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Ordinarily the word "lifestyle" is more likely to be applied to slender magazine articles puffing lofts full of Eames furniture rather than books about smallholdings in Dorset.
The River Cottage Cookbook, however, is a hefty 450 pages of pure, gumbooted rural lifestyle; and one could not wish it shorter. Cook, broadcaster and food-writer-at-large Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been ensconced at River Cottage for a number of years, cultivating his vegetable garden, raising chickens, pigs and even cattle for his table and taking occasional potshots at the local wildlife. His achievements have been chronicled on television; now they appear between hard covers.
Although it calls itself a cookbook and does contain a large number of fine recipes, the book's scope is much broader. Really, this is more like one of those "Enquire Within on Everything" volumes 19th-century settlers used to take to the outback with them, full of instructions for mixing whitewash, worming dogs and making a bag pudding. Starting with vegetables, proceeding to livestock and fish (River Cottage does indeed have a river and is only five miles from the sea) and concluding with the wild food, floral and faunal, of the hedgerow, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall explains how he grows, gathers, kills and cooks his own food.
There is a lot of information here, and a lot of hard reality, too: he is very clear and forthright about the place of death in this kind of life. But then this is a very clear and forthright book overall, a very engaging and really quite inspirational manual of how to live the country life so many of us dream about. It's well-illustrated, too, with Simon Wheeler's fine photographs of Hugh at work chasing chickens, skinning eels, carrying piglets and so on. The food in the River Cottage kitchen looks wonderful, too, though the photo of a cod-head glaring resentfully from under a beehive of parsley in a stock pot carries many more resonances than it is possible to summarise here. --Robin Davidson
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Readers in search of a single tome illustrating not only how to deal with a pig carcass but also how to prepare a Shrimp and Sea Lettuce Tempura need look no further. English carnivore extraordinaire Fearnley-Whittingstall (
The River Cottage Meat Book) has revised his 2001 answer to the
Whole Earth Cookbook into this new, slightly Americanized, edition. There are 95 healthy recipes, everything from Strawberry Sandwiches to Nettle Soup, Crispy Pig's Ears to Pigeon Pitas (yes, real pigeons), but the work is primarily an intense and heartfelt almanac of raising and eating organic plants and animals without the intrusive use of slaughterhouses, packaging plants or grocery stores. For cooks with an acre or two of land, or with access to woodlands, there are priceless lessons in raising sheep (a good ram is hard to find), choosing the right cow (bright eyes and lumpless udders) and picking the perfect wild mushroom. For city dwellers, the author, pictured on the cover with a plump piglet under each arm and later shown happily tearing apart a rabbit, might just be the Edgar Allan Poe of poultry. As a benchmark, somewhere between horror and hors d'oeuvre, consider this typical set of instructions before delving into the text: A chicken is not ready to kill for the table until you think it is. Pick it up, feel its weight, and feel its breast. If it feels tempting, then you should kill it if you want to.
(May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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