The Secret of Cooking is packed with solutions for how to make life in the kitchen work better for you, whether you are cooking for yourself or for a crowd. Bee shows you how to get a meal on the table when you’re tired and stretched for time, how to season properly, cook onions (or not) and what equipment really helps. The 140 recipes are doable and delicious, filled with ideas for cooking ahead or cooking alone and the kind of unfussy food that makes everyday life taste better.

Do you wish you could cook more, but don’t know where to start? Bee Wilson has spent years collecting cooking “secrets”: ways of speeding cooking up or slowing it down, strategies for days when you are stretched for time, and other ideas for when you can luxuriate in kitchen therapy. Bee holds out a hand to anyone who wants doable, delicious recipes, the kind of unfussy food that makes every day taste better: quick feasts from a can of beans; fast, medium, and slow ragus; and seven ways to cook a carrot. Alongside thoughts on how to cook when you’re alone, with children, or just plain tired, Bee offers 140 recipes including: the simplest chicken stew even the pickiest of eaters (aka children) will love Zucchini and Herb Fritters, a Grated Tomato and Butter Pasta Sauce (with or without shrimp), and other ways of making your box grater work for you salads to savor, like a tuna salad with anchovy dressing leisurely projects like an Aromatic All-Purpose Curry Powder and quicker food for friends (try Bulgar and Eggplant Pilaf with pistachio and lemon) the loveliest red curry sauce you can make in your instant pot universal desserts, or those gluten-free and dairy-free sweets that you can serve no matter who comes over, like a Vegan Pear, Lemon, and Ginger Cake With advice on seasoning, cleaning up, and choosing the best equipment, Wilson reimagines modern cooking and brings the spark back into everyday meals. As Bee says, “There’s still magic in the kitchen, if you know where to look.” Shall we cook?

Fortnum & Mason Food Book of the Year 2020 'Addresses the paradox of our age: why as we become progressively wealthier, our diets become ever poorer . . . the villains of the piece are familiar and plentiful and Wilson lays them bare' The Times 'I always walk away from her writing feeling more hopeful than despondent, resolved to do better for myself, my family and the planet' Chris Ying A riveting exploration of the hidden forces behind what we eat, The Way We Eat Now explains how modern food has transformed our lives and our world. To re-establish eating as something that gives us both joy and health, we need to find out where we are right now, how we got here and where we're going.

Fortnum & Mason Food Book of the Year 2016 We are not born knowing what to eat; we each have to figure it out for ourselves. From childhood onwards, we learn how big a portion is and how sweet is too sweet. The way we learn to eat holds the key to why food has gone so disastrously wrong for so many people. But how does this happen? And can we ever change our food habits for the better? An exploration of the extraordinary and surprising origins of our taste and eating habits, in First Bite award-winning food writer Bee Wilson explains how we can change our palates to lead healthier, happier lives.

Award-winning food writer Bee Wilson's secret history of kitchens, showing how new technologies - from the fork to the microwave and beyond - have fundamentally shaped how and what we eat. Since prehistory, humans have braved sharp knives, fire, and grindstones to transform raw ingredients into something delicious -- or at least edible. But these tools have also transformed how we consume, and how we think about, our food. In Consider the Fork, award-winning food writer Bee Wilson takes readers on a wonderful and witty tour of the evolution of cooking around the world, revealing the hidden history of objects we often take for granted. Technology in the kitchen does not just mean the Pacojets and sous-vide machines of the modern kitchen, but also the humbler tools of everyday cooking and eating: a wooden spoon and a skillet, chopsticks and forks. Blending history, science, and personal anecdotes, Wilson reveals how our culinary tools and tricks came to be and how their influence has shaped food culture today. The story of how we have tamed fire and ice and wielded whisks, spoons, and graters, all for the sake of putting food in our mouths, Consider the Fork is truly a book to savor.

Supper for one? Whether you're a career girl, eccentric bedsitter or wild bachelor, this vintage 1950s cookery gem is the essential guide to dining in solitude (with a new foreword by Bee Wilson).

The Career Woman (who buys a chicken as a treat)
The Bedsitter (who experiments with newfangled gadgets)
The Old Lady (who feeds her menagerie of pets)
The Schoolboy Moocher (who makes toffee and wallows in grapes)
The Bachelor (who learns to stockpile food)

Meet the experts in cooking alone . . .

'Every servantless man and woman should read her.' Truth

Supper for one? Cooking Alone (1954) is a delicious miniature compendium of tales inspired by a cast of eccentric solitary characters. Brimming with entertaining anecdotes, recipes (rabbit with aubergine and prunes, anyone?) and top tips (ever wondered how to store ice cream in a bedsit?), Kathleen Le Riche is a witty, charming guide to the single life. Reissued with a new foreword by Bee Wilson, this vintage delight is a hymn to the pleasures of dining solo.

