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Sophie Grigson's Country Kitchen: 120 Seasonal Recipes With her usual modern, relaxed style, Sophie Grigson offers over 120 colourful and delicious recipes to make the most of seasonal food. Fresh food has always been the cornerstone of Sophie's cookery and country living ensures she has fresh produce all through the year. Her own garden, farm shops and local markets - to say nothing of what grows wild in the fields - all inspire her to create simple recipes for her friends and family. Freshen up in spring with Garden Rhubarb and Honey Compote, simmer in summer with Spiced Courgette Salad, produce your own Bramble Jam for autumn and rustle up a Roast Goose for Christmas. |
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Leith's Techniques Bible Learn how to prepare meat and fish, make perfect pastry and bread, as well as equip a kitchen. Understand what makes recipes work and what has happened when they haven't. With answers to every cookery question from how to make perfect mashed potatoes to making a spun sugar cage, this is a cookbook for everyone from the novice cook to the experienced chef. The market for fully comprehensive cookbooks is crowded. This latest is a worthy addition but it comes at a price that, to this reviewer, has to be discounted to be competitive. A useful feature of the book is the "what has gone wrong when.." sections; however if that is your main reason for buying the book then consider Anne Willan's "Cooked to Perfection" (which is profusely illustated with useful photographs). This book has a number of useful line drawings but no photo illustrations - which seens to the reviewer, to be penny pinching when considering the price - and comparing it with the step by step series of, for instance the Good Housekeeping series. |
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Cooking Like Mummyji - Vicky Bhogal If you think you know Indian cooking, think again. This book from a fresh, young talent reveals a little-known cuisine with roots both in the Indian sub-continent and in Britain. 'I have often thought it such a shame that the Western world is not let in on the secret of real Indian home cooking, as though it is a sort of long-standing trick, our last remaining jewel,' says Vicky Bhogal in the introduction to Cooking like Mummyji. 'Our home food is much simpler than what you find in Indian restaurants. We use very little spices. The same ingredients are generally used for everything, but, like musical notes, can be combined in many different ways to create beautiful melodies.' Vicky Bhogal is passionate about British Asian food. In over 100 recipes she reveals its secrets. Many of the names of her dishes will be familiar to afficionados of high-street Indian restaurants, but they will find Vicky's versions surprisingly fresher, healthier and more delicious, with simpler, more vivid flavours. Her cooking is also a good deal friendlier and less complicated than the recipes of most Indian cookbooks. Along the way Vicky makes some sharp, fun observations on British Asian culture and we encounter some of her family members and learn their favourite recipe. And since Vicky's family and friends have lived in the UK for two generations now, Indian cooking techniques have been applied to their favourite British ingredients with some surprising results, for example an Indian version of Fried Eggy Bread, Baked Beans with Spring Onion Sabji, Pasta with Yoghurt and Chilli Drizzle. |
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BBC Good Food Magazine is a must have for everyone who loves cooking and eating. It's full of mouth-watering ideas for quick everyday dishes, inspirational entertaining and other recipes you've ever dreamt of - all devised to save you time and effort. Food news, what's new in the shops, gadgets, tips, giveaways and competitions - you'll find it all in Good Food. Plus each month, there’s an exclusive 8-page guide to all the top recipes featured on TV. |
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Jamie's Kitchen Jamie Oliver is setting up a new restaurant, which is also a training school for young chefs, and you're invited to find out how he gets along. This guide features all the recipes from Jamie's cookery course as well as from the restaurant menu, including the ultimate in Mediterranean-style fast food - pasta and fresh sauces, thick wedges of bruschetta with basil and tomatoes, warm vats of stew for the winter and simple French salads for the summer. Follow Jamie's hints and tips and learn how to make delicious food alongside him. Amazon.co.uk Review Jamie Oliver's new book, Jamie's Kitchen has only been home a few days and it's already a victim of sticky page syndrome. Like its predecessors--The Naked Chef, The Return of the Naked Chef and Happy Days with the Naked Chef--its beautiful photographs are slightly slick with olive oil and the clear layout of recipes is traced across with fingerprints of chilli jam, while crumbs of polenta and splinters of rosemary nestle in the gritty crease of the