London Review of Cookbooks

Rose Petal Jam: Recipes and Stories From A Summer In Poland by Beata Zatorska and Simon Target

2011-09-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

Barszcz, bigos, pierogi, żurek, smalek, kielbasa and even flaki on occasion: I am a big fan of Polish food. My partner's Mum is Polish and coming from a small family, I was initially a bit intimidated by the Polish Easter and Christmas meals with so many cousins, uncles, aunts and headed up by his indomitable Babcia and charming Dziadzio. But with a never-quite-empty glass of Zubrowka and wrapped in a warm welcome I soon became part of the family and begun to take these celebratory gatherings in my stride. And oh, the food. The beetroot! I fell in love with beetroot in Hanwell, simply mashed, or my favourite, creamy beetroot with nuts. Halved hard-boiled eggs at Easter and pierniki at Christmas, and bowls of krówki and chocolate coated plums from Krakow at any time, Polish food is all about sharing what you have and no-one ever being hungry. Possibly ever again.

We spent last New Year with Matt's family in Poland, at the hostel his Mum built and now runs in the grounds of her grandparents' family home and the celebrations inevitably involved a lot of food. I don't think I've ever seen as much food laid out, repeatedly, over the course of one evening. And then the bigos and żurek came out after midnight, and again at breakfast as the best hangover cure known to mankind.

Hot pierogi, potato, blood sausage, ribs, roast pork

The cold plates: canapes, eggs, cheeses and bread

Salads of all sorts: Russian, potato, pasta, cabbage

The hot platters of pierogi and meats were served at each table with guests, and the cold table was kept topped up all night.

I've got a paperback recipe book of traditional Polish food from which I've cooked a little, mainly the barszcz recipes (of which there are about seven) but it's a traditional recipe book with no pictures, just recipes, and on reflection, I think that put me off a little bit. When I read about Rose Petal Jam: Recipes and stories from a Summer in Poland I thought it might be more promising and inspire me to recreate some of the dishes I've had at family meals and in Poland.

What the book does beautifully is transport you to Polish family life. The author was born and lived in south west Poland until she was 18 when her family emigrated to Australia. Homesickness prickled when she re-read 19th century Polish poetry and so she returned one summer with her husband to the village of her girlhood.

The first part of the book focuses on her memories of a childhood in Poland and so features many recipes made by her clearly beloved grandmother Jósefa whom she called Mama Druga ("second Mum"), including the rose petal jam of the title. These recipes are interwoven with stories from Beata's early life and some recipes from the other women who she grew up with: Great Grandmother Julia, Aunt Sabina and her mother Lidia's recipes have their place but its her Babcia Jósefa's recipes which are most evocative of a preschool childhood in rural Poland.

A return visit provides the recipes and photos that comprise the second half of the book as the author and her husband - whose photos illustrate the book - explore the parts of Poland beyond Lower Silesia and give the reader a fuller flavour of Polish culinary traditions.

The book is best described as part memoir, part recipe book and although I found her back story charming, I'm not convinced it works as a format. I do wonder how many people who have bought the book have read the author's recollections of growing up in the countryside, her studies in Wrocław, or the couple's road trip round the country. According to the back cover, this is the first of four books about Poland (the next, Sugared Orange Zest: Recipes And Stories From A Winter In Poland) and I'm not quite sure how this model will lend itself to a further three instalments, presuming they're all of the same format and author as the first.

But as someone who has eaten and loved many traditional Polish dishes I found the recipes evoked some powerful gustatory memories and I was keen to try to recreate some homely Polish classics for Matt.

So far I've made:

Beetroot-shoot soup
Poppy seed cake
Cucumber salad
Pork with caraway and onions
Pierogi
Pierogi with buckwheat and cheese
Red cabbage salad

I want to make:

Roast duck with apples
Pasta with cabbage and mushrooms
Pierogi with beef
Polish beef goulash

Never gonna happen:

Pork and cabbage "hunter's stew" (aka bigos). Not because I don't like it but I think it's one of those dishes I'd never ever be able to live up to and so best left to those with the time, skill and access to mountains of sauerkraut to cook up massive cauldrons of the stuff.

As enjoyable a read the book is, I feel that the editing was more weighted towards the travel and memoir side of the book, less so on the integrity of the recipes. Clearly I haven't cooked my way through all 53 recipes and I may have been unlucky, but I found many of the recipes I've tried yielded an excessive amount of food, and one I suspect is just wrong. Surely all of this should have been uncovered in editing and testing the recipes? I know not every book is tested rigorously, and I concede I may have stuffed the poppy seed mix up somehow, but I can't help but feel the recipe is wrong. It's not like Matt and I have sparrow-like appetites - when shown a plate of pierogi, you often have to hold us back but not even we can eat more than a plateful apiece.

I know all too well how bountiful the Polish kitchen can be, and how large many Polish families are but the recipe for poppy seed cake makes two enormous cakes, not one large and 2 small the book advises. I halved it and still ended up with a torpedo of a cake. The red cabbage salad would have fed about 10 as a starter or side. The pierogi recipe makes 120 dumplings which the author suggests will vanish when placed before you and "a big family or more than a couple of hungry friends". I don't think I've ever seen anyone eat more than 10 pierogi in one sitting, and I say that as someone who utterly adores them. A family of 12 or 10 round for dinner is too much of a presumption, even if you do get leftovers (and leftover fried pierogi are a real delight). I think what bugged me most is that it's such a simple recipe there's no reason not to give it in more typical quantities and let the reader scale up if need be. Same goes for the filling recipes that follow.

