A Girl and Her Pig: Recipes and Stories

By April Bloomfield and JJ Goode

"April, April, April—what a chef! Delicious, brilliant, inspiring. . . . Now, with the publication of A Girl and Her Pig, you can sample her remarkable food in your own kitchen."—Fergus Henderson

April Bloomfield, the critically acclaimed chef behind the smash hit New York restaurants The Spotted Pig, The Breslin, and the John Dory, offers incomparable recipes and fascinating stories in this one-of-a-kind cookbook and memoir that celebrates all things pork and more. 
In A Girl and Her Pig, April Bloomfield takes home cooks on an intimate tour of the food that has made her a star. Thoughtful, voice-driven recipes go behind the scenes of Bloomfield's lauded restaurants and into her own home kitchen, where her attention to detail and reverence for honest ingredients result in unforgettable dishes that reflect her love for the tactile pleasures of cooking and eating. Bloomfield's innovative yet refreshingly straightforward recipes, which pair her English roots with a deeply Italian influence, offer an unfailingly modern and fresh sensibility and showcase her bold flavors, sensitive handling of seasonal produce, and nose-to-tail ethos. A cookbook as delightful and lacking in pretention as Bloomfield herself, A Girl and Her Pig combines exquisite food with charming narratives on Bloomfield's journey from working-class England to the apex of the culinary world, along with loving portraits of the people who have guided her along the way.
A Girl and Her Pig is a carnivore's delight, a gift from one of the food industry's hottest chefs—in the upper echelon alongside Mario Batali, David Chang, and the legendary Fergus Henderson—featuring beautiful illustrations and photographs, and refreshingly unpretentious, remarkably scrumptious recipes for everything from re-imagined British pub favorites such as Beef and Bayley Hazen Pie to Whole Suckling Pig.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9780062224248

April Bloomfield

April Bloomfield is the executive chef and co-owner of the Michelin- starred The Spotted Pig, The Breslin, The John Dory, Tosca, and Salvation Taco restaurants. She won the 2014 James Beard Award for Best Chef in New York and was nominated for an Emmy for cohosting the second season of the PBS show Mind of a Chef. A native of Birmingham, England, she lives in New York City.

Book preview

PANCAKES WITH BACON AND CHILI

Shrove Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday. In Britain, we also call it Pancake Day. Traditionally, many families, anticipating the upcoming fast, took Shrove Tuesday as their last opportunity to cook with lovely things like eggs and sugar and butter. Although my family didn’t fast, my mom always made these crepe-like pancakes come Shrove Tuesday. They’re quite thin and crisp at the edges. You’ve got to flip them delicately, with a deft flick of your wrist. My mom once tossed one so high that it stuck to the ceiling.

The pancakes take some time at the stove, but the process is satisfying—you’ll find yourself getting better at flipping with each one. By the end, you’ll have quite a stack. My mom used to serve them sprinkled with sugar and Jif lemon juice from a squeeze bottle shaped like the fruit. I prefer to eat mine drizzled with maple syrup (especially the bourbony kind from Blis Gourmet) and sprinkled with crumbled chili, with some salty, floppy bacon on the side. I love to stack them up and cut them into wedges to serve them, so you are eating twenty-four layers in each bite.

serves 4 (makes 24 pancakes)

FOR THE BATTER

½ pound (1¾ cups) all-purpose flour

Kosher salt

4 large eggs

1¾ cups whole milk

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

FOR THE PANCAKES

About 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted,

plus 1 tablespoon or so butter for finishing

Extra virgin olive oil

12 slices bacon

Maple syrup

Dried pequin chilies or red pepper flakes

Make the batter: Sift the flour into a large mixing bowl and stir in 2 pinches of salt. Make a well in the center of the flour and crack the eggs into it, then slowly but steadily whisk in the milk and ¾ cup water (start whisking from the center, and you won’t get lumps) until you have a smooth, liquidy batter. Whisk in the 4 tablespoons of melted butter.

Make the pancakes: Heat an 8-inch nonstick pan over high heat for 2 minutes, so it gets nice and hot. Take the pan off the heat and spoon in a little melted butter, a little less than a teaspoon, swirling it around the pan. Then, still off the heat, pour in just enough batter to coat the pan in a thin, almost translucent layer—a generous 2 tablespoons—quickly swirling to disperse the batter evenly (a few bare spots are okay). Return the pan to the heat and cook the pancake, without messing with it, just until the edges begin to brown and lift away from the pan, about 30 seconds. Firmly but carefully shake the pan and, with a deft flick of your wrist, flip the pancake. (You can also use a spatula to lift an edge of the pancake and flip it with your fingers.) Cook it on the second side for 30 seconds, or until both sides are splotched with light golden brown. Transfer it to a plate. Continue cooking the pancakes, stirring the batter and adding a scant teaspoon of the melted butter to the pan between each one, and stacking the pancakes on the plate as you go. They’ll keep each other warm until you finish, though it helps to keep the plate in a warm oven.

Pour a few glugs of olive oil into a large pan and set it over high heat. Once the oil begins to smoke, add 4 slices of the bacon. After a minute or so, add the rest (or work in batches to avoid crowding the pan). Cook until the slices are slightly crispy and brown at the edges but still a bit floppy, 3 to 4 minutes. Transfer the bacon to paper towels to drain.

Drizzle the pancake stack with maple syrup, top with a knob of butter, broken up into little pieces, and crumble on as many chilies as you’d like. Serve cut into wedges, with the bacon on the side.

My mom isn’t good at cooking much, but she makes the best fried egg sandwich. She gets the egg really crispy and golden around the edges, and now that’s how I cook mine. The key is to get your pan and oil nice and hot, so that when the egg hits the hot fat, it sizzles and spits. I sprinkle the setting white and gleaming yolk with Maldon salt, crushed between my fingers. I like my eggs spicy, so they also get some crumbled pequin chili. I can’t stand snotty whites—there’s nothing worse—so I’ll often cover the pan for a few seconds as the egg fries, or baste it with hot fat.

I love a fried egg on toasted crusty bread, perhaps with bacon that’s a little crisp but still floppy (I find that when bacon or pancetta is very crispy, you can’t taste the pork). And I love a fried egg on bubble and squeak, the yolk spilling over the top with a poke from your fork.

A lot of people like to eat two eggs at a sitting. I like to eat one. One is perfect.

SQUASH AND PANCETTA TOASTS WITH FRIED EGGS

Right before The Pig opened, I was working eighteen hours a day with my sous-chef and a line cook, trying to get everything ready. For a week, we operated on four hours of sleep a night and practically nothing to eat. We were so busy we didn’t notice. This is what I cooked for our first real meal, which I guess you’d call breakfast. There’s sweetness from the squash, heat from the chili, sweet-and-salty from the pancetta, and creamy relief from the egg. I like to scoop a big hunk of squash, pop it onto the toast, and smoosh it down, leaving some smooth and some with a little