The Full English Cassoulet: Making Do In the Kitchen

by RichardMabey (Author)

• New

  Hardcover
  2008

  $18.96

  Richard Mabey began experimenting with cooking as soon as he was big enough to clamber to the cupboard where the powdered chocolate was kept. At scout camp he learned how to cook a Sussex Pond Pudding in a billy-can, and thirty years ago he permanently broadened the nation's palate with his guide to edible wild plants, Food For Free. His new book is a joyous exploration of local ingredients, broadening your horizons by travelling, vernacular heritage, and making use of everything except, as the saying goes, 'the pig's squeal'. It includes: Collecting Corsican chestnut receipes and American mushroom ideas, and meditating on what a forest-food culture would have been like; Cooking eggs in nothing but the sun; Making bread the prehistoric way - with old beer; Exploring the outer limits of apple cusine (i.e. the outer limit is making leather out of apples); 'Cooking against the grain' - if we didn't have access to wheat, what could we make with nuts? How to deal with gluts - those autumn mountains of beans and courgettes; Making-do the wartime way - canny tricks his mother taught him; re-introducing his father's passion for offals.

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.84

  Richard Mabey's sparky, offbeat book is about canny and inventive making-do, or 'busking in the kitchen'. Whether creating a cassoulet which uses English ingredients, making bread from chestnuts or slow-cooking a Peking duck in front of an ancient fan heater, he encourages us to be daring and imaginative in our cooking and our approach to food. Although it contains wonderful, mouth-watering recipes like broad bean hummus, pumpkin soup and fillet-steak hearts this is more than a recipe book - it is a guide to a whole new way of thinking that embraces scrumping, celebrates picnics, and revels in saving energy wherever it can, whether that's by one-pot feasts or cooling on car radiators. After all, if you care about food 'life's too short not to stuff a mushroom'. Previously published in hardback as The Full English Cassoulet.