Food Lover’s Library

A series of beautifully-produced re-issues of some of the great classics of food and recipe-writing from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

The series is keenly priced at £9.99 and while collectible, each title stands alone due to the quality of the authorship.

This series will become the ultimate library for lovers of great food and food literature.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Seasonal English Cooking

by Rowley Leigh

Originally published in 2001 to enormous acclaim, Rowley Leigh superbly demonstrates the qualities inherent to this series – culinary genius combined with a distinctive literary style. Well known to a British audience through his weekly column in the Financial Times and his London restaurant, Le Café Anglais, it just felt wrong not to have this classic book in print for a fresh generation of readers.

Split into four chapters – Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter – Rowley picks out exactly what is in season, and devises menus for a variety of events which range from the downright amusing ‘club dinner for the rich uncle’, to a painstaking ‘the vegetarian in Lent’ to terrifying ‘still courting: a foursome’. There is nothing here that could not satisfy the most pernickety of diners, and Rowley ends each chapter with a practical hint on a particular subject, such as frying steak properly or a discourse on the Jerusalem artichoke.

With over 250 carefully selected recipes, a brilliant suppliers list and directory, the reader and cook is transported instantly into Rowley’s own kitchen at home, where simple, seasonal food is cooked as vibrantly as possible.

COOKING FOR CHRISTMAS

How to Plan, Survive and Enjoy Christmas

by Josceline Dimbleby

‘The moment that Britain changed from a nation that regarded olive oil as a pharmaceutical aid and garlic with deep suspicion, to a country comprised of cooking-obsessed epicureans can be traced to November 1978. This was the date when Sainsburys published a small book called Cooking for Christmas by Josceline Dimbleby’ Polly Russell, The Financial Times.

Over 60 mouthwatering recipes feature in this revised and updated edition, which also includes the best of the Josceline Dimbleby Christmas Book published in 1987. Classic recipes such as the veal, lemon and parsley stuffing for turkey, featherlight cheese biscuits and the superlative orange pastry for mince pies are reproduced for a new audience. Practical advice on how to take the stress out of cooking over the entire holiday season is delivered in the author’s famously warm and confident style.

Josceline Dimbleby was brought up both abroad and in England. She has been one of Britain’s most popular food writers for over thirty years. Her cookery books have sold well over 2 million copies in the UK alone, and been translated into many languages. Her first book A Taste of Dreams, published in 1976, won the Andre Simon Award for the best cookery book of the year.?? Since then she has published seventeen cookery books and was cookery correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper for 15 years, winning a Glenfiddich Award for her pieces on India and the Far East.

Her book Orchards in the Oasis – Recipes, Travels and Memories was published in October 2010 and won the Kate Whiteman Award for Work on Food and Travel at the Guild of Food Writers Awards in June 2011.

Josceline continues to travel widely, writes occasionally on travel and food for various publications, gives live talks and contributes to television and radio programmes.

GOOD TEMPERED FOOD

Recipes to Love, Leave and Linger Over

by Tamasin Day-Lewis

Slow-cooked food and what the author likes to call ‘good tempered food’, is what proper cooking is all about.  In fact, it’s the chief pleasure of cooking.  It’s about re-uniting yourself with a sense of pleasure in the kitchen, rediscovering that ‘slow’ or ‘time-taken’ doesn’t mean difficult.  This is a hugely underrated pleasure in its own right – as can be the planning, shopping, reading of cookery books or recipes online, deliberating, or telephoning a friend for a recipe.

Good Tempered Food also shows how to plan in advance and half-prepare a dish a day or even a week before.  For example, a dish like risotto can be half-cooked before time, the simplest of meat sauces can be converted from lasagna to cottage pie, hot and cold puddings can be pre-cooked and finished at the last minute.

The book is full of dishes that will give you pleasure to cook – roasted baby tomatoes mixed with baby broad beans, a handful of chives, mint, chervil and thyme, some lemon zest and cheese thrown onto some pasta of a fat piece of belly of port idling in the oven for several hours, steeped in molasses, sweet brown sugar and star anise.