spine. And that is the best recommendation for any cook book. Oliver's recipes are truly irresistible and this book might well be his best ever--both in quantity (100 recipes) and quality. The Channel Four series associated with the book will focus on his experience of setting up a restaurant school to turn unemployed kids into professional chefs. While Jamie's Kitchen isn't a course book per se, he takes home cooks through kitchen essentials including poaching, boiling, steaming, stewing, frying, roasting, grilling and baking--all in a no-nonsense style. He proves to be a terrific pupil of his own culinary education, spun in true-to-form Jamie style by the results of his experiments. He has learnt his lessons well from his time at the River Café with recipes such as spring minestrone, pasta and risottos to dream about and a focus on the quality and seasonality of produce. Rick Stein's style of pedagogy also works very well here with sections on basic chef skills such as chopping, boning and filleting. Jamie also helpfully includes easy recipes to some of the basics of French and Mediterranean cookery such as pesto and aioli. But he's also extended his playful ways with oriental cuisine--tempting us with dim sum delights such as steamed pork buns. He also finds room to skirt the borders of increasingly popular Spanish and Middle Eastern flavours with sweet roasted garlic soup and Lebanese lemon chicken respectively, and makes sure to throw in some dinner party dynamite with headliners such as fresh mackerel cooked in pomegranate, lime juice and tequila, and a baked chocolate pudding that's almost too good to share.. Will you be able to get or give a better cookbook than Jamie's Kitchen? You could try, but we wouldn't bet on it. --Fiona Buckland |
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Chrome La Pavoni Europiccola espresso cappuccino coffee maker, with milk frother. Capacity 0.8 litre - up to 8 cups of espresso. Hand lever controlled steam pressure operation ensures coffee is made to your exact requirements. Automatic cappuccino attachment makes a perfect cappuccino every time. Valve device for warming and frothing milk. Large boiler ensures limescale deposits have minimal effect. Independent steam for other hot beverages. |
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Amazon.co.uk Review Ordinarily the word "lifestyle" is more likely to be applied to slender magazine articles puffing lofts full of Eames furniture rather than books about smallholdings in Dorset. The River Cottage Cookbook, however, is a hefty 450 pages of pure, gumbooted rural lifestyle; and one could not wish it shorter. Cook, broadcaster and food-writer-at-large Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been ensconced at River Cottage for a number of years, cultivating his vegetable garden, raising chickens, pigs and even cattle for his table, and taking occasional potshots at the local wildlife. His achievements have been chronicled on television; now they appear between hard covers. Although it calls itself a cookbook, and of course does Contain a large number of fine recipes, the scope is much broader. Really, this is more like one of those "Enquire Within on Everything" volumes nineteenth-century settlers used to take to the outback with them, full of instructions for mixing whitewash, worming dogs, or making a bag pudding. Starting with vegetables, proceeding to livestock and fish (River Cottage does indeed have a river and is only five miles from the sea) and concluding with the wild food, floral and faunal, of the hedgerow, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall explains how he grows, gathers, kills and cooks his own food. There is a lot of information here, and a lot of hard reality, too: he is very clear and forthright about the place of death in this kind of life. But then this is a very clear and forthright book overall, a very engaging and really quite inspirational manual of how to live the country life so many of us dream about. Well-illustrated, too, with Simon Wheeler's fine photographs of Hugh at work chasing chickens, skinning eels, carrying piglets and so on. The food in the River Cottage kitchen looks wonderful, too, though the photo of a cod-head glaring resentfully from under a beehive of parsley in a stock pot carries many more resonances than it is possible to summarise here. - Robin Davidson. |
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Spice rack in chrome. Supplied with 12 empty spice jars - from John Lewis. |
