georgeegg

The Potato Book and The Snack Hacker

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A photo of two hardback books. The one on the left is The Potato Book by Poppy Cooks, which is pink and features a photo of the author, a young blonde-haired woman, eating a chip, and The Snack Hacker by George Egg, which looks like a partially-opened sardine tin containing various snacks.

We’ve picked up a couple of new cookbooks recently: The Potato Book by Poppy Cooks (sponsored link) and The Snack Hacker by George Egg (sponsored link). And I’ll be honest: the main reason I’m writing about these new books is to break up what had been planned to be a full week’s worth of blog posts about smart home tech and firmware. As it was, we ended up buying a new car sooner than planned, and so some of those posts have been pushed back now. Anyway, on with the books.

The Potato Book

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned a book by Poppy O’Toole, better known as Poppy Cooks, as we also have her slow cooker book and use it regularly. Poppy is known as ‘the potato queen of Tiktok’, and so I guess it was only a matter of time before she published a book of potato recipes. Indeed, the cover of The Potato Book has a quote from Nigella Lawson describing her as ‘the high priestess of the potato’.

The Potato Book is split into eight themed chapters – mashed, roast, chips/wedges/hash browns, 15-hour potatoes, world classics, baked, potato salads, bakes and extra crispies. Usually the first recipe in each chapter sets out the basics, so the very first recipe in the book is how to make a classic mashed potato with salt, butter and double cream. The rest of the chapter is then variations on the basic recipe, such as hot honey and bacon mash.

Crucially, each recipe tells you what variety of potato to use for the best results. For example, the mashed potato recipes call for Maris Piper potatoes, but others use red-skinned or baby potato varieties.

We’ve only had the book a couple of weeks, and so far, we’ve just cooked her Swiss Rösti recipe. It wasn’t bad, but didn’t end up as crispy as we’d hoped.

I’m not going to spoil the final recipe in the book, but it’s worth marvelling at it.

The Snack Hacker

The second book was The Snack Hacker by George Egg. We’ve seen George’s Anarchist Cook show before (almost ten years ago, blimey) and this is in a similar vein – unconventional ways of preparing food.

Whilst some of the recipes are akin to traditional cookbooks, where you start with a set of raw ingredients, many take an existing snack food item and ‘hack’ it into something better. For example:

  • a Gregg’s Steak Bake, with some mustard, soured cream and spices to make a Stroganoff Steak Bake
  • a Breakfast McMuffin enhanced with mackerel fillets, curry sauce and mayonnaise to make a McKedgeree Muffin

It’s not just a book of recipes though. It’s also a memoir, covering George Egg’s career and childhood memories – especially the ones that are food-related. The illustrations and design are excellent – all done by Egg’s son, Jem Ward, with whom he pitched the idea for the book.

As yet I’ve not cooked any of the recipes, but I enjoyed reading it and will be trying a couple.

George Egg – Anarchist Cook

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Photos of the recipe cards from George Egg's Anarchist Cook show.

Last week, as part of the British Science Festival, we went to see George Egg perform his show ‘Anarchist Cook’ at The Studio theatre in Bradford. George Egg is a touring stand-up comedian who consequently spends a lot of time in budget hotels. As he finishes his comedy gigs in the late evenings, it’s often difficult to find any decent food available (apart from pizza and kebab shops).

So, the show is based on the premise of: what can you cook in an average hotel room, using only the equipment that’s there?

This is, of course, bearing in mind that you don’t usually get a cooker, oven or any cooking utensils in an average hotel room. Instead, George Egg cooks a three course meal in just over an hour, using an iron, a kettle, a pillow case, some of the complementary salt and pepper sachets, some foraged plants from hotel reception, and a Gideon Bible.

The starter includes crostini toasted on the iron, ricotta that had been strained through a pillow case using UHT milk sachets (209 sachets to be exact), and a salad with leaves from a spider plant (which until now I didn’t know was edible). For the main course, he steamed sea bass in the travel kettle, and desert was pancakes, again cooked on the iron.

These were just three of the recipes that George has come up with, and he mentions others in his show. This includes curing your own salami sausages (requires a hotel room with removal ceiling tiles and being able to request the same room a few weeks later), and making bread using a complimentary wine bottle as a rolling pin and the countertop in the bathroom.

It was a good show, clocking in at around an hour long, and the audience were invited to try the food at the end. Alas, by the time we’d made it out, it had all been eaten – the show was free, funded by the science festival’s sponsors, and so it was a full house. We did, however, buy the recipe cards – although we’ll probably use more conventional cooking utensils to make them.

The Anarchist Cook show has recently run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and George Egg is due to reprise it at a couple of dates in Wales next month. Hopefully he’ll be able to tour it elsewhere soon as it’s a good show to watch – it’s both entertaining, and educational. If not, he also has plenty of stand-up dates coming up as well.

Disclosure: I work for the University of Bradford who were this year’s host of the British Science Festival.