Cooking on holiday – without taking half your kitchen with you

Making a meal anywhere but home can feel unnerving, but all you need is some forward planning and an essentials list

Greetings from my parents’ kitchen in north Norfolk where, despite its familiarity, cooking takes on a less predictable dimension. By some measures their kitchen is well equipped – three toast racks, countless skewers, a three-egg poaching pan, many beer tankards, and a very noisy battery-operated pepper mill – but I’ll admit to missing my knives, my lemon juicer, and my salad spinner (my mother insists that one of the latter will never “clutter up” her cupboards, to which my riposte is, “An egg poaching pan?”). And that’s before all the ingredients that don’t make it into the hurried pre-holiday essentials shop, the indispensability of which only dawns on me in their absence – the rice wine vinegar, the maple syrup, the capers, the tahini.

All this is to say that cooking anywhere but your own kitchen can feel like a paradigm shift and demands a different approach. This could mean intricate planning or, in my case, it invariably sends me running to my archive of tried-and-tested recipes, will work regardless of what shops are nearby or what equipment is in the kitchen. These have seen me through summers in various kitchens that are not my own, from this very one in Norfolk to a scattering of Airbnbs in Europe. They require little more than a knife, a couple of pans, a wooden spoon and a heat source. A box grater and a whisk are handy, too. And, as your drinks columnist, it would be disingenuous to pretend that a decent corkscrew isn’t utterly vital. (For a sound list of real kitchen essentials, which don’t include three toast racks and a battery-operated pepper mill, I have always loved referring back to Laurie Colwin’s Low-Tech Person’s Batterie de Cuisine in her book of essays, Home Cooking.)

But what am I cooking in these hot weeks away from home? Well, there’s always pasta, and there’s always Rachel Roddy. Her courgette carbonara is the silky stuff of dreams, where the summer squashes – I like a mixture of green and yellow – are cut into matchsticks and briefly fried in garlicky oil before being tossed through long pasta with beaten egg, loads of parmesan and black pepper. It is a recipe I have come back to more times than I can remember and is particularly good in summer but can, of course, be made out of season, wherever you are. Other favourites, which also put summer produce to work, include her peperonata – red peppers that have yielded to heat and fat to make a sauce as good on pasta as alongside eggs, pulses or meat – and bursting tomato pasta, one of her many iterations on tomato pasta, but which feels particularly fitting as the clammy days roll on.

I tend to build holiday meals around carbs, which is perhaps not very in tune with the protein- and fibre-maxxing movements, but it suits my purposes because first, you can get pasta/rice/potatoes/rolls/ready-made pastry anywhere, and second, everyone in the family (even the noisiest and fussiest members) can get on board somehow. So a tortilla de patatas is always a good shout – either hot alongside salads at supper, or for show-stopping sandwiches to have on the beach. I also love Georgina Hayden’s idea for stuffing baps with fried halloumi and apricot jam – her recipe is for a quick homemade jam, but it also works with shop bought. I love the addition of crunchy salad or even one or two salty crisps.

And then there are all the possibilities of rice. Rachel Roddy comes good again with these stuffed peppers – a little pile of rice alongside soaks up the oily-anchovy-tomato liquor perfectly – and these braised green beans with tomatoes and onions, which are great with rice or bread. I recommend crowning the lot with feta.

Curries can be thorny territory in a holiday rental – you never know which spices the local corner shop will carry, or what the previous guests may have left behind. I find that a holy trinity of cumin seeds, mustard seeds and turmeric goes a long way and, if I’m feeling organised, will try to take them with me (along with Marmite and breakfast tea if I’m going abroad). All that said, curries and stews are in fact brilliant for holiday cooking because they are so adaptable, much like Alison Roman’s viral “The Stew”, which uses easily found ingredients and can be adapted to as you see fit. Unless you are baking, there is rarely a right or wrong in cooking beyond whether you like it or not. I like to treat this trio of Sri Lanka-inspired Meera Sodha recipes – potato and green bean istoo, squash kiri hodi and courgette and white bean curry – as merely an aspiration; all use ingredients that are available in supermarkets, but if any are not, you’ll still be handsomely fed by these failsafe rubrics.

Speaking of adaptability, I leave you with two dishes that I come back to on holiday, year in and year out. Rosie Birkett’s cheeseboard tart, a recipe she originally wrote to use up the remains of Christmas cheese, elevates any cheese. I love to add a handful of chopped jalapeños to cut through the richness. Meanwhile, Thomasina Miers’ raspberry, cardamom and almond cake is eminently versatile; I swapped the rasps for strawbs and the cardamom for black pepper. Both of these recipes call for a springform tin, which I’ll sheepishly add to the essentials list. But at least it’s not an egg poaching pan.

My week in food

Booksmart | A bonus of staying at my parents is their dog-eared collection of cookbooks. From a beloved pile of Rose Elliot – the OG vegetarian cookery writer, responsible for much of the food I was raised on – to Josceline Dimbleby’s series for Sainsbury’s and curiosities such as Cooking With Love by Leslie Sellers, which features seductive numbers including Kidneys Wendy, Arthur Davidson’s Stringy Meat and Carpetbag Pork Chops. Not a love language I speak.

Frankenchickens | I have been gobsmacked by Project Slingshot, a campaign launched this year with the motive of ending factory farming in the UK by 2040. Founded by Veganuary co-founder Matthew Glover, the campaign is using high-impact public transport ads, social media and celebrity endorsement (including Joanna Lumley and Rutger Bregman) to raise awareness of the likes of “Frankenchickens” (hens selectively bred to grow quickly for large breast meat, but which suffer with heart, lung and mobility issues). It’s moving the debate from, “Should people eat meat?” to, “Should animals be raised in industrial conditions?” I’ll be watching closely and hoping consumers respond.

Dante’s peak | I was fortunate to visit Dante, the new restaurant at Claridge’s, last week – an import from New York known for its peerless cocktails. They brought us garibaldis while we umm-ed and ahh-ed over the menu, and I am now borderline obsessed with this two-ingredient drink; 45ml Campari and 120ml fresh orange juice join to make something far greater than the sum of its parts. Zingy and bittersweet, the Dante iteration is particularly good, using “fluffy” orange juice made with a high-speed centrifugal juicer, which may now join the ranks of kitchen “essentials”.

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