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Amazon.co.uk Review Book Description 'I have always been a slave to juice, that sweet, heady nectar that dribbles down your chin and drips onto your chest. Juice is what takes fruit from being simply a pleasure into a sensual experience.' In this inspiring collection of juicing ideas, Nigel Slater suggests elegant combinations, comforting and indulgent old favourites, and clean-tasting, revitalising ideas. The countless health benefits are an added bonus, a 'glorious freebie'. The recipes are all here because they are delicious.M With his characteristic no-nonsense approach to food, Nigel Slater will convince the most ardent sceptics of the joys to be discovered in delicious combinations of fruit and vegetable juices. Exquisitely photographed, THIRST is a glorious, mouthwatering collection from the bestselling food writer who revels in the simple pleasures of eating and drinking. Food writer Nigel Slater turns his enthusiasm for the pleasures of eating to the pleasures of drinking fresh juices. His book, full of recipes and advice, celebrates the pleasures to be gained from the "nectar of the gods". He explains that once you reconcile yourself to cleaning your juicer you're hooked: the benefits of a glass of fruit and vegetable juice can be felt almost immediately. In this collection of juicing ideas, he suggests elegant combinations (pear and watercress), comforting old favourites (banana, milk & honey), and clean-tasting, revitalising ideas (pineapple mint shake). For Slater, the health benefits - which are clearly explained - are an added bonus, a "glorious freebie". |
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Amazon.co.uk Review A Cook's Tour is the written record of Tony Bourdain's travels around the world in his search for the perfect meal. All too conscious of the state of his 44-year old knees (Crunch! Pop! Snap!) after a working life standing at restaurant stoves, but with the unlooked-for jackpot of Kitchen Confidential as collateral, Mr Bourdain evidently concluded he needed a bit more wind under his wings. The idea of "perfect meal" in this context is to be taken to mean not necessarily the most upscale, chi-chi, three-star dining experience, but the ideal combination of food, atmosphere and company. This would take in fishing villages in Vietnam, bars in Cambodia and Tuareg camps in Morocco (roasted sheep's testicle, as it happens); it would stretch to smoked fish and sauna in the frozen Russian countryside and the French Laundry in California's Napa Valley. It would mean exquisitely refined kaiseki rituals in Japan after yakitori with drunken salarimen. Deep-fried Mars Bars in Glasgow and Gordon Ramsay in London. The still-beating heart of a cobra in Saigon. Drink. Danger. Guns. All with a TV crew in tow for the accompanying series --22 episodes of video gold, we are assured, featuring many don't-try-this-at-home shots of Tony in gastric distress or crawling into yet another storm drain at four in the morning. You are unlikely to lay your hands on a more hectically, strenuously entertaining book for some time. Our hero eats and swashbuckles round the globe with perfect-pitch attitude and liberal use of judiciously placed profanities. Bourdain can write. His timing is great. He is very funny and is under no illusions whatsoever about himself or anyone else. So far, so PJ O'Rourke. But most of all, he is a chef who got himself out of his kitchen and found, all over the world, people who understand that eating well is the foundation of harmonious living. Robin Davidson Synopsis Anthony Bourdain, life-long line cook and bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential, sets off to eat his way around the world. But being Anthony Bourdain, this was never going to be a conventional culinary tour. Inspired by Apocalypse Now, Bourdain heads out to Saigon where he eats the still-beating heart of a live cobra (washed down with its blood), and then into Cambodia, the Heart of Darkness, where he travels deep into landmined Khmer Rouge territory to find the rumoured Wild West of Cambodia (Pailin). Other stops include dining with gangsters in Russia, a medieval pig slaughter and feast in northern Portugal, the Basque All Male Gastronomique Society in Saint Sebastian, paladars in Cuba (Commie Beach Party), rural Mexico with his Mexican sous-chef, a pilgrimage to the French Laundry in the Napa Valley and a return to his roots in the tiny fishing village of La Teste, where he first ate an oyster as a child. Written with the inimitable machismo and humour that has made Tony Bourdain such a sensation. A Cook's Tour is an adventure story sure to give you indigestion. |
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With the wealth of cookbooks around at the moment, Kevin Gould's witty and irreverent Dishy (subtitled "Real Food for Real People") is something of a treat. The easy-to-follow, step-by-step recipes range from classic coq au vin, mackerel with sharp fruit, lamb cutlets with smooth chickpeas and panfried monkfish with roasted garlic. Choose side dishes such as the enticingly named "velvet spinach" (the secret's in the creme fraïche) and butter baked witloof (a type of chicory from Belgium, for those not in the know). Desserts are healthy (misted fresh fruit) or downright wicked (grand pot au chocolat). What makes Dishy stand out, however, is its bright, colourful design and tongue-in-cheek humour--it's packed full of colour photographs, cartoons and witticisms galore (a double-page spread of fluffy chickens precedes instructions on how to cook them); a recipe for a whole roast duck cooked