Middleton shares tips in debut food column

A reader browses through Middleton’s column in the Waitrose supermarket’s magazine at a store in London.

Guardian News and Media/London

Should there be any lingering doubts as to Waitrose’s magazine’s commitment to fuelling its readers’ most aspirational and farthest-flung fantasies - the April issue coquettishly promises to reveal “India’s Delia, Sweden’s Nigella and Thailand’s Gordon” - the debut musings of its newest columnist, Pippa Middleton, ought to lay them blissfully to rest.

In her first article for Waitrose Kitchen, starkly entitled Pippa’s Friday Night Feasts, the 29-year-old veteran of the party-planning scene and sister of the Duchess of Cambridge offers her tips on how to engineer a “relaxed, Asian-themed night in with friends”.

Not only does she provide recipes, from hoisin duck rolls to ginger mojitos and tangerine and sake jellies with coconut cream, she also offers the odd aesthetic suggestion.

Bright flowers can serve to “soften angular Asian-style tableware”, while judicious deployment of paper lanterns, fairy lights or floating candles can “set the mood”.

In a brisk and, at times, moving, exhortation to the kind of stick-in-the-mud whose idea of a perfect Friday night is six pints and a curry or a frozen pizza in front of a box-set, Pippa pleads for people to embrace the beginning of the weekend.

“Friday night,” writes the author of Celebrate, the renowned one-stop guide to entertaining, “is the perfect time to cook. “Regardless of how tired I might be, the moment Friday lunchtime arrives I get that contagious pre-weekend excitement. Even if I’m feeling exhausted and don’t feel like doing anything but watching telly, I can put off being tired till Saturday.”

After all, Friday with its liberating “promise of the weekend” and safe distance from Sunday’s “pre-Monday melancholy” is a bit special.

To that end, Pippa recommends going the extra mile: to accompany her oriental twist on the famous Cuban cocktail, she suggests homemade sushi rolls.

“The first time I made sushi was at Edinburgh university,” she writes.