A FEAST OF VEGETABLES

Seasonal British Cooking

by John Tovey

A Feast of Vegetables is an alphabet of 200 recipes for all kinds of vegetables – from asparagus to swede and turnip (there aren’t any British vegetables beginning with ‘z’). Each has a chapter devoted to it, with an explanation as to its origins, nutritional value and uses.

After that, recipes for first courses, accompaniments and main courses follow: from cabbage cooked in cider, and courgettes with marsala, to leeks in a cheese pastry, and spinach fried with chopped walnuts.

John Tovey was one of the first celebrity chefs, making TV programmes for the BBC and writing 17 cookbooks since he opened the Miller Howe hotel in the Lake District in 1971. As the inventor of sticky toffee pudding, his influence is still strong, with many chefs today acknowledging their debt to him

SPIRITOUS JOURNEY

A History of Drink

by Jared Brown and Anistatia Miller

What role did Scotch whisky play in the development of the steam engine?
Who first coined the word ‘alcohol’ ?

Spirits and drink historians Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown know. They have been on a spirituous journey since they first launched their website Shaken Not Stirred: A Celebration of the Martini and the book by the same name.

Fifteen years of travel around the world, a few worn out library cards, and thousands of pages of undiscovered research later, they have amassed their findings in the two-volume work, Spirituous Journey: A History of Drink, of which this is the first.

Jared Brown is Master Distiller at Sipsmith Independent Spirits. He is publisher of Mixellany Books, specializing in drink-related subjects and co-author, with his wife Anistatia Miller, of a few dozen books. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian and Observer Food Monthly.

A KITCHEN IN CORFU

Classical Mediterranean Cooking

by James Chatto & Wendy Martin

For many years James Chatto and his wife, Wendy Martin, made their home in the remote village of Loutses, an olive-farming community in the north-east of Corfu. During their first winter, when the tourists had left and the shops and restaurants of the coastal resorts closed, they learned that there was more to Corfiot cooking than they ever imagined.

The Lousiotes take a keen interest in food and were willing teachers. Cooking from memory, measuring the ingredients by eye and correcting the seasoning by frequent tasting, they had preserved their recipes without ever writing them down.

The chapters follow the framework of landscape: the hills and sea, the olive groves and vineyards, orchards and vegetable gardens where the villagers hunt and grow their food. Over the centuries culinary influences from all over the Mediterranean have been absorbed and freely adapted to suit the extraordinary variety of produce that grows on this beautiful and very fertile island.

This is a beautifully written book that explains the cultural and historical significance behind every ingredient and dish. Delicious recipes include artichokes in egg and lemon sauce, grilled wild duck and honey doughnuts.

POOR COOK

Fabulous Food for Next to Nothing

by Caroline Conran & Susan Campbell

Originally published in 1971 at the height of the oil crisis recession and the rising threat of supermarket convenience foods, Poor Cook rapidly became a household classic and is still reviewed in lifestyle magazines today.

‘Eating cheaply does not mean buying inferior expensive ingredients, but good cheap ones. Happily people who love cooking like to make the most of humble ingredients, and positively enjoy turning a plain packet of semolina into a dish of melting, fragrant gnocchi…’

Economically challenged as we are again in 2015, this is the perfect way to reduce the family grocery bill and at the same time produce simple classic food. Over 300 classic recipes that you can’t find in modern cookery books such as Baked Eggs, Kedgeree, Steak and Kidney Pudding and Apple Dumplings sit easily alongside the author’s love of French and Italian cuisine. Pot-au-feu, Clafoutis, Risotto Milanese and Coffee Granita as well as many other international dishes make their appearance here.

Practical information as to the most inexpensive cuts of meat, metric conversions, temperature charts, roasting tables and essential larder ingredients make this book a timely addition to every kitchen.