Not just any old cookbook! (The River Cottage Family Cookbook - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall)

Member Name: jonkitlib

Product:	The River Cottage Family Cookbook - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Date:	30/05/09 (59 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of extra information - gives the why as well as the how

Disadvantages: Expensive - but well worth it if you want to learn about food as well as recipes

My seven year old son and I spotted this book on a friend's bookshelf and took it down for a closer look. We were instantly hooked and it appeared on his Christmas list for obliging grandparents to buy. We've been dipping into it ever since, not only for recipes but also for general information and ideas.

The River Cottage Family Cookbook is written by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, a broadcaster and campaigner well-known for his commitment to real food, and Fizz Carr, a journalist with five daughters and a passion for animal welfare and for the education of children about food and where it comes from. It shows.

Illustrations:
The book is packed full of real photos of real situations with real children from real families; there is nothing posed or staged about the action pictures and we are allowed to see the imperfect results as well as the occasional beautifully lit foodie shot. And when I say packed, I really do mean packed! Barely a page goes by without a picture of some sort, and the whole book is interlarded with full page and double page colour photographs. This makes reading it an incredibly visual experience and really helps to catch a child's attention. In addition, a few of the recipes have step by step picture instructions, making them particularly easy to follow. The pictures are not the glossy perfect finish of a cookery magazine, however, but rather action shots - a child's hand punching down a bowl of dough, little fingers pinching pasta into bow shapes, a pancake mid-toss. It's almost like seeing freeze-frames from a cookery programme.

What is a Family Cookbook?
The book begins with an introduction setting out the premise of a family cookbook as "a book that everyone in the family can pick up and use." The authors confidently expect that a child from the age of about 10-12 will be able to use it with a little adult help, while older children should be able to tackle most of the recipes unaided. There's lots in there for adults and younger children too, and a wide enough range of recipes to make it suitable for anyone of any age who wants to learn to cook and is interested in the why as well as the how.

Why we like it:
Our favourite feature of this cookbook is not that the recipes are clearly laid out and easy to follow, although that is helpful. It is not that everything is brightly and engagingly presented, although that is what attracted our interest in the first place. It is not even that the recipes included cover everything from boiled eggs to profiteroles, though that has widened our culinary scope. It is rather that there is so much more to this than just a cookery book. The recipes are really the icing on the cake, because what is at the heart of this book is a love of food and all the issues surrounding food. The amount of extra information included is incredible and offers so much more of an experience than just cooking! We spend at least as long planning and reading about what we might make as we do preparing it, and all of that time we are reading, chatting and learning together.

Presentation:
To accommodate all this information, the book is divided into chapters according to the major food group involved, then the recipes are chosen to fit into that section. For example, the first chapter is on flour, beginning with a photo montage of images from flour production (combine harvester) through use (bread being made, dough kneaded, pastry rolled, pizza dough stretched) to final product (freshly cooked raisin bread loaf, scone with jam and a bit taken out of it) and a little introductory paragraph extolling the uses and importance of flour. Turn the page and there are three further pages describing different types of flour, how they are made and used and why different flours are good for different recipes (gluten is the key!). There's even a bit of history in the link between cereal crops and the development of settlements and civilisations - and we're still only a few pages in! Logically enough, we move from flour to bread, starting with a general background and moving on to discussion of why you should bother to make your own bread (taste, satisfaction and being able to eat it warm from the oven), the importance of yeast, types of flour, how to knead, what shape to make your loaf, ideas for adapting basic recipes... and then a project to try capturing wild sourdough yeasts. A quick idea for yeast-free (and faster) soda bread and then we're on to the next section: pasta - shapes, types, a project to make your own pasta dough and then it's on to pizza, then pastry, then flatbreads. Each section is set out clearly, with bold coloured titles and smaller subheadings, often in the form of questions. Recipes are referenced so that you can have a go at making the things you are reading about and the sections are easy to skip if you just want to get straight to the cooking but are interesting enough to read by themselves even when you have no intention of cooking at that time.

Recipes:
When you do get to the recipes they are very clearly laid out and easy to follow. The name of the dish appears as a coloured heading, followed by a brief description of introduction, then a section listing everything you will need (not just ingredients, but also equipment) in bold colour. The instructions are broken down into small, simple steps with enough descriptive details to make it easy to see when you are doing it right - an important consideration for youngsters cooking alone or inexperienced cooks following a new recipe. Each step is numbered, making it easier to keep track of where you are up to, and at the end of each recipe is a suggestion of how to eat what you have made and a list of possible variations you might like to try. The extra information and the variations mean that the book equips you to cook vastly more dishes than it lists; once you have mastered the basic idea you can tinker with it and create new dishes and variations - all part of developing confidence in the kitchen and a love of good food.

Variety:
The recipes cover a good range of basic dishes, including meals as well as individual dishes. There is an entire chapter devoted to that key food group, chocolate, and each recipe has suggestions for variations too. It gives an excellent grounding in both the theory and the practical preparation of a wide variety of foods.

Any downsides?
It's not a cheap book. RRP is around £25 (for the hardback edition; I've not come across a paperback version), although you may well be able to pick it up for less - it's currently listed for £15.27 on www.amazon.co.uk, for example. The wealth of information and advice it provides, however, is well worth this price, and given how readable the book is it's likely to find its way out of the kitchen and onto the family bookshelves every so often, before being taken back into the kitchen for the next cooking session. A cookery course would almost certainly cost more and probably tell you less.

(n.b. This is an updated version of a review posted by me on Ciao.co.uk)

Summary: Very readable, crammed with information, real pictures and interesting recipes.