With its taught, glossy skin and regal, deep purple colour, this is surely one of the most beautiful vegetables around.  (Although, to be pedantic, it's a fruit, which puts it in competition with figs...)

It is a member of the Nightshade family, as in Deadly, along with potatoes tomatoes, peppers, chillies and tobacco.  It is the only major vegetable in the Nightshade family to come from the Old World.  (The tomato was slow to catch on in Europe when it was introduced from South America due to its resemblance to Deadly Nightshade.)

Miso is Japanese fermented soybean paste.  It looks like peanut butter and smells bad.  But don't let this put you off.  It adds an intense and savoury depth and complexity to many dishes.  

It is high in 'umami' - the fifth (and best) basic taste, after sweetness, saltiness, bitterness and sourness.  Other umami-rich foods are Parmesan, soy sauce, fish sauce, mushrooms, tomatoes and some meats.  They are all high in tasty glutamates (as in monosodium glutamate, which occurs naturally in seaweed and was isolated and developed as a food additive back in 1907).

It's good for you too, as it's very tasty, yet low in calories, and also full of protein, beneficial bacteria and B vitamins.

Black Cod is not related to the true Cod; it's from another family of fish altogether.  It's also called Sablefish and Butterfish, or rather Sablefish and Butterfish are also called Black Cod.  Fish are notoriously mislabelled, or sold by more than one name - it's very confusing.

You could use fat fillets of any buttery, flaky white fish instead, maybe Halibut, Haddock, Bass or Pacific Cod.  Apparently Nigella uses Salmon.

Don't use Atlantic Cod as there aren't many left.

The real Black Cod comes from very cold waters in the Southern hemisphere.  It can live in such cold places because its blood contains a natural antifreeze.  Special antifreeze proteins cling to little ice crystals in the blood and prevent them growing and killing the fish.  

We all know that bees make honey from nectar.  But did you know that they ingest and regurgitate the nectar several times before laying it in the honeycomb?  Or that they use their little wings to fan the honeycomb to evaporate enough moisture from the honey so that it cannot ferment?  

Honey has so much sugar and so little moisture that you can keep it your whole life without it going off.  The sugar kills most bacteria and the lack of moisture prevents natural yeasts from reproducing.  Someone once found a 2000-year-old pot of honey in an Egyptian tomb and said it tasted great.