with a hairdryer faces one for goose with curling tongs and crimpers. Buy the book to find out which one is genuine. The best touch is the list of imaginatively titled menu suggestions at the end of Dishy--there's the "Hoping to Get Lucky" menu, the "Two Couples of Similar Social Standing Who've Known Each Other for Ages, and Are Talking About Holidays" menu, "Intelligent Documentary TV Dinner" (a lot of leaf salad and furrowed brow), the Soap TV dinner (refried tomato spaghetti and release of trouser button) and the pièce de resistance, the "Impressing A Couple You Call Your Friends But Don't Really Know That Well" menu (prawns and wilted rocket and guessing each other's incomes). Dishy is a book of visual delights to chuckle over--oh, and has some genuinely interesting recipes as well. --Catherine Taylor June Hughes writes: Having read it from cover to cover in just a short space of time, I am not sure whether I am mad or whether it is merely a very bad joke. However, some of the things it says are far from mad and indeed are rather interesting, if somewhat perverse in presentation. For example, it has flowcharts for recipes (not a new idea but vividly illustrated and with comments that sometimes astound). |
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Larousse Gastronomique, the classic cookery encyclopedia, is known worldwide for its authoritative and comprehensive account of the culinary world. Originally created by Prosper Montagne and published in 1938, Larousse Gastronomique is an invaluable source of information for the enthusiastic cook and serious gastronome alike, whether your interest is in the mythological origins of ambrosia, or how best to use a marinade. Revised and updated with many new entries, illustrations and charts, Gastronomique covers almost every ingredient and cooking style in history past and present, from abaisse to zuppa inglese. Detailed information and maps of the wine producing regions of the world, includes New World producers such as Chile and Australla. Advice on using appliances; recipes; and developments in nutrition, Larousse Gastronomique holds all the answers. |
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Most diners believe that their sublime sliver of seared foie gras, topped with an ethereal buckwheat blini and a drizzle of piquant huckleberry sauce, was created by a culinary artist of the highest order, a sensitive, highly refined executive chef. The truth is more brutal. More likely, writes Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, that elegant three-star concoction is the collaborative effort of a team of "wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts, and psychopaths," in all likelihood pierced or tattooed and incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive or a foreign phrase. Such is the muscular view of the culinary trenches from one who's been groveling in them, with obvious sadomasochistic pleasure, for more than 20 years. Bourdain, currently the executive chef of the celebrated Les Halles, wrote two culinary mysteries before his first (and infamous) New Yorker essay launched this frank confessional about the lusty and larcenous real lives of cooks and restaurateurs. He is obscenely eloquent, unapologetically opinionated, and a damn fine storyteller--a Jack Kerouac of the kitchen. Those without the stomach for this kind of joyride should note his opening caveat: "There will be horror stories. Heavy drinking, drugs, screwing in the dry-goods area, unappetizing industry-wide practices. Talking about why you probably shouldn't order fish on a Monday, why those who favour well-done get the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, and why seafood frittata is not a wise brunch selection.... But I'm simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I've seen it." --Sumi Hahn |
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Peter Mayle, author of the bestselling A Year in Provence has done it again--but differently. Travelling this time beyond his adopted Provence throughout France, the food and travel writer has produced Bon Appetit!, a celebration of many of the country's gastronomic joys. Whether pursuing La Foire de Fromages, the annual cheese fair at Livarot; a Burgundian marathon offering runners Médoc refreshment; or a village truffle mass that concludes with a heady dégustation of the newly blessed tuber, Mayle takes his readers in hand and shows all. Wide-eyed yet knowing, ever affable but with a touch of mischief, he's an ideal companion, the best possible narrator of his lively food adventures. Mayle's gastronomic baptism occurs when, as a 19-year-old, he dines for the first time in France. "At the first mouthful of French bread and French butter," he writes, "my taste buds, dormant until then, went into spasm." The paroxysm leads to serious food-and-wine perambulations--and, finally, to chapters including "The Thigh-Taster of Vitel" (a frog-eating fete), "Slow Food" (snail love in Martigny les Bains) and "The Guided Stomach" (an investigation of the Michelin Guide restaurant inspection) among others. Readers are also present for a debate on the secret of the perfect omelette, a search for the best possible chicken in Bourg-en-Bresse and a visit to a St Tropez restaurant notable for its scantily clad habitués. Those familiar with Mayle's work, and those yet to discover it, are in for a treat. --Arthur Boehm |
