Reading a cookbook at breakfast

A breakfast recipe and thoughts on Cafe Cecilia Cook Book

Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This newsletter has a recipe for breakfast inspired by my friends' mother, some initial thoughts on Cafe Cecilia Cook Book, and some eating notes from the past week.

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Eggs muddled with tomato, parsley and greek yogurt

Breakfast for three directly inspired by a dish cooked by my friends’ mum Susie.

Ingredients
3 eggs
1 large ripe tomato, roughly diced
2 tablespoons of fairly finely chopped parsley
2 tablespoons of thick greek yogurt
20g butter
3 slices of toast, buttered

to finish (optional)
30g butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon of harissa (or 1/2 teaspoon of hot smoked paprika)

How to make

Put the toast on.

Melt the butter for the eggs in a frying pan on a low heat, crack in the eggs and break up the yolks and scramble gently in the pan with a fork or whisk. As they are beginning to set, put the tomato and parsley in and mix gently. Then mix in the thick yogurt and allow it to melt through. Season with salt and pepper.

Butter the toast. Divide the eggs between each piece of toast.

If doing the harissa butter on top – Melt the butter in a small frying pan or small saucepan. Add in a tablespoon of olive oil. Add in the harissa or hot smoked paprika and allow it to froth up then tip immediately over the three portions.

We ate this breakfast - my partner, my mother in law, and I, with the baby eating porridge with peanut butter and banana then some toast, sitting on a chair on the floor - and discussed and looked at Cafe Cecilia cookbook, on which my notes below.

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Reading Cafe Cecilia Cook Book today at breakfast

I am so impressed by the cookbook that Max Rocha just published for his restaurant Cafe Cecilia – I’ve been talking about it all morning with my partner and mother in law and thought about it all the way home from London last night. I’ve eaten at the restaurant once, on my own, about two years ago and it was very good. I had mussels stuffed with breadcrumbs, and bread, and a green salad and a plate of red peppers. I had no particular expectations about what the book would be like, though, and no foreknowledge other than it would be a book of Max Rocha’s food from the restaurant. I can be quite irritable about the formal qualities of recipe books when I don’t think they are right but was repeatedly delighted when I looked through this book.

Here are some reasons I think Cafe Cecilia Cook Book is good (with the caveat that I think there is room for many styles of cook book, and this is one that has been done well. I also think a cook book works differently to recipe column - it’s the collection and arrangement of recipes together that creates a sense of narrative in a book.)

Cafe Cecila Cook Book speaks through the recipes and has the confidence to know that recipes contain their own narrative, their own information. Recipes are rich texts that the cook needs to encounter for themselves. It’s so tempting to in some way try to muffle that encounter – to dance around the recipe and frame it too much – but a good recipe often needs little or no explanation and sings strongly in its own voice. Max’s autobiography is present in the dishes themselves - the combination of Irish-inflected home cooking from his family, and stints at different restaurants such as St John and the Rive Cafe, and the culture of his own kitchen and its staff are there on the plates of food – which are compellingly and simply photographed.

It’s quite a slow recipe book – recipes are given real space – which gives me the space to see and appreciate recipes and methods. It’s a book that respects the fact that the way each of us does something in the kitchen is different, and that’s enough – that’s a recipe. Yes, I want to know how to make Rosie’s fried egg and melted cheese roll that seems to me what the staff might cook themselves before a shift. The precise way they melt the cheese, which I have not tried before. Yes I want to know how to boil an egg in a particular way. Yes I want to know the way that they make mackerel pate and sausage and broccoli pasta and rice pudding at Cafe Cecilia – dishes I make all the time, and am always thinking about. I am curious to try a slightly different way. Apart from a few super luxe recipes that you might do for a special occasion (or more realistically, go to a restaurant to eat), there is a real flavour of home cooking in this book.

They have put dressings and custards and that kind of thing at the back, so the recipe pages themselves are not over-engineered or convoluted with too much information. If you need aioli or a custard or whatever as part of a dish, the required quantity is listed in the ingredients, and you are sent to the right page for instructions.

The book is organised - with the exception of a special section on Guinness bread and dishes served with or made with Guinness bread at the beginning that gives the book a strong identity from the off, without being overly ‘themed’ – in a straightforward and useful way.

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Eating Notes

I made pasta with a couple of diced boiled potatoes, boiled cavolo nero (both of these cooked in the same salted boiling water I cooked the pasta), anchovy, garlic, and chilli flakes and made saucy with cooking water. Very good. I always think of Rachel Roddy when I put potato in a pasta dish, as she introduced me to it.

Soup-stew of pumpkin and sweetcorn flavoured with lemongrass, chilli and coconut milk. Served with leftover chicken, rice, and chilli oil, too, added after this photo was taken.

Ursula’s bowl of potato with spring onion greens, butter and a small amount of cheese, which she really really liked.

Dinner tray with baby monitor. Baked sweet potato split with sour cream inside. Then a tin of black beans drained and mixed with: two diced tomatoes, 1/2 diced avocado, 1/2 diced red onion, finely chopped red chilli, fresh coriander, olive oil and salt. Then topped with feta. Very good.