Jul 30

The most wonderful book

"Everything is made to seem so easy – it turns out it is."

Caroline Taylor/All That I'm Eating

Around the time of my birthday I was in my favourite bookshop - Readings - and spotted this on the shelf. It was not cheap and pretty hefty looking, but, hey, it was my birthday and I love Nigel Slater's books. This is actually an old book - published way back in 2009 but I came to Nigel Slater late in my cooking life, so missed out on some of his earlier ones. You don't see them in the bookshop. Anyway I splurged and bought it and have now finished reading it all the way through. In fact I'm going back to the beginning, because I forgot to note things to return to for one reason or another, with little yellow post it stickers. The book now has lots of them sticking out all over the place, ready for me to find inspiration for the blog, or for what to cook for tonight's dinner. Any night's dinner.

I'm going to buy a copy for my sister, who, although an excellent cook, is not really that interested in cooking. She is, however a passionate gardener with a beautiful garden over there in Sussex near the Downs. And it might help her with her cooking problems too. For this book is essentially about Nigel Slater's garden - shown below in before and after mode.

It as he says a typical terrace house London garden in size and shape - long and thin - but not that long really - I think he says 12 metres. It's in Highbury near where David and I lived just before we came to Australia, and also near to the then very deprived area of Hackney. He says 'terrace' house and yes it is, but it's a Georgian terrace house - the kind of house we should have bought in the now very expensive, but then somewhat dodgy, area of Islington at the bottom of our hill. Now sure, he has money and he enlisted his colleague at The Guardian, Monty Don, prestigious garden expert, to build him a vegetable garden. There was excavation and tons of manure and soil improvers added to the London clay - but I guess it's something we could all be inspired by - even if you had to dig it all over yourself. And if you were younger.

He doesn't recommend those box hedges around the plots however as they are:

"snail hotels, providing a home for hundreds of gastropods who come out at night, drink from your beer traps, then go on a drunken rampage."

Raised beds are his recommendation.

Since making his acquaintance through his books I realised that he was a passionate foodie, in his emphasis on always buying the best quality you can afford, but I did not quite realise that he was a passionate gardener as well. And because he is such a wonderful writer I have become tempted to have another go again in my very, very small way, to grow a few select things. I even went out and weeded half of my tiny - and I do mean tiny - plot the other day, which I haven't done for ages and ages. I may even try tomatoes again, and he was so rhapsodic about potatoes that I might give that a go in a small-scale way. I think Jamie Oliver said you could grow them in a dustbin. Must look it up.

The book is arranged by vegetable, so in the tradition of my first recipe posts, let me take you through his first vegetable Asparagus. Every vegetable gets the same kind of treatment. The photographs, as always with Nigel, are by Jonathan Lovekin, one of England's top food photographers, and the photographs are indeed outstanding. If the prose doesn't suck you in then the photographs, like this one of the asparagus will.

This is another favourite photograph, roast onions. Each blob of oil perfectly in place, and ditto for the flavourings - the juniper berries, the thyme, the garlic. You almost don't need the recipe. Just look at the picture and give it a go.

But back to my asparagus example. Opposite each opening photograph, be it of the vegetable itself in cooked or raw form, the flowers or the plant, you have an essay, a couple of pages long, on what the vegetable means to Nigel. These are wonderful pieces. Some of it is lyrical, some of it practical, or historical - informative in some way, and some of it is personal history. For example from the asparagus introduction:

"Life is full of small rituals, and never more so than in my kitchen. The first asparagus of the year is boiled within minutes of my walking through the door with it, butter is carefully melted so that it is soft and formless but not yet liquid, then I eat it with the sort of reverence I usually reserve for mulberries or a piece of exquisite sashimi. It is almost impossible not to respect those first spears of the year. ... it is the strongest sign yet that summer has started."

The next section is an 'in the garden' section in which he talks about how to grow the vegetable under discussion - even if, like asparagus for which he does not have enough room - he does not grow it himself. Sometimes this is followed by a 'diary' in which he describes his season of growing the particular vegetable, which includes disasters as well as triumphs. He will also list the varieties of plants - irrelevant no doubt to us in Australia, but then what would I know?

