“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”, so wrote Mark Twain and it is true that it often harder to say what you mean in a few words.
The art of concise, clear writing is equally applicable to food and the art of cooking can similarly be described. Elizabeth David wrote eloquently and elegantly about an omelette and a glass of wine, waxing lyrical about ingredients, method, outcome, woven into essays on place, time and mood. But whilst it is great, and rarely easy, to do the apparently simple sublimely well, there is more to life.
Our shorthand cooking, like scribbled notes, is so often tried, tested and repeated staples. There is nothing wrong with these reliable and beloved dishes, but the magic ingredient missing from these is neither time nor money, but imagination. They are recreated, without the need to think, on a wet Wednesday after work and fill our bellies, but do not enliven an otherwise uneventful evening.
This book changes all of that, turns simplicity upside down and demonstrates how simple cooking can create deep, complex, layered flavours to enliven a weekday supper or wow a weekend supper party!
From a self confessed "bung it in the oven" kind of cook, Diana Henry's From the Oven to the Table is the book we all need. She has rigorously applied an editor's blue pencil to the four page, 28 ingredient dishes we can never face attempting and given us straightforward recipes that you will not think twice about making, but which will delight and amaze you. Diana has done most of the hard work for us and your oven will finish the job.
There are combinations of ingredients that I can guarantee you would never have dreamt of yourself. Take the recipe on page 66.
How many of you have ever thought about cooking aubergines with butter? You there, at the back with your hand up - really? No, I thought not. Then add saffron, garlic, ground ginger (a sadly neglected spice, reserved for biscuits and usurped in our culinary affections by the fresh root version), black cardamom and dates.
The result, I have to tell you, is beyond the descriptive powers of this writer, but licked plates were perhaps the best testament to the joy of this dish.
I could go on and on, I wont, I don't want to bore you. I just want to say that you should buy this book because you will enjoy reading it, there is always more than recipes to Diana's book, and you will definitely cook from it time and time again.
Yes, that is a 12" prospector pan on the front cover - buy one of those too!
Netherton Foundry Shropshire 2019 ©
That pan is on my wishlist! And everything we’ve cooked from this book so far has been amazing.
ReplyDeleteIsn’t it simply wonderful. We had roast salmon with beans this evening
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