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John Humphrys, broadcaster, writer, farmer and consumer, has written The Great Food Gamble to address the serious questions he and many of his audience have about the food on our tables in the wake of BSE, foot and mouth, and concerns about the effects of factory farming practices on the nation's health and environment. Humphrys knowledgeably traces such intensive agricultural practices to British food policy from the end of the Second World War to ask whether the relentless drive for more and more food has been a mistake and whether the risks we run are worth it to have what may ultimately prove to be an illusion of choice. Are there really no alternatives, he asks? As readers of Devil's Advocate and listeners to Radio 4's Today programme will no doubt expect, Humphrys has a no-nonsense approach. He has little time or patience with mealy-mouthed politicking. Industrial practices, backed up by political will, is costing our health and our environment too dear, he argues. He counts the cost of intensive factory farming, not only in terms of the destruction of our rural heritage, long-term environmental effects and mounting health concerns about the use of antibiotics and pesticides, but the hard cash cost of subsidies and cleaning up pollution that put the lie to the food industry's claim of providing "cheap" food. Humphrys adds his voice to the great food industry debate along with George Monbiot's critique of the supermarket's control of food production in Captive State and Eric Schlosser's stomach-churning analysis of our unfortunate infatuation with fast food in Fast Food Nation. Humphrys' prose is unashamedly popular: evocative and even nostalgic for a fast disappearing experience of the British countryside, even as he stops short of being romantic. If this means that he substitutes rhetoric for detail, he remains bang on target and knows that to engage people in this debate and connect it effectively to their lives is the most effective way to counter the enormous power wielded by the other side. A bitter harvest indeed.--Fiona Buckland |
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 Waitrose have joined forces with Food Illustrated Magazine, to bring you an improved and authoritative monthly magazine. The Waitrose Food Illustrated commitment is to quality food writing and fine photography. Each month you will find a mix of intriguing and inspiring features about food and wine, and people who create, produce and cook. Delivered FREE throughout the UK!
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Rowley Leigh's stylish No Place Like Home is a vigorously argued treatise in praise of home cooking. Strange, perhaps, for a metropolitan restaurant chef--but Leigh's food is noted for its simplicity, seasonality and truth of flavour. Here he concentrates on food that is better when done at home than in a restaurant. A roast leg of lamb rather than a piece of grilled chump; summer pudding rather than a Grand Marnier soufflé. Cassoulet; breast of veal with pork, spinach and garlic stuffing; baked quinces with cinnamon and Vin Santo. This is wonderful food--rich, savoury, elegant and designed to bring out the best in the ingredients. Leigh covers all the basics--roasts, stews, perfect mash and so on--but also gives himself room for a welcome idiosyncrasy. The book is cleverly structured: it falls into four seasonal parts, each of which contains a number of complete three-course meals for different types of occasion--Easter Sunday Lunch, Alfresco Dinner, Halloween Night, Boxing Day Lunch are some of these exemplars. (Leigh acknowledges that few people care nowadays to cook three courses for every meal, but as he says, the recipes are there if you want them.) Additionally, three starch Interludes contain meditations on potatoes, rice and pasta. Leigh is devoted to British food, as you can tell from his flag-waving spring meal to impress foreigners: sea kale with blood orange hollandaise; sea trout fillet with a horseradish crust, served with Jersey Royal potatoes; and rhubarb fool. The book is greatly enhanced by good photography (good in that it actually shows what the food should look like) and by Lucinda Rogers' witty line-drawings, so reminiscent of Elizabeth David's early illustrators. --Robin Davidson |
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 Full colour consumer lifestyle magazine on food, health and nutrition for those who want to eat well, feel fit and look good !
Coverage dedicated to giving readers the truth about food. Filled with features regarding nutritional, medical and scientific research, allergies, recipes, interviews and readers medical queries plus a whole lot more.
Delivered FREE throughout the UK!