Then we turn to 'in the kitchen' in which he will tell you what to look for and the many ways in which the vegetable can be cooked. Hidden in here are mini recipes such as:

"once we have tired of boiled asparagus and melted butter, the spears make a deeply herbaceous soup or a mild, rather soporific tart and marry well with pancetta or soft-boiled eggs. A few in a salad will make it feel extravagant, even if the only other ingredients are new potatoes, oil, lemon juice and parsley. My all-time favourite asparagus lunch is one where a small, parchment-coloured soft cheese is allowed to melt lazily over freshly boiled spears. The warm cheese oozing from its bloomy crust makes an impromptu sauce."

And if you are tantalised by some of these, but don't really know what to do, often they are enlarged into a more detailed process in the recipe section.

But before you get to the recipe section proper, you have 'Seasoning your ...' which is short list of the ingredients that go with, and heighten the flavour of your vegetable. For asparagus these are butter, lemon juice, tomato, Parmesan, bacon, cheese and eggs and each of these has a few comments, maybe a suggestion of how to use it. Of the Parmesan, for example, he says:

"Finely grated over buttered spears or used to form a crust on a gratin of asparagus and cream."

Little thoughts on which to build and to inspire you to have a go.

Finally in this introductory section for each vegetable you will have 'And ...' which will provide a few random fact, hints and personal notes. For asparagus we have how to weed asparagus, how best to plant it, how to pick it plus:

"*This vegetable loses its sweetness by the hour. Anything that has travelled from overseas is likely to disappoint.

*Avoid cooking asparagus in aluminium pans. It can taint the spears.

*Roll lightly cooked spears in thinly sliced ham, lay them in a shallow dish, cover wth a cheese sauce and a heavy dusting of Parmesan and bake till bubbling."

The number of recipes in the recipe section varies according to the vegetable and some of them as, I said, are merely enlarged versions of what he has already told you - like Warm asparagus, melted cheese; Roast asparagus and Asparagus with pancetta and A tart of asparagus and tarragon, which I have marked for an experiment because here, somewhat surprisingly he praises the benefits of tinned asparagus:

"I retain a soft spot for tinned asparagus. Not as something to eat with my fingers (it is considerably softer than fresh asparagus, and rather too giving), but as something with which to flavour a quiche. The canned stuff seems to permeate the custard more effectively than the fresh. This may belong to the law that makes canned apricots better in a frangipane tart than fresh ones, or simply be misplaced nostalgia. I once made a living from making asparagus quiche, it's something very dear to my heart. Still fresh is good too."

They are not all illustrated, but here is the first 'proper' recipe of the book A pilaf of asparagus, broad beans and mint which can be found on the website of the New Zealand Herald, but without any acknowledgement of where it comes from. Which is a little poor.

Almost every vegetable you can think of gets its spot in the sun in this wonderful book. So when you are stuck with cauliflower - as I am today - you can find the perfect solution - perhaps A soup of cauliflower and cheese, or A fried cauliflower (seasoned with paprika and served with a salsa verde - it looks pretty sensational - a great accompaniment to a steak or even some fish perhaps. Maybe tomorrow.

So yes it's a tiny bit precious I suppose, and a tiny bit gourmet snob/élitist - organic and all that - although he does admit that organic slug repellent is not as effective as the inorganic kind. However, overall it's just wonderful - mostly because of the writing, recognised by all of the reviewers, including this one from the Wall Street Journal:

“But the crowning glory of "Tender" is Mr. Slater's own prose, even when treating of something as lowly as the autumnal cabbage—each dark-green leaf of which "somehow seems as if it will fend off our winter ills. Elephant ears of crinkled green, sparkling with dew; black plumes of cavolo nero like feathers on a funeral horse, and the dense, ice crisp flesh of red cabbage. Strong flavors indeed."