The River Cottage Year |
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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
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Pages: 224 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 0340828218
Pub: Hodder & Stoughton
Pub date: 2003-05-12
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 66442
Editorial Review:
For an ever-growing army of admirers, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall can do no wrong. The River Cottage Year seems sure to follow the commercial and critical success of his previous book, The River Cottage Cookbook, which was something of a publishing phenomenon, selling by the bucket-load and winning every major cookery book award.
The format of this new book is intriguingly different: this time we are given (in chronological order) the author's insights and observations on life and food as the seasons and months go past, interweaving cookery with the cycles of the natural year. These sections aren't all the book has to offer: the new volume is crammed with 100 original seasonal recipes, all beautifully detailed. Of course, we may look at the results of these mouthwatering delights in the new Channel 4 series that accompanies this book and lament how we're not quite in the same cookery league. But Fearnley-Whittingstall has a gift not possessed by some of his rivals: we are always made to feel that the delights offered here are within our grasp, provided we follow the helpful advice we are given.
The food is a mixture of the ambitious and the achievable, and looking through The River Cottage Year is a blissful experience, whether your intention is simply to dream about dishes or to actually get down to the nitty-gritty of making them. The illustrations are as tempting as anything in the text, and the book will unquestionably raise the author's profile still higher.
--Barry Forshaw
Reader Reviews:
Informative, easy reading and educational. (0/0 people found this helpful)
Buy this book with the intention of becoming more seasonally aware of our uk produce, or simply for inspiration in great seasonal recipies. I'm not going to bang on like others have re. the politics of this book, ulitmatley, the recipies are
(a) VERY easy reading/following
(b) Eye opening (who'd honestly have thought that roast cod's head could look as mouth watering as it does in his book)
(c) Clean, fresh, "Un-pimped" every day food!
One particular massively favourite in my family has been Decembers, Chocolate & Chestnut Cake. I urge you, while chestnuts are in the supermarkets fresh, and its that comfort food time of year, buy this book for that recipe alone. It is jaw droppingly simple but devistatingly delicious. One tip, you need to roast off approx 500g uncooked weight, to get the 250g of chestnuts you need, but the end result is SO worth the peeling, HONESTLY!
Food for thought (5/5 people found this helpful)
Another wonderful book from HFW.
Once more there are great recipes that you actually want to eat - and as quickly as possible! I find myself leafing through my copy with anticipation on a regular basis to see what goodies will be in season in the coming weeks.
Good food, great philosophy, and again without pretention.
Inspiring stuff.
More excellence form Hugh (11/12 people found this helpful)
Set out in a monthly format,with each month / section starting with an introduction from Hugh outlining what's seasonal at the time & offering some marvellous recipes .
There is a fantastically useful guide to seasonality at the start of the book , allowing you to see when your fruit & veg will be at its best & when fish & game are in season
My copy is very well thumbed, I go back to it on a very regular basis - the recipes , as ever where Hugh is concerned, are easy to follow & really tasty - the recipe for Cock pheasant au vin in particular, is an out & out winner - delicious.You really should try the Blackcurrant double ripple ice cream as well - decadent or what ?
Treat yourself & get cooking with a seasonal bent.
Get in Touch with truly `Seasonal Produce` (39/40 people found this helpful)
Voted `a corker' by Jamie Oliver, this is a book which challenges that `all-year' round availability of `fresh' ingredients, with a primary aim of re-educating the reader to think about how fresh, not to mention how tasty, e.g. the fine green beans are ,that have just flown in from Kenya?
`Shopping seasonally is not a high-minded duty, or a restrictive choice, but a liberating pleasure.
The downside of the modern food culture of infinite year-round choice is a kind of options paralysis - there is so much on offer that you don't know where to start.
Understanding the seasons frees you from this ball and chain.
In a world where the production and marketing of food has gone mad, seasonality is sanity.'
It implies freshness, good taste and even good health. And it offers the best and quickest solution to the never-ending question, `What shall I cook today?'
As seen on Channel Four, `The River Cottage Year' book has 255 high quality matt pages, split over the twelve months of the year along with a section entitled `Why Cook Seasonally?' and an alphabetical guide to `Seasonal British Produce`, showing, monthly, both `in season' and `at it best' for vegetables/fruit/fish, shellfish & game and popular edible wild plants inc fungi, herbs, `greens`, fruit and nuts.
Each chapter is headed up by information about the relevant month, followed by around 9 recipes.
Photography, by Simon Wheeler.
Even if you think you have no aspirations, or skill, as a gardener, this book could inspire you to literally sow your seeds and amble down that path called `Grow Your Own`.
And from Hugh's description of his Dorset life, even the more apprehensive of us might be persuaded that it is all within reach, whatever the size of your garden, or window box.
Still not convinced.......amble along to a local Farmers' Market, offering only the best at the best time.
The only minor criticisms which have been aired are that there are not pictures of each finished dish, plus the recipes themselves don't have the usual `list' of ingredients - just highlighted text detailing the requirements, but with everything else in this book, you don`t really notice!
Our favourite recipes:-
Mixed Wild Mushrooms on Toast
Raw Asparagus and Other Crudities with Anchovy and Caper Mayonnaise:-
`......In fact just cut asparagus is sweet enough to eat raw, and I urge anyone who grows their own to try it like this, dipped in a simple vinaigrette........, or as above.
The loss of sweetness in asparagus (as with many vegetables, including peas and sweet corn) is a simple function of time elapsed after harvest.
Sugar begins to revert to starch as soon as the plant has been cut. It can be fixed only by cooking or freezing - the latter is OK for peas and sweet corn but pretty detrimental to the fragile texture of asparagus..........'
Baby Broad Beans with Chorizo
`If I had to name my favourite first harvests of the year, I think it would be baby broad beans. Try as I might, I can't resist attacking the pods when the beans inside are scarcely bigger than my little fingernail. After a few portions of lightly cooked infants, adorned with only a little melted butter, I'll move on to some simple combination - and thin slivers of lightly fried chorizo is one of my favourites.'
Barbecued August Vegetables
Crushed Strawberries and Cream
French Beans with Tapenade and Chicken
Mackerel with Melted Onions and Black Olives
Autumn Bliss
` I worked this recipe out from scratch....... My plan was to celebrate the wonderful variety of autumn raspberry after which the dish is named. I wanted a dish that acknowledges the change in the weather, the creeping autumn chill and therefore takes the raspberry away from its usual summer association of chilled desserts and into the realms of hot puddings.'
Getting back in touch with the seasons (46/47 people found this helpful)
If you were to judge this simply on the recipes then this is much the same as many of hugh's other books, lots of recipes but a fair chunk of text given over to the lifestyle and, lets be honest, that's where Hugh's books are pitched in the market they are selling a vision of a lifestyle and not a manual on how to run your kitchen. In fact based simply on the recipes I'd say that this is probably not the best of his books but it wins on one major point. By dividing it into months it answers that question that so many of us may have wondered - what is in season now? It is, after all, too easy to stand in the local supermarket and be so isolated from the natural world that you have no idea that this is the time of year when if you see aspargus on the shelves then its probably been air freighted half way around the planet.
Buy this, read the recipes by month and go to the grocers and markets rather than supermarkets. Its one simple step to feeling better about consumption.
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