Pierogi dough is so simple: flour, butter, water

I used a pint glass as my cutter and it gave the perfect size circles

Ready to be boiled

Pierogi with red cabbage and cucumber salads

Having read all the recipes, I think almost all of them underestimate in how many they serve so I'll use my judgement when I cook from it next.

The poppy seed cake recipe however went very wrong somehow. I did halve the recipe, but I wrote down the new quantities alongside each ingredient so that I didn't mistakenly include a full quantity of any one ingredient and thus ruin the dish (a mistake I've made in the past when halving recipes) and I followed it precisely, but the cake mixture was most definitely a batter rather than a dough and thus impossible to roll out, be spread with the poppy seed mixture, and then rolled up into a cake. I did have to convert dried yeast quantity given into the corresponding amount of quick yeast (for which I used the Doves Farm table), but I do not think that was the problem. I had to add about half again of flour to make a workable dough, and the result was far too heavy. Not inedible, and much improved with a cup of tea but definitely not quite right. If anyone has had any better luck with this recipe, please tell me where I went wrong!

Swollen poppy-seeds soaked in milk

A batter, not a dough

Poppy seed mixture and egg whites

Batter + more flour = dough that can be rolled

Probably more filling than dough, but hey

Poppy-seed cake (about a third of the whole cake is on show here!)

That's not to say I didn't enjoy the book, I did. A lot. And I will be cooking more recipes from it, but with an eye on quantities. The balance of flavours in the recipes I made was spot-on, and got the thumbs up from the half-Polish taster. The recipes on my "what to cook next" shortlist all look like great recipes, if a bit on the generous side, and I look forward to trying them, particularly as the nights are now drawing in and comfort food is creeping back into my kitchen.

The book is lovely to look at and the photos of traditional Polish crafts, countryside and cities make me wonder if it was funded by the Polish Government because if you read it and don't book a trip to Kraków, or Warsaw then you're made of sterner stuff than I. The publisher has given a has a quirky index given in Polish and English, and with such a lot of prose, is extremely helpful. The true index then catalogues the content of the book as well as the recipes, which is neat if I want to look up what she said about Zakopane, or a list of all the cabbage recipes. And it just made me happy to read, which earns it a place on my shelf.

Rose Petal Jam: Recipes And Stories From A Summer in Poland
Beata Zatorska and Simon Target
Tabula Books
2011

Next up: River Cottage Veg Every Day! by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

River Cottage Handbook Number 3: Bread by Daniel Stevens

2011-06-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

A significant change in my kitchen in the past couple of years has been to stop buying supermarket bread and either buying "artisanal" handmade loaves, or baking my own. The first loaves I made felt like triumphs but two years on I am amazed we ate them! Heavy and dense, they made decent enough toast but were no a replacement for bought bread, so my local bakery retained my custom.

Those loaves frustrated me. I wanted to produce the kind of bread I bought in Euphorium: loaves with a thick, brown crust and slightly chewy, well-flavoured bread within. The kind of bread that you want when you've got some excellent cheese, or to mop up the soupy liquor in a pot of mussels, or just with butter and jam. I didn't know why my bread didn't taste like that, so started looking for a book that would help me understand the process of making bread, and teach me how to make a perfect loaf. That book was the River Cottage Handbook No. 3: Bread by Daniel Stevens. I bought it and very quickly, my bread-eating and making habits changed.

I was brought up on sliced white and brown bread, bought from the supermarket and turned into toast, sandwiches, and sometimes bread and butter pudding. I don't remember eating anything different, with the exception of buying baguettes on holiday in France, and sometimes bread from the local bakery. But as a family of five, sliced white was a staple in our house. It seems that's still the case. 80% of the bread eaten in the UK is made using the accelerated proving and baking method known as the Chorleywood bread process, which is 60 years old this year.

But as The Proclaimers didn't say, Chorleywood no more.

As I blogged over on Doesn't Do Dishes back in August, the River Cottage Bread book was the biggest influence on my kitchen life in 2010, and it continues to be my go-to book for bread. It is responsible for ending my bread buying habit and means I'm now a regular customer of Doves Farm instead of a bakery.

I bought my copy at the beginning of 2010 seeking a book that would explain all the steps of bread-making, and help me improve upon the brown bricks coming from my oven.

The book is structured in a progressive manner, starting with the basics and working up to more complex breads, what to do with leftover bread (which when you bake your own, will more likely go stale than mouldy) and even covers building your own oven:

Why bake bread?
Getting started
Bread making step by step
The basic bread recipe
Beyond the basic loaf
Bread made with wild yeast
Bread made without yeast
Buns, biscuits and batter breads
Using leftover bread
Building a clay oven
Useful things

The first three chapters are essential reading and are the most compelling reason to buy this book. They focus on the individual steps of bread-making, starting with why he started to bake his own bread. Dan runs through the essential kit before moving on to explain the role of each core ingredient as well as the extras you can add to personalise your bread and lastly he describes the steps of bread making. I found this section invaluable in demystifying the whole process. Knowing the why you only really need flour, yeast, salt and water, and understanding each of the stages of fermentation, proving and baking made the process feel a lot simpler and helped the rhythms of bread making became smooth and intuitive.

The level of detail was just right for me: it did not bamboozle me with too much talk of hydration percentages or ratios, and plenty of step-by-step photos gave me the visual clues I badly needed when I was less familiar with the whole process and it was most reassuring when I could see my dough looked like his. Similarly, the sourdough chapter ("Bread made with wild yeast") has a very simple sourdough starter recipe: no raisins, grated apple or yogurt in sight. This makes starting your own a far less daunting prospect (and is a lot less wasteful than many other methods I've read).