Bee Wilson is the food writer and historian who writes as the 'Kitchen Thinker' in the Sunday Telegraph, and is the author of Swindled!. Her charming and original new book, Consider the Fork, explores how the implements we use in the kitchen have shaped the way we cook and live. This is the story of how we have tamed fire and ice, wielded whisks, spoons, graters, mashers, pestles and mortars, all in the name of feeding ourselves. Bee Wilson takes us on an enchanting culinary journey through the incredible creations, inventions and obsessions that have shaped how and what we cook. From huge Tudor open fires to sous-vide machines, the birth of the fork to Roman gadgets, Consider the Fork is the previously unsung history of our kitchens. Bee Wilson writes a weekly food column, 'The Kitchen Thinker' in The Sunday Telegraph, for which she has three times been named the Guild of Food Writers Food Journalist of the Year. Her previous books include The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us and Swindled!. Before she became a food writer, she was a Research Fellow in History at St John's College, Cambridge. She has also been a semi-finalist on Masterchef. Her favourite kitchen implement is currently the potato ricer. 'A cracking good read, as enjoyable as it is enlightening' Raymond Blanc, Chef-Patron 'Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons' 'Wonderful ... Witty, scholarly, utterly absorbing and fired by infectious curiosity' Lucy Lethbridge, Observer '[A] delightfully informative history of cooking and eating from the prehistoric discovery of fire to twenty-first-century high-tech, low-temp soud-vide-style cookery' ELLE magazine 'A graceful study' Steven Poole, Guardian

Ever since men first hunted for honeycomb in rocks and daubed pictures of it on cave walls, the honeybee has been seen as one of the wonders of nature: social, industrious, beautiful, terrifying. No other creature has inspired in humans an identification so passionate, persistent, or fantastical.
"The Hive "recounts the astonishing tale of all the weird and wonderful things that humans believed about bees and their "society" over the ages. It ranges from the honey delta of ancient Egypt to the Tupelo forests of modern Florida, taking in a cast of characters including Alexander the Great and Napoleon, Sherlock Holmes and Muhammed Ali.
The history of humans and honeybees is also a history of ideas, taking us through the evolution of science, religion, and politics, and a social history that explores the bee's impact on food and human ritual.
In this beautifully illustrated book, Bee Wilson shows how humans will always view the hive as a miniature universe with order and purpose, and look to it to make sense of their own.

'Highly persuasive ... a well-organised and solid dossier that alerts us to legalised chemical trickery.'Joanna Blythman, The Spectator 'A bombshell book' Daily Mail 'Eye-opening and important . . . a book full of righteous anger' Bee Wilson, from her Foreword Did you know that bacon, ham, hot dogs and salami are classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as 'category 1 carcinogens'? Would you eat them if you knew they caused bowel cancer? Following ten years of detailed investigation, documentary film-maker Guillaume Coudray presents a powerful examination of the use of nitro-additives in meat. As he reveals, most mass-produced processed meats, and now even many 'artisanal' products, contain chemicals that react with meat to form cancer-causing compounds. He tells the full story of how, since the 1970s, the meat-processing industry has denied the health risks because these additives make curing cheaper and quicker, extending shelf life and giving meat a pleasing pink colour. These additives are, in fact, unnecessary. Parma ham has not contained them for nearly 30 years - and indeed all traditional cured meats were once produced without nitrate and nitrite. Progressive producers are now increasingly following that example.? Who Poisoned Your Bacon? - featuring a foreword by acclaimed food writer Bee Wilson - is the authoritative, gripping and scandalous story of big business flying in the face of scientific health warnings. It allows you to evaluate the risks, and carries a message of hope that things can change.

Bad food has a history. "Swindled" tells it. Through a fascinating mixture of cultural and scientific history, food politics, and culinary detective work, Bee Wilson uncovers the many ways swindlers have cheapened, falsified, and even poisoned our food throughout history. In the hands of people and corporations who have prized profits above the health of consumers, food and drink have been tampered with in often horrifying ways--padded, diluted, contaminated, substituted, mislabeled, misnamed, or otherwise faked. "Swindled" gives a panoramic view of this history, from the leaded wine of the ancient Romans to today's food frauds--such as fake organics and the scandal of Chinese babies being fed bogus milk powder.

Wilson pays special attention to nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and England and their roles in developing both industrial-scale food adulteration and the scientific ability to combat it. As "Swindled" reveals, modern science has both helped and hindered food fraudsters--increasing the sophistication of scams but also the means to detect them. The big breakthrough came in Victorian England when a scientist first put food under the microscope and found that much of what was sold as "genuine coffee" was anything but--and that you couldn't buy pure mustard in all of London.

Arguing that industrialization, laissez-faire politics, and globalization have all hurt the quality of food, but also that food swindlers have always been helped by consumer ignorance, "Swindled" ultimately calls for both governments and individuals to be more vigilant. In fact, Wilson suggests, one of our best protections is simply to reeducate ourselves about the joys of food and cooking.

Ever since men first hunted for honeycomb in rocks and daubed pictures of it on cave walls, the honeybee has been seen as one of the wonders of nature: social, industrious, beautiful, terrifying. No other creature has inspired in humans an identification so passionate, persistent or fantastical. In this gem of a book, award-winning writer Bee Wilson explores the magical world of the honeybee. From the hive to honey, from beekeepers to honeymooners, via Aristotle, Shakespeare, Napoleon and Sherlock Holmes, here is a book that delights and surprises at every turn. And there is even a recipe or two.