Tulipomania was one of those bizarre feasts of crazy financial speculation that we love to refer back to when some sector of the economy, like house prices (especially London ones), starts to overheat and sets off upward. There is no more colourful example of the working of unfettered market forces by which fortunes were made […]

For many years I have used a recipe for chocolate cake  that I found in Jane Cable-Alexander’s book Giving a Children’s Party (Pelham  Books, 1980). During that time I’ve changed the ingredients quite a bit, cutting out the salt entirely, substituting butter for margarine, using 3 eggs instead of 2 and, having experimented with different flours, […]