The River Cottage Cookbook - Hardcover

Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007375271 ISBN 13: 9780007375271

Publisher: Collins, 2011

Synopsis

More than just a collection of Hugh's recipes, this book is a witty, practical guide to the River Cottage lifestyle from Channel 4's iconoclastic back-to-basics chef. Includes tips on how best to buy organic produce and, for the more adventurous, advice on rearing your own meat, growing your own vegetables, and tapping into the free wild harvest.

‘How much of this book you incorporate into your life is up to you. But if all you do is grow a few herbs in a window box, make nettle soup once a year, and try a free-range goose for Christmas instead of a frozen turkey, you will already, I hope, be enjoying your life more.’ Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

With over one hundred recipes and Simon Wheeler’s acclaimed photography, The River Cottage Cookbook has been a hugely influential and original book, appealing to all downshifters and those who prefer their food to be full-blooded and wholesome.

The River Cottage Cookbook has won the Andre Simon Food Book of the Year Award, the Guild of Food Writers’ Michael Smith Award and the Glenfiddich Trophy and Food Book of the Year.

This new edition’s preface looks back at River Cottage from the perspective of 2011. The book also includes new recipes, new pictures and an updated directory that reflects the changes over the past ten years.

About this title

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 does contain a large number of fine recipes, the book's scope is much broader. Really, this is more like one of those "Enquire Within on Everything" volumes 19th-century settlers used to take to the outback with them, full of instructions for mixing whitewash, worming dogs and 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. It's 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

Review:

A magnificently unsqueamish collection of instructions and recipes -- Nicci Gerrard, Observer, 25 November 2001

A practical and lively smallholder's bible, essential reading ... I am prepared to bet this will prove one of my favourite cookery titles this year -- Philippa Davenport, Financial Times, 17 February 2001

As good for the armchair as it is in the kitchen, even worth packing for reference outdoors -- Tom Jaine, Guardian, 17 March 2001

About this edition

• Publisher: Collins
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0007375271
• ISBN 13: 9780007375271
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448