Gary Rhodes Cookery Year: Spring into Summer

Rhodes, Gary

ISBN 10: 0563534206 / ISBN 13: 9780563534204

Published by BBC Books, 2007

Seller Inventory # 354627284

Synopsis:

Gary Rhodes is one of Britains best-loved television chefs, and has written over ten best-selling books for the BBC including New British Classics and Rhodes Around Britain. Divided into 2 books Spring into Summer and Autumn into Winter The Cookery Year shows us how to make the most of seasonal ingredients to produce delicious recipes bursting with flavour all year round. In Spring into Summer, now available in paperback, Gary guides us through the range of vegetables, salads, meat, fish and dairy products that are coming into season, and uses the very best of these in over 120 original recipes. Both a reference book and a source of inspiration, Spring into Summer is essential reading for experienced and novice cooks alike, and will help you rediscover the joy of cooking and eating the very best food.

Review: Cookery Year Spring Into Summer (the first of two volumes) is built upon the notion, which may be new to some readers, that foods tend to be seasonal and, by and large, are at their best in that season. Rhubarb, flounder, lamb and asparagus in spring; beetroot, broad beans and soft fruit in summer. Rhodes is first and foremost a restaurant chef, which, as he says, means that he is accustomed to an unlimited supply of fresh food from around the world all through the year: returning to the real world seems to have been a bit of a revelation.

It must also be his professional background that inclines him to present his recipes as complete servings--main dish and accompaniments. Grilled beef comes with baby turnips, marinated mushrooms and a beetroot dressing. Soaked lemon semolina wedge (a cake) with warm blueberries. Baked cheese puffs with fresh beetroot sauce. This is generous, but at the same time oddly limiting: it's hard to imagine many cooks taking these recipes into their repertoires and playing freely with them.

One hesitantly comes to the conclusion that Gary Rhodes inhabits a dimension not altogether congruent with the one occupied by the rest of us. There is, on the one hand, the fluent strangeness of his prose, in which verbs slip effortlessly from transitive to intransitive (main dish A "eats well" with garnish B, we keep being told). And the recipes themselves, on the other, invariably well-constructed and thought-provoking as they are, seem often to have arrived fully-formed from some mysterious other universe free of gastronomic tradition and history. What general principles can a cook extract from Roast Gurnard with Beetroot, White Bean and Orange Salad or Braised Beef Brisket with Tarragon Carrots and Cauliflower Champ?

Readers will be able to judge for themselves how liberating these combinations are. At any rate, it's a relief to find Rhodes largely eschewing his baffling enthusiasm for school dinners (no Gypsy Tart recipes here). --Robin Davidson

Bibliographic Details

Title: Gary Rhodes Cookery Year: Spring into Summer
Publisher: BBC Books
Publication Date: 2007
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: New