Need to add some purpose to your superficially fulfilling but fundamentally empty existence?
Learn to cook. Call it survivalism, bunkering down from the Brexageddon with a sofrito chopped in the company of like minds and a secure bulwark of tagliatelle, kneaded and rolled by your own fair hands.
Call it rejection of the relentless, soul-destroying, health-wrecking, sanity-sapping rat race, one which makes you want to retrain as a jolly, red-cheeked chef plump with butter and shortcrust satisfaction. Maybe it’s just the deluge of cookery shows on telly, or the realisation that we app-addicted urbanites are incapable of completing practical tasks. Whatever — here’s where to learn to cook your way to happiness.
Chopping tekkers
As you know from watching Nigella, Tom, Michel et al attacking a pile of onions, proper chopping is not only crucial but dead impressive. Learn how to work those blade angles like a pro and which knife to use where — as well as how to prep, truss and segment a chicken — at Borough Kitchen’s hugely useful applied knife skills course.
£99 (boroughkitchen.com)
For dinner party kudos
Honing your pastry or chopping technique is all well and good, but it’s not going to put a hugely impressive three-course dinner party on your table, is it? For that, you need to get into a Building Feasts sesh, where you’ll learn to cook (and eat) all manner of multi-course marvels with minimal stress on your part. The dream.
£75 (buildingfeasts.com)
For serious chefs
Fancy a career change? Do you harbour deep longings of being elbow-deep in flour, enveloped in the steam of simmering scarlet sauces? Quit your job and go to Leiths. Okay, maybe don’t quit straight away, but certainly take a mini-sabbatical at one of its week-long courses in the fundamentals of cooking, for a sense of what it might be like to go pro.
From £820 (leiths.com)
For shuckers and shellers
Woah, you don’t want to go pro. You kind of actually just want to have a laugh, with some mates, in really nice surroundings with really nice booze. Off you pop to Bentley’s, the wonderful old-school Mayfair joint, for a brilliantly OTT seafood cookery class including champagne and canapés, a four-course lunch with matched wines and a goody bag.
£250 (bentleys.org)
For Italian stallions
Hello, do you like pasta? Obviously you like pasta. Learn to make the thing you love — and other things, such as foccacia, and tiramisu, and pizza, and ragu — with The Essential Italian course at Marylebone’s wonderfully warm La Cucina Caldesi, founded by brilliant cookbook writers Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi.
£160 (cucinacaldesi.com)
