More at home with finance mags than gossip rags, Spear’s has never had much interest in celebrity eating habits. That is, until we were handed a copy of Midnight Feasts: An Anthology of Late Night Munchies at a launch of the London on a Plate app at Mortons, and learnt what James Middleton reaches for after dark
More at home with finance mags than gossip rags, Spear’s has never had much interest in celebrity eating habits. That is, until we were handed a copy of ‘Midnight Feasts: An Anthology of Late Night Munchies’ at a launch of the London on a Plate app at Mortons, and learnt what James Middleton reaches for after dark.
For the serial celeb-stalker there is now an anthology of stars’ favourite midnight snacks, food to be ‘eaten in bed,’ preferably while snuggling next to someone equally famous and hiding from the paps. We can well imagine Fergie tucking into baked eggs while watching Oprah, or James Middleton making his favourite ‘red velvet cake balls’ (main ingredient: red velvet cake mix) to please the future queen.
Each recipe is introduced with a nostalgic description of guilty pleasures and late-night nibbles past and present — more often than not the hungry remembrances of boarding school food-fests penned by waif-like socialites, or the bucolic fantasies of jam-making and fruit-picking by authors who were always too posh for processed food.
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The recipes themselves display varying degrees of culinary sophistication and realism. We wondered how often Gwyneth ‘probiotic domestic goddess’ Paltrow enjoys Chinese duck with Apple and the other kids. Kinvara Balfour offered her recipe for LA chocolate brownies. (We should have asked her to bring some with when she hosted the Spear’s Design for Living Awards.)
Daisy de Villeneuve’s plum conserve seems like a lot of effort in the late hours, but we were not quite sure we needed Gillian Anderson to explain to us how to make peanut butter and banana, or Ferguson Henderson’s step-by-step guide to sardines on toast.
Mark Hix’s recipe for Welsh Rabbit crumpets may be mouth-wateringly appetizing, but if you find your cupboards are disappointingly bare, do not despair: just reading the anthology’s gooey tone and rich recipes will sate you. And perhaps that is the point: all the pleasure, none of the calories.
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