Anna Higham – Food for Thought
As we ascend into midsummer, it is hard not to notice the blushing fruits hankering for a picking or the medley of vegetables and herbs enlivening gardens and hedgerows. The arsenal of fresh produce available to green thumbs in sun-drenched months feels limitless; whether it’s a punnet of ruby-red strawberries that could be blended into a sorbet, blackcurrants for cordial or coral-tinted peaches that could be roasted and served with a cool sorbet, rosemary and olive oil ice cream.
This is only a sample of recipes to expect in The Last Bite, the mouth-wateringly delectable cookbook by the former River Café executive pastry chef Anna Higham. Over the years, Higham has won a number of accolades for her ability to sweeten even the sourest of critics with her irresistible desserts. In her debut cookbook, which Higham wrote to “communicate her love of fruit, of butter, and of sweetness,” the chef commands the utmost reverence for the seasonality of fruit and the desserts that can be whipped up from them.
Higham grew up on the outskirts of Glasgow in what she tells me was a distinctly “unremarkable” town where the highlight was a 24-hour ASDA and a drive-through McDonald’s. But it was during the holiday season, when Higham and her family spent time in France and Andalusia, that she revelled among the technicolour offerings of the local markets. “I have so many fond memories of my mother getting very excited by the fruits at the market,” Higham recalls fondly. “She adored apricots, and as you can imagine, finding them in the late ’90s in a small town in Glasgow was tricky.”
Although her mother wasn’t a “dessert lover” per se, she still made her way through the likes of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, making a rotation of three puddings: lemon tart, apple tart and banoffee pie. Meanwhile, Higham studied Nigella Lawson’s eponymous How to be a Domestic Goddess, making all the chocolate cakes in Lawson’s chocolate hall of fame. However, Higham decided to turn her razor-sharp curiosity and intellect toward studying architecture at Glasgow School of Art. “I was always baking,” says Higham, “but I also did well at school and did well in exams, so there was a lot of expectation for me to go to University.”
Yet, the long days spent in the lecture hall did little to quell her appetite for cooking, and during her studies, she began to take up part-time shifts in a cheesemonger, delicatessen and bakery. But what began as a side hustle soon morphed into a genuine ambition, and Higham decided to drop out of university and pursue being a chef. “It was one of those things that you discover something you really can do, and it feels very natural to you that I knew I had to do it”, she says.
Higham spent the first three years of her pastry career working in the Gordon Ramsay Group, at Bread Street Kitchen and then at Pétrus in London before moving to New York to work at Gramercy Tavern. When she arrived back in London, Higham did a trial at the Michelin-star restaurant Lyle’s in Shoreditch, where, to the best of her abilities, she made a pear pudding with ice cream and a gingery crumb. “I knew that this is where I wanted to be,” she tells me, “they very much had an ingredient-led approach like they had at Gramercy Tavern, a sort of we have these beautiful pears, so let’s find the best way to show them off.”
For almost half a decade, Higham oversaw the pastry and bread at the restaurant, conjuring up micro-seasonal desserts defined by simplicity and flavour. In 2019, she took on the role of group head of pastry as Lyle’s expanded to open Flor, a bakery and wine bar in Borough market. Flor would go on to win London restaurant of the year in 2019, Higham would win the baking category at the Young British Foodie awards in 2019, and also Code’s Hospitality 100 most influential women in 2020 as a result of her time spent at the bakery.
It was also during her award-winning time at Lyle’s and Flor that Anna Higham constructed two of her signature desserts: “The lardy bun at Flor will also always have a special place in my heart,” she says, “I remember the founders asking me what our “cronut” was going to be, and the lardy bun for me spoke about who we were as a bakery as we were able to use pork fat and grain from a single farm.”
“At Lyle’s, I made a caramelised ice cream with a well in the middle that I filled up with cold espresso. I then made a meringue using egg white powder and replaced the water content with espresso. I piped that on and blowtorched it so it would taste like marshmallows. I still worry I’ll never make anything as good as that.”
Higham left Lyle’s and Flor to take up the position of executive pastry chef at the lauded River Café in 2020. “Before me, they never had a dedicated pastry team, and it was only the chefs doing the pastry and dolce sections,” she says.