So far I've made:

the basic bread recipe (p76)
malted grain bread (p78)
white bread (p78)
oaty wholemeal (p79)
malted and seeded loaf (80)
empty-the-shelf bread (p82)
focaccia (p89)
ciabatta (p90)
pizza (p104)
sourdough (p115) and River Cottage sourdough variation (p116)
my sourdough (p117)
soda bread
hot cross buns (p152)
crumpets (p165)

Crumpets

I want to make:

croissants (p147)
lardy cakes (p151)
Chelsea buns (p154)
socca (p172), a thick French pancake made with chickpea flour
brown bread ice cream (p189)

Never gonna happen:

tortilla (p134), only because I prefer tortillas with masa harina over wheat flour

When I started using the book, I didn't own proving baskets and used tea towels inside baking trays to support my bread. I used a serrated knife instead of a dough slasher, and ruined a couple of cheap baking tins to make steam before settling for a spray bottle that I quickly squirt into the oven. I used to re-read the steps as I was making the bread, and on more than one occasion, forgot to preheat the baking trays, or to slash the bread, or to spray or put a tray of water in the oven.

But now - ten months and many loaves on - I have three proving baskets, a dough slasher, and I don't need to read the steps any more. But I sometimes forget the quantities of salt and yeast, and I still consult it for inspiration or a change. It's slightly sticky from flicking through the pages mid-knead but is still always within reach when I start a new loaf.

Sourdough proving in banetons

The finished product

This book has given me confidence to play about with bread, and courage to experiment with new techniques. Last week I folded oats, nuts, dried fruit and poppy seeds into a loaf's worth of dough to make a breakfast bread for toasting, and although I now generally use Dan Lepard's repeated 10 second knead method over Dan Steven's more traditional 15 minute knead, learning the steps here meant I understood why that method would work. But when I'm trying a new type of bread for the first time, this is the book I turn to. I have made the ciabatta recipe only once and although it didn't follow the progress as the book described, I found I knew enough to adapt the recipe (baking the extremely wet dough in tins rather than trying to shape it) instead of freaking out and adding more flour (and throwing the yeast-water-salt-flour ration right off), or throwing it away. I'll tweak the quantities next time and see how it goes.

Breakfast bread

If you're an absolute beginner, at the stage of producing brick-like loaves, find you have a weird flying crust, or chewy bread, or you want to nurture your own sourdough starter then this book is for you.

The reason its earned such a prime spot on my bookshelf is that Dan Stevens has turned me into a chilled out bread baker, and I didn't think that was possible. Most importantly, I can now turn out loaves to rival the local bakery, and feel confident to experiment with more challenging baked goods. Bring on the croissants!

River Cottage Handbook No. 3: Bread

Daniel Stevens

Bloomsbury

2009

Next up: Rose petal jam by Beata Zatorska and Simon Target

Mexican food made simple by Thomasina Miers

2011-05-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

When I moved from Edinburgh to London one of the things I missed was an excellent Mexican restaurant called The Haw House (no sniggering at the back) where I marked many a birthday with sizzling fajitas, enticed a handsome boy to share a bowl of guacamole and a cerveza or two, and celebrated my graduation with an awesome margarita and chicken mole, a dish that had seemed too exotic on all my earlier visits but just right for that moment.

Celebration is what Mexican food was made for. It's food to feed a crowd and the fresh, sharp flavours make you smile and think of sunshine and music and fun even on a dark and gloomy day in London. It may not have been cutting edge but the old school Mexican food I first tasted at The Haw House was enough to start a long love affair with the smoky, chilli-spiked meat dishes and lighter citrussy salads of Mexico.

When I moved to London in 2003 I couldn't find anywhere to feed that habit (although to be fair, I was far less well-versed in London geography and restaurants back then). Run-of-the-mill TexMex places dotted the capital but they were never going to hit the spot. Until Wahaca opened and cranked up the authenticity rating to 11 with their street food and classic dishes of Mexico.

Founded by Masterchef 2005 winner Thomasina Miers, Wahaca delivers a true taste of Mexico to hungry Londoners. And although it's not sold as such, her book "Mexican food made easy" can be read as the unofficial Wahaca cookbook, featuring as it does many of the dishes often found on the menu in the restaurants. Many, but not all: pork pibil fans need to look elsewhere for a homemade hit of the tastiest pulled pork braise known to mankind (as it happens, I looked to Rick Bayless, with some help from Cool Chile Co's achiote powder....)

I've lost count of how many friends I've recommended this book to as an authentic but accessible Mexican cookbook. A flick through the book is enough to make you hungry and yearn for summer as so many of the recipes make perfect eating for hot weather. That's not to say it's a summer cookbook: there is a good selection of warming stews and braised dishes to inject some sunshine into the depths of a British winter. But I think spring and summer are when the recipes in MFMS shine.

The book is divided up as so:

Salsas, sauces and relishes
Nibbles and side dishes
Soups
Salads
Street food
Cheesy things
Slow-cooked main courses
From the grill
Soul food
Puddings
Drinks

There's also a handy list of suppliers of Mexican ingredients (both physical shops and online) at the back of the book. Even in the heaving metropolis of London I find it hard to source ingredients liken masa harina so the online suppliers list is a brilliant idea.

Aguachile

They layout is clean and colourful, with lots of photos of Tommi cooking the food. Not every dish is photographed, but this isn't a bad thing - all the more room for more recipes.

