No Place Like Home - Softcover

Rowley Leigh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007232411 ISBN 13: 9780007232413

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2006

Synopsis

A celebration of home cooking by the chef at one of London’s top British restaurants.

’Some things are better cooked in restaurants: that’s why people go to them. But the converse is equally true. There are plenty of dishes that no restaurant does properly.’

Distinguished chef and food writer Rowley Leigh places these dishes at the heart of his first book. Home cooking is celebrated for its simplicity, seasonality and the delights of eating at home and cooking for friends. This encompasses the art of making good gravy, sautéing potatoes and grilling sea bass, as well as digressions into Euro food, Australian cricket and the strangeness of rhubarb, amongst others. Menus are based on events such as Boxing Day lunch, Hallowe’en Night and a May birthday lunch for a ‘fishetarian’ aunt.

Beautifully written and illustrated with original line drawings and colour photography, this is an elegant, witty and irresistible invitation to keep those home fires burning.

About this title

Product Description:

Rare Book

Review:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0007232411
• ISBN 13: 9780007232413
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Illustrator: Lucinda Rogers