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Navy Bean Soup – from The Savoy Kitchen
Serves 4
Drain the beans and put them in a large heavy pot with all the other ingredients. Cover with 2 litres of cold water and bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 3 hours. The beans should be very soft and the soup thick. Remove the ham bones from the soup with a slotted spoon.
Remove about 3 cupfuls of whole beans (don’t worry if you pick up a few bits of sausage etc as well) and mash them roughly in a bowl with a potato masher before returning to the pot.
Stir the soup well before serving (with ketchup or not).
Buy The Savoy Kitchen – A Family History of Cajun Food by Sarah Savoy here.
The Award-Winning Savoy Kitchen!
We were really excited to hear that Sarah Savoy’s The Savoy Kitchen – A Family History of Cajun Food is the UK winner of ‘Best US Cuisine Book’ at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2013 – a fantastic Christmas present, and incredibly well deserved.
The book will now go on to compete for ‘Best in the World’ at the Beijing Cookbook Fair in May but for now, best in the UK will do just fine. The Savoy Kitchen is the 3rd Kitchen Press title to get a Gourmand accolade so congrats and thanks also to the team that makes it all possible.
The Gourmand Cookbook Awards were founded in 1995 by Edouard Cointreau to ‘reward and honour those who cook with words’ and this year featured entries from 187 countries. They’ve become a major fixture in the food & drink calendar so it’s a real privilege to be on their awards list. Next stop Beijing…
A Thanksgiving Gift: Sarah Savoy’s Sweet Potato Cheesecake!
Here’s a Thanksgiving gift for y’all from the Queen of White Trash Cajun herself: it’s Sarah Savoy’s Sweet Potato Cheesecake!
For the crust:
Put the crackers in a food processor and blitz until you have crumbs. Stir in the butter, and press this mix into the bottom of a 23cm springform pan. Put it in the fridge to chill.
For the cheesecake:
Preheat oven to 200°C (390°F). Put the sweet potatoes on a baking tray, and bake for 45-60 minutes until very tender and soft. Peel the sweet potatoes and mash thoroughly.
Increase the oven temperature to 230°C (450°F).
Beat the cream cheese until soft with a hand mixer (ouch) or a stand mixer. Add the sugar and salt and mix well, then stir in the eggs one by one. Add the crème fraîche (or sour cream), flour, vanilla seeds, spices and mashed sweet potato and mix until just combined (don’t overmix or you’ll have a sloppy, gloppy mess).
Pour the batter over a wooden spoon over the crumb crust (so as not to disturb the crumbs), and put the cheesecake in the oven. You might want to put it on a foil-lined baking sheet just in case. Bake for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 120°C (250°F) and cook for an hour more.
Now for the most important part. Turn off the oven but do NOT open it. Leave the cake in the oven for 2 hours and put a note on the oven warning people not to open it.
Once the 2 hours are up, chill the cake in the fridge for at least an hour before serving.
Check out more of Sarah’s recipes in The Savoy Kitchen – A Family History of Cajun Food.