So far I've made:

Sweetcorn and black bean salsa (p27)
A simple roast chilli salsa (p28)
Pink pickled onions [to go with pork pibil] (p34)
An easy peasy peanut mole (p42)
Mole poblano (p43) although it makes a whole lot more sauce than the suggested 4! I'd say at last 8.
A classic guacamole (p48)
Aguachile, "bites of fresh fish [scallops] suspended in a blend of lime juice, fish sauce and fiery hot chillies" (p59)
Frijoles refritos (p63)
Red rice; green rice (p64)
Homemade tortillas (p100)
Autumn tacos with onion squash and chorizo (p106)
Spicy bird tacos (p112)
Tamarind and chilli-infused belly of pork (p147)
Picadillo, a kind of Mexican ragu, "sweet-savoury recipe great on its own with rice, stuffed inside tamales, burritos or chillies, or served as a pasta sauce" (p151)
Griddled corn cakes (p180)
Pineapple caramel from the Vanilla Cheesecake recipe (p190)

I want to make:

Pork scratchings (p50): I've just found a supplier of pig skin so cannot wait to make these. One of my favourite dishes at Wahaca, alongside the guac
Any of the soups (chapter 3): they all look great candidates for summery (packed) lunches
Steak burritos (p117)
Meatballs de Mehico! (p143)
Barbacoa, a "slow-cooked meat [she suggests mutton. Mmm, mutton...]...exotically spiced dish that melts in the mouth" (p146)
Torta (the Mexican club sandwich) (p156)
A fast and delicious black pudding polenta (p170)
All of the drinks chapter!

Never gonna happen:

Every recipe looks tasty and achievable, so none are ruled out
That said, I wasn't bowled over by the peanut mole, so won't make that again. But that's the only disappointing dish of the list I've made.

I've turned to this book mainly for entertaining friends, from a casual weekend dinner where margaritas have played as much a role as the food, to the dinner party I threw to celebrate my being made redundant. And celebrate we did with aguachile, mole poblano, spicy bird tacos, conchinita pibil (not from MFMS, alas) all served with homemade and guest-cooked tortillas, guacamole, green rice, pink pickled onions, roast chilli salsa, black beans, and a New York style cheesecake topped with caramel pineapple. The photos here are of that food, but are mainly of the leftovers - after taking the aguachile shot, we kinda got into the party spirit....

One thing to note is that not many of the recipes are single or couple-friendly. I think the watermelon and tostada salad is the only one that serves just two and most are to feed 4, 6, 8 or just lots! But then Mexican is a generous cuisine that lends itself to big pots of food to share, so this book is definitely one for the sociable, greedy or with a large household. Many dishes keep really well and make great leftovers, and lots, like picadillo improve for a day or so in the fridge, so I've found cooking slightly larger quantities is no big deal.

Frijoles refrito

The most popular dishes among my willing tasters have been the spicy bird tacos and the tamarind and chilli-infused belly of pork. The spicy bird tacos is basically poached/leftover chicken in a tomato sauce but the finished dish is a whole lot more than the sum of its parts. I poached a chicken according to the recipe on p140 and we made our own tortillas. The result was outstanding; soft but well-flavoured chicken in a warmly spiced tomato sauce.

Spicy bird taco filling

The tamarind and chill pork belly was an absolute gem: melting, gently spiced pork belly, with awesome cracking. I cooked the pork a lot longer and lower than the recipe suggested, but the combination of chilli and tamarind with pork belly is outstanding.

Perhaps the most useful element of the book is its emphasis on techniques and methods used for many of the staple dishes. Tommi clearly learnt a lot on her travels through Mexico, both about the core ingredients in Mexican cooking and the techniques used to give the dishes their complexity of flavour. She explains in the introduction that it's the layering of all the components of a Mexican feast that provide the "ambrosial quality of Mexican food" and she's right. Her first-hand experience is shared with us through a series of step-by-step masterclasses in the core elements of Mexican cooking: roasting the ingredients for a salsa, preparing your own chipotles en adobo, making tortillas from scratch, eating a taco, folding a burrito (harder than you think!), frying quesadillas, poaching and braising the Mexican way, and of course, how to make the perfect margarita. Its these elements that I think allow the reader to assemble a real feast, and are my favourite aspect of the book.

Pink pickled onions. No food colouring added, honest

That's not to say I haven't had a couple of recipe hiccups along the way, some with cooking times, others with the quantity, and one when I made a guess where to add some previously-roasted ingredients to the mole poblano, but nothing a tweet to the author didn't resolve! As well as reading and replying to her @mentions on Twitter, Tommi has left a little note at the end of the book encouraging readers to get in touch with what they think of the book, and to tell her how we get on with the techniques and recipes. I love that she actually cares what her readers think, and although that sounds obvious, I'm not sure many cookbook authors (especially those tagged - rightly or wrongly - with the "celebrity chef" label) do.

I think this is a cracking book, focussing on a cuisine not often lauded on these shores, and despite the recent explosion of burrito bars in London, still not always done well. The recipes are generally clear and the results are mostly excellent, often spectacular. The only drawback may be getting hold of the ingredients you need, but as mentioned above, the "Suppliers" listings should sort you out. If you like Mexican food, buy this book. It really does make it simple.

Mexican food made simple
Thomasina Miers
Hodder & Stoughton, 2010

Up next: River Cottage Bread Handbook

Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook by Tarek Malouf and the Hummingbird Bakers

2011-03-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

If I'm honest, really honest, if I had to give away all my cookbooks but was allowed to keep one genre it would be baking. I love baking: cakes, pies, bread, cupcakes, macaron, whoopie pies, tarts, meringues, cheesecakes...I've never met a combination of fat and flour I didn't like.