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What is there to say about a new Nigel Slater book? Especially one called Appetite. It is exactly what it should be. This is the book he has been heading for all along. It is about food, to be sure, but it is also a statement of his personal philosophy, which seems to amount to this: that our appetites are founded in pleasure; and that we must interrogate those pleasures, and take them very seriously indeed, if we are to eat as well as we can. To eat well means to eat, and cook, pleasurably. So in Appetite Slater takes food, and cooking, back to where he believes it belongs, back to the realm of sensuous pleasure and comfort. Back to the sheer bliss, as he might say, of putting something warm, soft and sticky in your mouth. Very cleverly, he has built his book not around detailed recipes as such--that would be too specific for his purposes--but around the sort of thing that might pop into your head as something you would really like to eat. No one says "I fancy Shallow Fried Herring Milt with Sherry Vinegar, Parsley and Butter Sauce tonight"; but they might well think of a Creamy, Calming Pasta Dish, or a Big Fish Pie, or Bangers and Mash. They might like to know, too, some of the endless variations they can play on these platonic essences. These are the kinds of food this generous and handsome book celebrates; foods that have a genuine part to play in people's lives. This is quintessential Nigel Slater, laid-back, not claiming any special privilege as a chef ("If I can do it, so can you" he remarks); and all wrapped up in that wonderful, lived-in, squashy prose that hits the spot every time. A feast of a book, from a man with no tricks or gimmicks, who is happily in touch with his own appetites and wants to put us in touch with ours.--Robin Davidson Jamie Oliver
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The Lost Gardens of Heligan are home to an impressive range of old varieties of vegetables, saved by enthusiasts from the onslaught of supermarket giants and EU regulations. This book puts the vegetables to the ultimate test: that of flavour. |
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Claudia Roden's beautiful book, Tamarind and Saffron, marks a return to the food of her origins and of her first book, the ground-breaking Book of Middle Eastern Food. It also signals something of a return, after the historical and cultural investigations of the acclaimed Book of Jewish Food, to food pure and simple. Perhaps half of the recipes in the new book are favourites from that first volume but, in recognition that Middle Eastern food is a complex and living tradition subject to national, regional, local and even family variation, many of these are given in new forms. These new versions may represent a lighter form, with oil instead of butter, with shorter cooking times and baking instead of frying; or they may illustrate the different view another national tradition might take of spicing, with Moroccan garlic, saffron, ginger and preserved lemon replaced by Syrian allspice and cinnamon, or Tunisian harissa. So, for example, you might care to try the ravishing succession of "Celeriac and Carrots with a Hazelnut and Yoghurt Sauce", "Moroccan Pumpkin Soup", "Spinach Pies with Raisins and Pine Nuts", "Squid with Garlic and Chillis", "Quails with Grapes", "Lamb with Quince", "Iranian Sweet Jewelled Rice", "Prunes Stuffed with Walnuts in Orange Juice", "Pistachio Ice Cream". This really is one of the great world cuisines, at its best representing fantastically sophisticated cooking. Claudia Roden is rightly regarded as one of its greatest exponents. --Robin Davidson |
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Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food has been over 20 years in the assembling, but here it is; and it is superlatively worth the wait. In fact, superlatives fall silent. A huge and authoritative dictionary of 2,650 entries on just about every conceivable foodstuff, seasoning, cuisine, cooking method, historical survey, significant personage and explication of myth, it is supplemented by some 40 longer articles on key items. Davidson himself (no relation) contributes approximately 80% of the 2,650 entries, thereby guaranteeing high levels of erudition, readability and deadpan feline wit. Since this is a monument intended to last, nothing so frivolous as a recipe is included. A decision taken early in the development of the project to abjure issues whose significance is largely topical has also ensured an agreeable high-mindedness--nothing on those crucial but essentially dreary topics BSE and GM foods, for example. |
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No sense is left unengaged by wine. Even our ears are
involved--for who can deny the cheerfulness of the
glugging sound as the wine slides into the glass? Or the
sigh as the cork leaves the neck of the bottle? Wine, for Malcolm Gluck, is not a long-suffering ritual, a status symbol, or a hallowed rite; still less is the acquisition of wine knowledge a weapon to wield in order to score points. Wine is the sensational liquid because it is not only life-enhancing, healthy and civilised but because it tantalises and satisfies all the senses: sight, smell, taste, touch and, yes, even hearing. In this ground-breaking book, you will discover what's really worth knowing about wine. What can you tell from looking at wine? What can you discern from its smell? What happens to a grape to make it taste the way it does when it becomes wine? You will acquire tasting technique; learn about glasses, vineyards, gender differences, wine books and wine tutors. Malcolm Gluck's passion for wine and his stimulating, emphatic, illuminating style are evident on every page. Wine is not a code given only to an elite to crack. It is a delicious pleasure which anyone can embrace. If you wish to have your eyes, nose and mouth opened to the greater riches of wine, you have only to open this book--any page will do. Its fulfilling fruits are not difficult to pick. |
