rather than prepare it at home.

Which country’s dishes do you most love?
I was born in India and seem to have been imprinted with an abiding love of its food. The cooking there is so diverse, but if I had to limit myself to one state, it would be Kerala, with its wonderful variety of vegetable dishes and coconutty fi sh stews, served with those fermented lacy pancakes called hoppers.

What’s your most-used cookbook?
I often turn to my friend Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken And Other Stories (Ebury Press, £12). His approach to cooking is one I share – avoiding fads and revelling in the process, rather than looking for shortcuts. And I sometimes refer to Eating In [currently out of print], a book of the recipes I contributed to the Evening Standard. It’s full of favourites.

What do you always have in your fridge?
Apart from the obvious things, I usually have home-made chicken stock. Even
when I’m not cooking, I’ll make stock just to have that smell of something delicious
going on in the house.

How did you get into restaurant reviewing?
In 1972, the Evening Standard ran a competition to fi nd a reviewer to replace the best of them all – Quentin Crewe. The entry had to be a review of three restaurants linked by some sort of theme. The prize was to do the job for three months but, 35 years later, I’m still at it.

Have you ever thought of doing anything else?
I’ve thought about it, but the job has fitted into my life so well. When my children were small, it enabled me to be at home with them as I could eat out in the evenings. And when I married Reg [Gadney] 15 years ago, I discovered he was thrilled to go out – he’s a writer and painter, so he tends to be cooped up inside all day.

Do you prefer eating out or a home-cooked meal?
I like both, but I don’t think I could have kept up my interest in restaurants for so long if they hadn’t changed as dramatically as they have over the past 30 years. Eating out in London now is completely different from the early Seventies, when there was limited choice and only a certain type of person went to restaurants.

What’s your idea of food hell?
There’s almost nothing I won’t eat, but I dislike pretentious food. I’ve eaten some strange things – bear’s paw gave me pause. Apparently, one paw is more tender than the other because the bear licks it. I don’t know if it’s the left or the right.

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