But I'd be lost without the cookbooks that instruct me in the science of baking, the exact weights and measurements, cooking times and temperatures. I know that a small variation here and there won't hurt, and substitutions are often fun, but at its core there are rules to be followed and you ignore the basic formula at your peril. The sense of alchemy when you transform a murky looking batter into lighter than air cupcakes or a three-layered, double-iced number, the thrill of creating something precise and skilled never fades.

The Hummingbird Bakery is smack bang in the middle of a key Yummy Mummy stronghold and I'm sure does a roaring trade in mid-morning cupcake and tea alongside a parked buggy or two but from the introduction it seems this is no scheme to capitalise on the pastel pound, he really has a passion for cake. Tarek Malouf may have his name above the door but he co-credits the Hummingbird Bakers on the title page, which I think is a gracious measure of his respect for the team who have been instrumental in its success.

Despite living in London, I've never eaten a Hummingbird Bakery confection as baked by their fair hands and will make a pilgrimage soon (probably by bike to soothe my food conscience) so I can compare. Going by the recipes I've tried, I'm both in for a treat and an awesome sugar-rush.

The book is laid out in neat by-type chapters:

Welcome to the Hummingbird Bakery (including frosting recipes)
Cupcakes
Cakes
Pies
Brownies and bars
Muffins
Cookies

Pretty self-explanatory really. The three frosting recipes should cover all eventualities given that you can flavour the vanilla one any which way you want, and all double up to fill the amazing triple-layered cakes. My kMix copes fine with a double recipe, but I think my arm may drop off if I had to whip 250g cream cheese and 100g butter into 600g of icing sugar by hand. You may be built like Popeye and can handle such things easily. I will say I've never had such light and airy results by hand as I now do with the stand mixer: a good 5-10 minute beat gives the icing amazing volume. I'm not sure how easily a double quantity of icing would fill and ice a triple-layer cake if you hadn't got the requisite volume.

To date I've made:

A lot of cream cheese icing (p11)
Red velvet cupcakes (p20)
Black bottom cupcakes (p27)
Hummingbird cake (p49)
Carrot cake (p50)
Lemon and poppyseed cake (p57)
Banana loaf (p67)
Lemon loaf (p71), but as a lime loaf
Chocolate cheesecake (p74), which I served with kirsch cream and kirsch-soaked cherries one Christmas as a riff on Black Forest Gateau
Lemon bars (p112)
Chocolate chip cookies (p131)

What I want to make next

Coconut and pineapple cupcakes (p33)
Banana and chocolate cupcakes (p34)
Green tea cupcakes (p37)
Brooklyn Blackout cake (p 54), mainly for the name, also for the chocolate custard icing
Every single pie in the "Pie" chapter: lemon meringue, pecan, key lime, pumpkin, Mississippi mud, banana cream, apple, blueberry. I blame Waitress but I have a deep desire to bake pies for everyone. No way Matt and I can eat one of these babies alone though and they don't travel to the office that well, so I haven't....yet.
Raspberry cheesecake brownie (p104)
Ham and mushroom muffins (p117). I haven't made many savoury muffins and these sound great.

Never gonna happen

Fridge-set banana cheesecake (p77). Just not a huge fan of fridge-set cheesecake. Much more a baked cheesecake girl.

Some of the recipes are a bit sweet for my taste as much as I love cake and I have on occasion knocked a bit of sweetness off the recipe. Only the black bottom cupcakes turned out badly, but I have a sneaking suspicion I tried to make them with low fat cream cheese, which I've since learned almost never works in baking. This was one of the first recipes I tried from the book so I should give it another go to check if it was me or the recipe at fault.

The triple-layered numbers have been the real show-stoppers. I made the carrot and Hummingbird cakes as leaving cakes for two of my colleagues and they tasted great, but looked amazing. There's definitely something cake-shoppy about a third layer, and all over icing. The Hummingbird cake is possibly my favourite recipe from the book so far, with its irresistible combination of banana, pineapple and nuts.

One of the best things about this book is that they issued a corrections page on their website for those who bought early editions (pre-May 2009) of the book in which the recipes for lemon and poppy seed cake, lemon loaf and red velvet cupcakes were revised and some helpful tips for making the filling for the Brooklyn blackout cake were added. Saying that I've just checked the site again and they've since edited the PDF that I printed out ages ago. Boo! Glad I printed them out and tucked my copy in the back of the book.

Oh how I wish more cookbooks did this. It's horrible to make a dish and trusting the recipe completely and then whether through inexperience or disregarding what your own instinct tells you have it go wrong for no clear reason. Maybe I've just not come across the panoply of corrections pages across the cooking interwebs, but this one, and Nigella's Kitchen Queries are the only I've found. Minor quibble is that it's under a heading of "Download our baking tips" but hey, at least it's there.

This book is a great introduction to American-style baking but with the benefit of being in UK weights and temperatures (as anyone who cooks from US cookbooks will know, converting gets a bit irritating after a while. What IS a stick of butter?). The edition I have may have a few errors but they tried to correct them. And I suspect the one fail I've had was my fault. So I think this one has to come recommended. The flavour combinations are interesting and I know I wouldn't have come up with some of the more unusual flavours like green tea and lavender on my own. Despite not having cooked any of them, reading and drooling over the photos in the "Pie" chapter may be worth the price alone.

P.S. The second Hummingbird Bakery book, Cake Days, has just been published, and although it appears to repeat some recipes (red velvet definitely) the Amazon review mentions Earl Grey and lemonade flavours.....I may have to investigate this one too.

Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook
Tarek Malouf and the Hummingbird Bakers
Published by Ryland Peters & Small, 2009

Up next: Mexican food made simple by Thomasina Miers

River Cottage Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

2011-02-06T07:21:00.000-08:00

Between my first River Cottage cookbook (The River Cottage Cookbook, bought in paperback shortly after I moved to London) and the latest (River Cottage Every Day) Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has gone from being "that bloke who cooked and ate a woman's placenta" to "that bloke who had a big fight with Tesco about their chicken's welfare". Everything I've read in between reflected his firm belief that we the public should "become more engaged with real fresh food", and this is the driving force behind his latest book. His recent TV series' have certainly advocated that: encouraging supermarket shoppers to consider the provenance of that £3.99 Tesco chicken to being unafraid to ask about the sustainability of the fish on the menu down at the chippy.

It's an attitude I apply to my own shopping and cooking as far as possible: if we've going to eat animals then we should treat them as well as we can, kill them in as humane way possible, use up every possible part of them and enjoy the experience of preparing and eating them. Fruit and vegetables should be fresh, and to be truly fresh, the should be local, and seasonal.

From the early days at the original River Cottage, that message was played out with Hugh's own small-holding and his journey to growing, slaughtering, butchering and eating his own animals. More recently he's taken the same message to the Channel 4-watching masses; encouraging more people to consider where much of their supermarket meat, fish and vegetables come from, and to consider changing their shopping habits to support producers who adopt higher welfare animal farming methods, and to offset the additional expense by eating less meat, less often.

Cooking food takes a bit of time, thought and effort, but it really can be only a bit. For those who want to put more effort in, the rewards are all the greater, but even a little bit of planning and some thought to where the contents of your shopping basket have come from can make a difference when multiplied up to the millions of shopping baskets up and down the country.

He's by no means the only TV cook or food writer to be extolling the ethical and taste benefits of free-range food, and I'm not saying he's responsible for the surge in growing your own fruit and vegetables. But I find he does in it a way that doesn't patronise or make out that it's miraculously quick and easy. River Cottage Every Day is the book that complements the TV series of the same name, and in the same way as he introduced home cooks to cheaper cuts of meat and ways to fit bread-making round the school run, he gives practical ways of cooking with the seasons and the cheaper end of the butcher's counter.

In the descriptions introducing each chapter he talks about the way food is cooked, eaten and shopped for in the Fearnley household, and gives suggestions to how you can gradually change your cooking habits to include more fresh, home-cooked meals by describing how he approaches that kind of cooking, and the role it plays in his daily routine.

If you're already pretty clued up on thrifty and seasonal shopping habits, and don't need anyone to explain why fresh homemade bread is better than a supermarket loaf, then you can skip over these, and dive straight into the recipes.

Since I bought this book, it has become a bit of a kitchen staple, particularly for the odder cuts of meat like lamb breast, beef shin and knuckley, boney bits of pig. But I hadn't realised quite how much I'd turned to it until I made this list!

What I've made:

pear and cinnamon smoothie: I'm not much of a smoothie fan, or of pears (too messy to eat at my desk) but this is a breakfast winner, especially after a run.
honey-baked rhubarb: how can that combo go wrong?
wholemeal drop scones: "healthy" pancakes :)
fridge jam: had never thought of doing this, and is perfect way to have some fruit to blob onto porridge or toast
cornbread: great with chilli
parsnip and thyme bread: a perfect pairing with a beef shin and kidney stew instead of mash
beetroot and walnut hummus: blobbed into beetroot soup, and onto toast
parsley and pumpkin seed pesto: another soup topper, this time potato and fennel
curried fish pie: I didn't think this would be great, but I was very wrong. I added a few hard-boiled eggs in too, and it woke up our post-Christmas, meated-out tatstebuds
Tupperware Mexican chorizo (meatballs): the only recipe I wouldn't do again. This was a bit of a disappointment - not the taste I was looking for and to be honest, I'd rather buy fresh chorizo instead
chorizo carbonara: not great, but mainly because I didn't love the tupperware chorizo
sticky glazed spare ribs: I made these after my friend Sarita made them for me, and they were fantastic both times (hers were better than mine if I'm honest...)
rabbit stew with tomato: brilliant way of cooking rabbit, which I often find quite dry, and gorgeous with fresh parpadelle
baked chicken curry: a firm favourite. Hugh's curry recipes are always winners
lamb and squash curry: another great curry, although the chutney I used was too sweet, so I'd be more choosy next time and go for a more sour/spicy one
shin of beef with ginger and soy: possibly the best recipe in the book. Really, really easy, and a fabulously flavoured stock. Served with greens and rice I can see this becoming my favoured way of slow cooking beef
roast breast of lamb with lemon and apricots: I didn't know what to do with breast of lamb, and will use this method again with a variety of stuffings
potato and fennel soup: yum
beetroot and cumin soup with spiced yogurt: yum again
stuffed butternut squash, and bacon variant: my new favourite way to cook butternut squash
apple and walnut crumble: great idea to add nuts to the fruit to give a more interesting texture
apple (and pear) and almond pudding cake: equally perfect for afternoon tea or for pudding, and I think even better with pears than the apples he suggests here
lemon trickle cake: another lovely cake, but I made it with limes for a change

What I want to make next:

digestives
Bill's Rona oatcakes
tartiflette toastie
leek, celeriac and smoked pollack soup
slow roast beef brisket with potatoes and onions (very similar recipe to his Guardian beef with turnips and swede recipe)
rhubarb and cointreau cranachan
sticky Jamaican style ginger cake
lemon curd marble muffins
caraway shortbread
chocolate and beetroot brownies

Never gonna happen:

Nothing! Every recipe looks make-able, and I'd happily eat them all.