“There are now six people in the dolce team, but the thing I am most proud of is the change in ingredients. River Café is proud of its provenance but slightly slipped in the pastry kitchen due to lack of time. But now we work with a great sustainable nut supplier, we get flour from a great mill in northern Italy which uses a blend of local heritage varieties, and we use original beans to create a bespoke blend of chocolate for the nemesis — the River Café’s most famous dish.”
It was also during her time working in the acclaimed kitchens of Lyle’s, Flor and the River Café that Higham began to hatch ideas for a cookbook of her own. Inspired by American cookbooks such as Chez Panisse Café and Chez Panisse Fruit by Alice Walters, Higham became frustrated that all of the recipes were in the wrong measurements and used produce she couldn’t access. “While working in hyper-British restaurants, I always wished that I had a reference that explained how to construct a pudding through using seasonal ingredients, from gooseberries to quinces to rhubarb,” she says.
After some encouragement from fellow sweet-connoisseur Raveneet Gill, Higham began to pile together the pages for a book where she would try and treat desserts as if it were a design brief (a nod to her former days as an architect). “If you have the parameters of seasonality,” Higham explains, “you have a licence to be more creative.”
Structured around the seasons, The Last Bite includes the tutorial-like principles of preparing the fruit or ingredient, how to season it, and then how to construct a dessert around it. The cover of The Last Bite, an oil painting by Erika Lee Sears, is as inviting as the desserts within. The recipes within the book are largely from Higham’s time at Lyle’s and at Flor, with more than 150 recipes for bakes, tarts, jams, mousses, meringues, ice creams and more than 40 plated seasonal desserts, from a light almond and fig cake to be made in Autumn, to a rich elderflower custard to herald in Spring to a goat’s cheese and cherry tart for Summer.
Higham hopes that readers will use The Last Bite to understand how to craft a dessert, pudding, or ice cream and then pair it with fruit at the peak of its season. “I really hope The Last Bite makes people want to get cooking,” says Higham, “that it takes the fear out of desserts and inspires people to get into the kitchen.”
For her last ever supper, Anna Higham picks “all the antipasti from the River Café menu” for her starter. For her main course, the “Diana Henry recipe for roast chicken roasted in milk with bay and garlic and for pudding, “rice pudding with a scoop of rhubarb sorbet” and “a dry gin martini” to drink.
Anna Higham’s recipe for a raspberry ice cream sandwich:
For the raspberry jam (makes 850g (1lb 14oz)
Ingredients
500g (1 generous lb) raspberries 300g (1$ cups) caster (superfine) sugar
50ml (¼ cup) lemon juice
Method
Combine the ingredients in a large heavy-based saucepan and mix well. Leave to macerate for about 30 minutes. The sugar will start to dissolve, shortening the cooking time and giving you a fresher-tasting jam.
Place the pan over a high heat and bring to a boil, then stir occasionally as it cooks. I find raspberry jam is particularly prone to spitting everywhere so be careful when you stir it. Cook the jam to 108°C (226°F). You can also test the setting point by using the wrinkle test.
Place a small plate in the freezer when you start to cook the jam. To test, drop a small amount of jam onto the frozen plate.
It should immediately thicken and set and the surface should wrinkle when pushed with your finger. If it is still quite liquid, cook the jam for another 3–5 minutes before testing again.
Pour into a container and store in the fridge.
For the raspberry ice-cream sandwich (makes one)
Ingredients
2 vanilla and hazelnut cookies (p208)
1 x 8cm (3in) disc raspberry semifreddo (p31)
2 tsp raspberry jam
Method
Make the raspberry semifreddo according to the recipe (p31). Pour the mixture into a shallow tray, rather than a loaf tin, to a depth of around 4cm(1¾in).
Bake the cookies and leave them to cool. Once the semifreddo is completely frozen, use an 8cm (3in) round cutter to quickly stamp out discs. Dip the cutter into warm water between each use to get a clean, neat finish. Return the discs of semifreddo to the freezer to firm up.
Any leftovers can be packed into a tub and stored in the freezer to enjoy another time. Match your cookies into evenly-sized pairs then spread the underside of each one with a thin layer of raspberry jam.
Once the semifreddo is firm again, sandwich a disc between each pair of cookies and gently press together to make sure it is well sealed.
The semifreddo and cookie dough will last well in the freezer for up to 2 weeks but it is best to construct the sandwiches shortly before you eat them.