Cookery Schools

Learning to cook in South Oxfordshire

If the quality of the wining and dining experience in South Oxfordshire encourages you to increase your own skills, then you can enrol at one of the cookery schools in the area.

Belinda Hill jokes that she was born "with a wooden spoon in her hand" and after gaining a diploma in professional cookery she set up Stirring Stuff cookery school at Badgemore, near Henley.

Henley Festival patron Raymond Blanc has a cookery school attached to his restaurant at Great Milton and another festival patron, Mike Robinson, operates a school just outside South Oxfordshire at the Pot Kiln in Yattendon.

Lotte Duncan bases her cookery school at Thame, where viewers of her popular tv programmes can take courses covering cookery, cheese making and wine tasting among other things. Lotte also organises demonstration days where English country food is cooked in a stress-free environment. Participants can be hands on or hands free according to their preference.

Lotte is aided by experts such as garden expert Tony Buckland, who writes a regular column about vegetables for Kitchen Garden magazine and Amateur Gardening.

Master of Wine Marcia Waters can advise on what to drink with which foods and Yorkshire-born Paul Young has the fabulous job of being a chocolatier and patissiere. He is another regular contributor to television programmes, including BBC2's Food and Drink.

Numbers at Lotte's school are limited to six at a time and include lunch in her cosy dining room in winter and outdoors in her garden in summer. The garden is well worth a look while you are there and is open to the public every year in order to raise money for charity.

When you leave one of her lessons you will be given a pack of recipes and foodie map of Thame so that you can shop for your own ingredients.