The recipes are simple to follow, and the flavour combinations and ingredient suggestions have prompted countless dinners and lunches in my kitchen.

One of my favourite chapters to read if not too cook from (given it's absence from the long list above) is the lunch box chapter. I'm a bit of a lunch box evangelist, not only because I'm fundamentally tight-fisted when it comes to spending money on work lunches, but I cannot stand throwing food away, yet am incapable of cooking for just two of us. If I can't foist leftovers onto Matt, I'll happily take the same thing into work for lunch two or three days in a row to avoid the hideous decision of where to waste a fiver in Holborn come midday. The lunchbox chapter not only struck a chord with my inner cheapskate, but gave me some new ideas on structuring lunchboxes around different carbs, and with different dressings and sprinklings, thus enlivening some more tired leftovers.

I share his passion for not wasting any food if possible, and although not every leftover experiment is as delicious as the parent meal, I'm with Hugh that sometimes leftovers can be even better than the main event from whence they came. He positively celebrates the leftover as the source for many an epic meal, and I salute him for that. Love food, hate waste indeed. I'm looking forward to tonight's chicken sandwiches more than I am the roast dinner (although that may be more to do with the fact that the sourdough will be ready by then...).

Visually, the book is very pleasing. The recipes are clearly laid out, although timings are again not included with ingredients (maybe this is just me and my rubbish recipe-reading habits?!). Simon Wheeler's photography is in the same observational style as the TV series and shows either Hugh at work making the food, or a perfectly composed, although not contrived, shot of the final dish. However it's Mariko Jesse's illustrations over the top of the photos and winding through the recipes that had most impact on me. Their wandering pen put me in mind of having a very artistic friend absent-mindedly doodling a fantastical path through my cookbook while I cooked for them. And that's a lovely thought indeed.

So, the verdict on River Cottage Every Day?

Full of easy-to-follow recipes which make seasonal, everyday ingredients stars
Very good on cooking with less common, and often much cheaper cuts of meat (in the same style as HFW's epic Meat Book)
Helpful, practical suggestions of how we can all cook more often at home
Sets out the founding principles of making varied, interesting lunchboxes, with some brilliant ideas to get newbies started and hardened packed-lunchers reinvigorated
Encourages anyone to give bread-making a go, and demystifies the process for absolute beginners
All in, a great book for first-time cooks, as well as old hands looking for some new ideas.

River Cottage Every Day

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Published by Bloomsbury, 2009

Up next: The Hummingbird bakery cookbook by Tarek Maouf

What to eat now by Valentine Warner

2010-11-28T13:03:00.000-08:00

"What to eat next?" is a question that is constantly buzzing around my brain, I suspect often to the mild irritation or simple puzzlement of those around me. What I'm eating always has my full attention, but as soon as my fork is set down, my mind quickly wanders to the next meal and where it's coming from, what it will be, and do I have everything I need for it? I suspect I may have found a kindred spirit in Valentine Warner.

"What to eat now" is the first of two cookbooks that complements Valentine's BBC series of the same name which originally aired in autumn 2008, and which was followed up with a summery series - and second book "What to eat now - more please!" - the following year. He caught my attention in the autumnal episodes as he railed against the invading signal crayfish and appealed to us to guzzle these interlopers with abandon, and I followed him through the two series, quite taken with his boyish excitement and clear passion for cooking and eating. Equally enthusiastic about picking, foraging and supping as hunting, shooting and fishing, Valentine's seasonal recipes are a love letter to the British countryside and its abundance.

And this translates seamlessly to his first cookbook. Split into eight sections, it's easy to thumb through whether you're seeking inspiration or instruction. The chapter headings make it easy to skim in search of recipes to match what you've got to cook with (Four Legs; Plump Birds; Fish Dishes; Cheese & Eggs; Root, Stem & Leaf; Sweet Things & Bread; Six drinks & Basics; A Potted History and Index) but I often find myself distracted from the search in hand by the stories that accompany each recipe. His anecdotes and recollections make this a charmingly personal book, and make it one I want to read, not just plunder for ideas. The author's pencil sketches of anthropomorphised beasts, roots, fungus and fish and ink line drawings of other culinary subjects are thoroughly in keeping with the book's idiosyncratic nature; my favourite is the heart of food pierced by a skewer.

But what of the recipes? I've made a fair few of these as the nights have drawn in, and they've been warming and tasty, and with some interesting flavour combinations that I wouldn't have thought of. Beetroot and horseradish relish with some poached chicken was a star turn, and marrow stuffed with beef shin was a gently spiced, warming conversion to a vegetable I just never think to buy. Not all were as successful: I'm not convinced I could taste the ginger biscuits in the venison stew (but I also forgot to add any salt that particular dish, and that would not have helped matters). Although somewhat disdainful and possibly mistrustful of vegetarians, his vegetable section is a joy and isn't stealthily sneaking meat in to dishes the way some other cookbooks do. His sweet section is short, but with some perfect examples of seasonal fruits being put to great use; some quinces bought on impulse made an excellent crumble with apples and pears, and made better for his suggestion of poaching the fruit before adding the crumble. And to have a section on drinks? What a hero! Meat tea sounds just-Enid-Blyton-enough for me to want to give it a go and the spiced sherry sounds like a winning recipe any time of the year, but certainly one to recommend to the chillier months.