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Richard Corrigan is a young chef who, having grown up in the Irish countryside, has made his reputation in London. His cooking, like the recipes he has published in The Richard Corrigan Cookbook, is strikingly imaginative and stylish, managing to encompass comforting simplicity and bold innovation. His philosophy, if that is the word, is indicated by his subtitle, "From the Waters and the Wild", a Yeatsian phrase emphasising the primacy that Corrigan places on fresh, seasonal produce (but which chef does not?). The book, which is full of intriguing dishes, is accordingly organised seasonally. The flavours are mostly British, with occasional touches of France, Italy, Spain, the Middle East, India, China ... The simpler ideas include winning items such as "Spring Vegetable Soup with Bacon Dumplings", "Young Turnips with Amontillado" or "Sorbet of Charentais Melons with Strawberry Sauce". Conceits requiring more skill and patience would include "Rack of Spring Lamb with Lamb Sweetbreads and Spiced Aubergines", "Sea Bass with Asparagus and Clam Vinaigrette", "Mallard with Pineapple and Pak Choi" or the brilliant "Saddle of Rabbit with Black Pudding, Roast Vegetable and Wild Mushroom Juice". Perhaps the most startling of Corrigan's innovations is the use of sweet tobacco-flavoured syrup (Old Holborn is specified) to accompany a fig tart. There is something very exciting indeed about this. |
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Richard Whittington has a no-nonsense approach to food, which is reflected in the titles of his books (Alastair Little: Keep it Simple and Food of the Sun) and his column in the Daily Mail ("The Cookery Doctor"). It's a recipe, so to speak, which has worked for him--he has won the Glenfiddich Food Book of the Year and he is regarded as one of Britain's finest food writers. Home Food: Exploring the World's Best Cooking continues the tradition. The book contains hundreds of well-chosen recipes which aren't gimmicky. Every recipe is achievable, being easy to prepare and carefully structured to maximise kitchen efficiency. They don't rely on excessive use of any one ingredient for impact and they are not described with adjectives like "wicked" or "sinful", words that some find go irresistibly with puddings. "Balance is the antithesis of self-conscious presentation," he writes. "I am not impressed if the sauce is pearled in equidistant and precisely uniform blobs around the circumference of a plate or the food built into towers that crash messily when prodded with a fork." His food is the good food of common sense and all our senses are involved in its enjoyment. |
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If California was a country, points out Stephen Brook, it would be the fourth largest wine producer in the world, after Italy, France and Spain. Consequently The Wines of California is a hefty tome, taking nearly 700 pages to explore this vast quasi-nation. The very special qualities that characterise Californian wines, however, are summed up by Brook in a single word: Generosity. It is the near-perfect climate that ensures the reliability of the harvests and the "rich, full- bodied, fleshy, opulent" qualities that Brook so prizes and which he communicates with such enthusiasm to his readers. His dedication and profound knowledge of the region are apparent everywhere and the result is an invaluable companion to the buying and drinking of Californian wine. California is sometimes seen as a wine- producing monolith. This book offers a useful corrective, discussing production at a local level. |
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Fred Plotkin's book provides 200 recipes to bring cooks the taste of Liguria - the Italian Riviera. The Ligurian diet offers an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, seafood, olive oil, cheeses and fragrant herbs for antipasti, bread, pasta and rice dishes. A chapter is also included on the wines of the region. |
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A collection of modern recipes for sourdough breads, cakes, biscuits and pastries, written for the home baker and tested in domestic ovens. Practical methods that demystify sourdough baking, and simplify some of the more complicated aspects of cake and pastry work. Baker & Spice supplies bread to some of London's leading restaurants, including the award-winning River Cafe, Zafferano, The Sugar Club, The Gavroche, and the Four Seasons Hotel. Founded in 1996 by Gail Stephens, the bakery has gained an international reputation for extraordinary craft baking. and the book contains many of the secrets worked in their ovens underneath Walton Street, Knightsbridge. |
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Explains the complicated hows and whys of wine-making, describing how the countless different options available to the modern wine-maker influence the character and taste of the final product |
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Worried about which glass to use for which wine at
dinner parties? Having a cutlery crisis? Faced with a
globe artichoke for the first time? Stumped for a simple
but stylish supper menu? Paul Burrell has the answers in Entertaining with
Style. This useful volume is packed with solid
information about dinner-party etiquette (including
instructions on how to eat such difficult social-indicator
foods as asparagus, fresh fruit, the dreaded artichoke
and even cheese), planning and executing a wedding,
flower arrangements for several occasions and dealing
with unwanted guests (greet them warmly, then deal at a
later date with whoever so inconsiderately brought them).
