In praise of the good old fashioned Cookery Book…

Who reading this still buys cookery books? I know they seem a little old fashioned in current times, but I have to admit that I still love a cookery book and I know I’m not alone in this. I would wager that there are lots of us squirreling away books with pages covered in flour, spicy fingerprints and scrawled notes in the margins. If you were to walk around my house, you would find two bookshelves dedicated to current favourites, a shelf for baking, an overflow shelf for the current favourites shelf and lastly, a dusty old shelf stuffed with cookery books that I should probably get rid of but can’t quite bring myself to. 

Every once in a while, my husband will mention that we do seem to have quite a lot of cookery books and maybe we don’t need all of them (he does this about my running book collection too – to look at it you’d think I’m some kind of ex-olympian, not a slightly obsessive 38 year old). It always falls on deaf ears – I might need a recipe from one of those books one day.

Despite the fact that we can all access any recipe for any food we could imagine in seconds thanks to the internet, physically turning the pages of a book, folding over corners and making shopping lists for potential recipes is still one of my favourite things to do. Sat in bed on a sunday morning with a coffee and a stack of cookery books, lazily planning the day’s eating and cooking is my idea of heaven.

There are a few that particularly stand out for me –  I once bought Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookery book ‘Notes From My Kitchen Table’ after a few glasses of wine, slowly remembering when the Amazon parcel came through the door a few days later. That book was so pleased with itself that it had forgotten that food is there to be enjoyed – one of few books to have been culled.

Then there’s the pistachio nubuck, decoratively boxed Laduree book that I spent weeks searching online for, only for its (beautiful, embossed) box to be scribbled on in biro by one of the resident toddlers within a week of it entering the house. What was I thinking?

In amongst weird purchases like the mottled second hand old fashioned books bought on a whim in a charity shop, or the persian/vietnamese/whatever is currently trendy book that I saw at a friends house or on social media, there are also favourites that I revisit time and time again –

The Riverford Farm cookbook – this came free with my veg box a long time ago and is full of sensible recipes that work. I have since bought copies as gifts for people and it’s always been well received.

Nigella Bites – One of my first cookery books. I learned to cook with this in my early twenties and for a long time the linguine with garlic oil, pancetta and parsley was my go-to dish when friends came over for dinner. A dish that we would serve with bottles of £5 wine from the shop at the end of the road, 20 Marlboro lights and a Moby playlist.. (actually I made the linguine again not very long ago and it’s still good – these days without the accompaniments).

Every book Bill Granger has ever written. I know it seems lazy not to pick just one, but I honestly can’t. I love Bill Granger’s food – the recipes all work, are delicious, and cater to every level of motivation from ‘really cannot be arsed’, to ‘desperate to impress’. Plus, Bill doesn’t need you to go out and find honey from bilingual bees (I’m looking at you, Ina Garten) and he won’t hold it against you if you don’t own a selection of heavy based copper pans (sorry, Raymond Blanc). The icing on the cake is the food photography – full of sunlight and beautiful crockery. It’s because he lives in Sydney isn’t it? I’m green with envy.

Richard Bertinet – Pastry – I also have his books Dough and Crust and like them equally. I think the format and layout of his books work brilliantly. They are easy to follow and full of useful photos, my daughter has started to use these recently too.

So that’s it – my roundup of current favourites and a weak justification for all those books crammed into shelves around my home. Let me know which cookery book you couldn’t live without. I’m off to show this to my husband…

Why the humble tart should be your go-to summer dish.

Thought to have sprung from medieval pie making traditions, there’s a reason that tarts are such a popular summer food. Although I love them all year round,  when the weather is warm and cooking feels like a bit of an effort, they come into their own as a deceptively hard working foodstuff – hear me out…

Made with whatever pastry you can lay your hands on, be it shop bought puff, a sweet short dessert pastry (or, if you’ve a bit of time on your hands some herby shortcrust), making a tart is as labour intensive as you want it to be. A sweet or savoury dish that’s on the table inside of 45 minutes and needs nothing more than a salad or a (huge) dollop of clotted cream, It’s a brilliant catch all for a fridge full of leftover ingredients or to use up the odds and ends from your fruit and veg box. And the best bit is that if you make it big enough, you’ve got tomorrow’s lunch sorted as well.

This week we had the end of a piece of Blue Boy from Country Cheeses in Topsham to use up (if you haven’t already tried it -it’s delicious!). With some creme fraîche, spinach and marinated artichokes it made a great little puff pastry tart – virtually no effort and cheap to boot.

Blue Bay, spinach and marinated artichokes with creme fraiche.

When you’re feeling a bit more committed to the kitchen, or have a spare bit of baking time it’s easy to upgrade your toppings with cured meats or fresh seafood and a slow cooked sauce as a base. Another version is the French Galette which is traditionally made with buckwheat flour –  making the crust is actually very easy and I love the golden, folded over edges. That said, this recipe from the fabulous Lavender and Lovage uses puff pastry and always goes down brilliantly with guests.

I could go on and on with this topic – on the sweet side, the list is pretty much endless….portugese custard tarts, tarte tatin and rhubarb with ginger are just a few suggestions, proving (in my opinion!) that as a low effort mainstay – the tart is a real workhorse. Let me know what you think – tag me in your tart recipes on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter – extra points for photos!

Peaches soaked in sauternes, blueberries and a lemon marscapone cream.

Why I love to bake…

I have always had a healthy interest in food (read that as ‘I have always been quite greedy’). As a child, some of my favourite memories involved being allowed to choose a mandarin yoghurt at the end of the Sainsbury’s shop, picking fruit at Pick-Fresh to make jam with my mum and sisters and having chicken cobbler with tiny button mushrooms for tea on chilly days, served with mash and fine green beans (I hated the green beans). But I was never that bothered about baking.

Later on, my favourite treat was to go out for dinner – especially if it was for a chinese which in late eighties Devon, was the height of teenage sophistication. As an adult, going out for dinner is still absolutely my favourite thing, but life gets in the way and with small children, ‘friends over for dinner’ replaces ‘out with friends for dinner’ as the new norm. So you up your culinary skills and rejoice in the fact that Cards Against Humanity is much better played at home anyway. But I could never really be arsed with making a pudding as well, so broken slabs of whatever posh chocolate was on offer were bunged on the table instead.

A few years ago I belonged to an all female supper club, as good friends we were more than happy to be honest about the climbing level of competition and as the weeks went on, I remember wanting to make some lemon Macarons that I had seen Nick Nairn wow the Masterchef judges with.

31 batches of Macarons I made. 31 BATCHES. Each one as terrible as the last but in a slightly different way. One month later, after buying three books on macarons, countless bits of kit, trialling french vs italian meringue, googling the meaning of tant pour tant (nope – if I had to, so do you) and feverishly monitoring oven thermometers, I served perfect lemon Macarons with popping candy shells to my supper club guests – who had the decency to look exactly as impressed as I had hoped they would.

And I haven’t stopped baking since. I discovered the therapeutic qualities of precisely following a recipe, tweaking, adjusting it and eventually make it your own. I learned that choux pastry is an absolute doddle but looks really impressive at the end, that Friands are utterly delicious and Clafoutis is not. I also learned that I never want to decorate a cake using fondant again. It doesn’t always end well, but that’s ok (all the swearing might understandably cause bystanders to think otherwise), baking has become a way of giving myself time to slow down and not think about anything other than the task in hand, which to me is absolute bliss.