So how useful a cookbook is it? To date I've made:

Bakewell pudding (p229): delicious, and deceptively large, but turns out two people can make a pretty good go of demolishing one over a weekend.
poached chicken with beetroot and horseradish relish (p56): clean and wholesome, and a great counter to heavy, rich winter stews.
venison pie (p50): a wonderfully heavy, rich winter stew with a pastry top :) Not convinced by the gingernuts though
rabbit stew with petit pois, cider and lettuce (p42): Peter Rabbit, braised with his playground veg
oxtail stew (p41): think I may have messed up the cooking time as it wasn't as unctuous as he promises, but still tasty.
stuffed marrow (p165). The beef shin ragu would be excellent with rice, but a gem with pleasingly bland and silky marrow.
quince and plum crumble (p225). I added an apple or two, too, and it was just lovely.
sloe gin (well, am in the process of making...it's in the cellar, steeping away) p244/; a cheeky slurp indicates it's one its way to greatness.

And what I want to make next:

lamb birra (p17)
pork, anchovy and black olive stew with polenta (p36)
baked crab creams (p122)
Alpine macaroni (p134)
Sweet and sour chard (p176)
Onion tart (p180)
Meat teas (p240)

Never gonna happen:

Roast suckling pig. I don't have the oven space required, not even for a 5kg version he helpfully downsizes the recipe for. Shame, as I love sparklers on food.

My only criticism of the book would be that timings aren't always very clear until you've read through the recipe, which I know I should always do, but I often skim read. So maybe this is a criticism of my own cooking practices instead. Anyway, I'd find a rough overall time indicator useful as adding up each bit of the recipe never quite works out for me,.

What I love about the book is the seasonality, and Val's passion for British produce, especially the less commonly trumpeted products like woodcock, venison, crayfish and mallard. Okay, so you wouldn't buy all of those things every week, some of them ever, but I feel comforted knowing that if I do see something on offer at the market, or a last-minute extra in the fridge at my veg depot, there's a pretty good chance Valentine's got a recipe for it. This is an unlikely contender for one of my backstop books simply due to the variety of game, fish, meat and veg covered. It appeals to the veg box champion in me by celebrating the less exciting winter veg, and singing the praises of wilder meats, and the bounty produced up and down the UK in general.

Some recipes have suggestions to turn leftovers into a new meal, which are handy if your imagination gets stuck when faced with a few bowls of this and that in the fridge, and appeals to the frugal cook in me.

Verdict?

Proudly British and seasonal but not hectoring with it.
Mostly straightforward recipes.
Engaging read and suffused with his personality.
Frequently flicked-through, especially when I have game or fish in the fridge.

What to eat now

Valentine Warner

Published by Mitchell Beazley, 2008

Up next: River Cottage Everyday by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

79 cookbooks

2010-11-27T15:12:00.000-08:00

I own 79 cookbooks. With several shelves full of them in my kitchen, I clearly knew I had a lot, probably more than anyone else I now, but somehow counting them makes it seem more than a little indulgent. In the grand scheme of my flat, with it’s many filled bookshelves I thought the cooking ones made up a smaller fraction. But now that I’ve counted, it seems about a third of our book space is given over to the culinary variety.

And when I say cookbooks, I mean books about food with recipes in them. I have a good few more that are about food and drink: those devoted to a certain type (cheese, beers, wines), restaurant and pub guides, books about the politics of food, about experiences at culinary school, cooks’ memoirs and diaries. And then there’s the folders of clippings and recipe cards, and my own spiral-bound notebook of my own recipes, or those copied from a webpage that I’m sure I’ll never find again. Despite a ruthless clearout that saw six years’ worth of delicious. magazines meet their end in Islington’s recycling centre, some more recent issues have found a home on a bookshelf, tucked in with the final few Gourmets (I was a late-comer to that party, and do miss the issues M would bring back from the US for me) and the last couple of months’ OFMs. And then there’s the first 4 issues of Fire and Knives, which as a sturdy little bound periodical, can be neatly lined up on my bedroom bookshelves so at hand for some late-night literary snacking.

So those 79 books are in good company amongst so much culinary literature. And although it’s a standing joke in the UK that we buy cookbooks, and watch cookery TV programmes, whilst chowing down a ready meal or takeaway, I do cook from them, as my other blog will attest. But I’d be the first to admit that I haven’t cooked from as many of them as I should, although I’ve read at least a few pages of each.

I’m with Rachel Cooke – there’s so much to be learned from reading cookbooks and absorbing new flavour combinations, techniques and ingredients. But given that the authors and their tireless testers spend so much time getting the recipes right, it seems only fair that we should be cooking from them too. And I do: I love trying new recipes, although I can be a bit impatient and tweak them to suit my equipment, ingredients and mood. But I do love a new cookbook, as my tally attests. The cook-the-book blog has been done beautifully by so many. French Laundry At Home inspired me to start my first blog, and to challenge myself a bit more in the kitchen and the Julie/Julia project is probably the most famous (and the casting of Meryl Streep as Julia Child a fabulous consequence). I’m going to put my collection to use and begin cooking from them more regularly, and use this blog to review them. With 79 to get through, I need to up my game and blog a bit more often than I’m used to, but I could do with a challenge, and so this is it:

79 cookbooks to choose from.
2 recipes (at least) from each.
At least one book reviewed a fortnight, more frequently if I can.
And no buying new cookbooks until I’ve reviewed at least 10 of my existing ones.

And to get the London Review of Cookbooks off to a seasonal start:

Up next: What to eat now by Valentine Warner.

One down, 78 to go.

............
Postscript: I’ve just spotted another, a gift from my friend Ben that’s hidden under a pile of post. So that’s 80 books. Sheesh. Best get cracking.