A collection of seasonal menus covers the gamut of social
eventualities from a Romantic Dinner for Two, by way of a
Summer Wedding and a Spring Family Lunch, to a Christmas
Lunch and New Year's Drinks and Canape Party. The recipes
are pleasant, uncomplicated British classics, such as
"Beef Wellington", "Simnel Cake",
"Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding" and "Punch
Jelly". The clincher, though, is that Paul Burrell used to be butler first to the Prince and Princess of Wales and later to the Princess alone. His pride in having served the Princess, and his affection for her and her memory, are touchingly evident throughout. Many of the recipes are revealed to be royal favourites. Nuggets of information about the running of royal households are discreetly distributed. The risks of kitsch or tastelessness in a project like this, it must be said, are high, and by and large they have been avoided. --Robin Davidson |
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You have to have a real fizz fetish to buy this for
yourself, but it's a great present for someone who has
more than just a passing interest in posh sparkling wine
and who owns a large, glamorous coffee table. That's not to say that all the wines featured are posh, but it would be too sadistic to put a review of Laurent-Perrier's Cuvée Grand Siècle 1952 (or the more readily available 1990) in front of a Champagne fan who couldn't afford to buy a bottle.Tom Stevenson has very forceful opinions and great technical tasting abilities. His beautifully put together reference book has been exhaustively researched and his knowledge of people, places and wines that feature here is second-to- none. If there's a criticism, it would be that the book lacks heart. The author has had more expertise in sparkling wines than any other style--his specialist subject would deny Magnus Magnuson of any "passes". His book, Champagne, was a milestone on the topic and won him just one of his current holding of 22 literary awards. The book has been produced in association with Christies, for whom he gives an annual Champagne Master Class. Buy the book and a few bottles of the most highly recommended sparklers; invite a few friends 'round; forget the Master Class. |
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The Chinese Kitchen is a magnificent book, like no other on Chinese food. The sheer range of substances--animal, vegetable and occasionally mineral-- that are incorporated into Chinese cooking can be daunting to the Western cook. The underlying philosophy, too, can be elusive. In this engrossing volume, Deh-Ta Hsiung has compiled a survey of the principal characteristic ingredients of this great cuisine, in all its regional variants. This is really an encyclopaedia of Chinese food, a magisterial study of 100 key foodstuffs and their place not so much in cooking as in Chinese life and culture as a whole. Beginning with fan, the rice or wheaten flour breads, noodles and dumplings that form the starch staple, and moving through the main food categories, Deh-Ta Hsiung gives an account of the item's history, varieties, means of production, appearance and taste. He offers invaluable advice on buying and storage, on its role in Chinese and western medicine and health, and, most importantly, outlines its culinary uses. Among the most difficult to assimilate into any Western notions are the "texture" foods: largely tasteless, gelatinous substances such as bird's nest, shark's fin and sea cucumber, these include some of the most sought-after delicacies and can command extraordinary prices. The Chinese Kitchen gives the clearest possible explanation of why these foods are so prized. Some 200 recipes, many of them classics, adorn the book, illuminating the character and versatility of the ingredients. This is a most exciting volume, at once a reference work that deserves to become a standard and an introduction to the intricacies of Chinese food and cooking. --Robin Davidson |
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