A spring in our step

Unfitted Kitchen goes live!

At last it is happening. From May 23 you can see and feel our brand new unfitted kitchen collection in real life.

The place to go is Kitchens Etc in the sweet little village of North Creake near Burnham Market in Norfolk. Keep up, London! And thank you Mick Murphy and Natalie Peters for taking this exciting step alongside Johnny Grey Studios.

Please contact Natalie at Kitchens Etc (natalie@kitchens-etc.co.uk) or me, Johnny, for further information. You can also go to www.unfitted-kitchen.com and have a look at our new website.

Calling designers and architects

You might like to know that we are offering a new service.

Interior designers and architects can team up with us to create original custom-made kitchens. The process is streamlined, with integrated CNC manufacturing techniques brought together with traditional handcrafting.

Our method modernises bespoke kitchen design and manufacture by lowering the cost of some of the components, allowing for luxury craftsmanship and finishes.

Please get in touch directly for more details and remember to opt in if you would like to hear from us again. 

South Downs food and ideas festival

Plans for the festival at Stansted Park are coming along nicely. We are looking at beautiful marquees, talking to chefs, cheese makers, bakers, butchers, fruit growers and wine makers.

A key aspect of the festival will be its talks. These are ambitious in scope and will really get us all thinking about the issues around the food we eat. 

Many artisanal food makers have already signed up. We are widening the categories to all things kitchen including furniture, utensils, ceramics, home crafted pieces and books. Let us know if you would like to exhibit or be put on the emailer list. Speakers for the book side of the festival will be announced soon.

Cool and colourful 4G kitchen

Installer Show
June 25 – 27, 2024
NEC Birmingham

My sessions: 

The culture of the kitchen
26 June 
4:15 PM - 5:00 PM

The future of kitchen design
27 June 
12:30 PM - 1:15 PM
Kitchen of the Future

There’s a chance coming up to see JGS’s four generational kitchen research project, an innovative, inclusive, real kitchen created in partnership with Newcastle University. Following its display in the Helix Building in Newcastle, it is now being reassembled at the Installer Show in Birmingham, a trade show but one of general interest to anyone with a building project in mind. I will be doing talks on the stand as well as joining the busy seminar programme, including one on the culture of the kitchen. The practical side of the kitchen and home building industry has a great champion in this show at Birmingham’s NEC. There is no entry charge. 

Julia, tasty TV series full of surprises

Becca and I have a new date with the telly on these shortening evenings. It’s a biopic series now in its second season about legendary American cookery writer Julia Child, streaming on Sky Atlantic/Now TV.

We’re loving Sarah Lancashire as Child, her mix of haughty command and uncertainty. It’s a sensitive portrayal of a marriage and gripping story of conviction in the face of sexist cultural snobbery. In the early 1960s, public television took itself extremely seriously and the idea (Child’s) of using the new medium to teach people to cook met with condescending bafflement from programme makers. Little did they know.

There are two kitchens in the show, in the Childs’ house and on set. Both are large spaces, built to accommodate serious cooking. The ‘real’ kitchen has ranks of saucepans and other implements on full display, including a very comprehensive collection of knives mounted horizontally on a green painted wall. There’s a gas range, but much of the action happens at the big farmhouse-type table. As it should. The set kitchen has to be altered to work properly for Child’s height, an ergonomic point I personally echo. 
 

Back in Blighty

English food has long been eclipsed by European food, particularly Mediterranean. I have an interest now in exploring what British food was, what happened to it and why and how finally we can enjoy its traditions. Helpful in this is Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England (1954).

Hartley came to study food through her career as a historian and she brings a sweeping perspective from the Middle Ages to the mid twentieth century. She combines this with journalistic sharpness, a sense of humour, personal anecdotes and a great many regional recipes. One I tried recently turned out wonderfully well. It comes from Leicestershire and uses pork and apples together with sugar, sealed in the oven with potato or pastry.

Here it is:

• Take a deep dish, lay a layer of pork chopped very small at the bottom.
• Cover with a layer of apples cut rather roughly and a dust of sugar. Shred a small onion finely over this and a dust of pepper.
• Cover with a thin layer of pork and continue these layers until the dish is full, letting the top layer be pork.
• Press it down firmly and then fill up with a very little stock, barely enough to moisten it.
• Cover with a thick potato crust and bake slowly, browning nicely.
• Some add a leaf of sage minced over the pork layers but don’t put in too much.