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Summary
Summary
British iconoclast and sustainable food champion Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall goes back to basics in this guide to simple, everyday home cooking.
In River Cottage Every Day , Hugh shares the dishes that nourish his own family of three hungry school-age kids and two busy working parents--from staples like homemade yogurt and nut butters to simple recipes like Mixed Mushroom Tart; Foil-Baked Fish Fillets with Fennel, Ginger, and Chi≤ and Foolproof Crème Brûlée.
Hugh brings his trademark wit and infectious exuberance for locally grown and raised foods to a wide-ranging selection of appealing, everyday dishes from healthy breakfasts, hearty breads, and quick lunches to all manner of weeknight dinners and enticing desserts. Always refreshingly honest, but without sermonizing, Hugh encourages us to build a close relationship to the sources of our food and become more involved with the way we acquire and prepare it. But he doesn't shrink from acknowledging the challenges of shopping and cooking while juggling the demands of work and family. So while Hugh offers an easy recipe for homemade mayonnaise, he admits to having a jar of store-bought mayo lurking in the fridge, just like the rest of us!
Including helpful and encouraging advice on how to choose the finest meat, freshest fish, and most mouthwatering fruits and vegetables, River Cottage Every Day shows us that deliciously prepared and thoughtfully sourced meals can be enjoyed every day of the year.
Author Notes
HUGH FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL is a renowned British writer, broadcaster, farmer, educator, and campaigner for sustainably produced food. He has written six books, including The River Cottage Meat Book , the 2008 James Beard Cookbook of the Year. Hugh established the River Cottage farm in rural Dorset, England, in 1998.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsall's newest edition to the River Cottage series focuses on the recipes he cooks at home for his family. He sees our food culture as a continuum, with those who are thoroughly involved with the story of their food on one end and those who are entirely dependent on anonymous, industrially produced food on the other. His object, he says, is to help people move along in the direction of "more engagement with real fresh food, away from dependence on the industrial food machine." Chapters include "Making Breakfast," "Daily Bread," Weekday Lunch (box)," "Fish Forever," "Thrifty Meat," "Vegetables Galore," "The Whole Fruit," and "Treats." Fearnley-Whittingsall's anecdotes about the recipes his kids make for their breakfasts (pancakes, oatmeal, tomato toast) and the lunches he packs for his wife (sardine nicoise, frittatas, slaws) hit home. The fish chapter focuses on sustainable species (and the intro outlines why you should avoid others). The meat chapter, interestingly, deals only with "secondary cuts," and offers intriguing yet homey recipes for neck of lamb, venison and pork burgers, oxtail stew, and spring chicken broth, to give cooks the confidence to open up new avenues and reduce waste. Throughout this wonderfully illustrated book, Fearnley-Whittingsall's passion is palpable, his genuine, spiritual love of food inspiring. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
THE lamb shakes rain from his wool, pea tendrils rise from the earth and a new yield of cookbooks arrives on bookstore shelves, ready for the fire. I worked with more than a dozen this spring, cooking like a summertime madman and considering sentences beautiful and lame. I read fantasy and prepared truth, imagined myself cooking in England and France, Mumbai and California, Italy, Spain, North Carolina, Georgia, Vancouver, Seoul. I made beautiful meals and terrible ones, found myself well instructed, poorly instructed, often coddled, sometimes lied to, perpetually amused. Cookbooks aren't really about cooking, and haven't been since the advent of color photography and food stylists. They're mostly lifestyle catalogs, aspirational instruction manuals for lives we'd like to live. Prose used to have to do the heavy lifting in this regard. No more. Now images implore us to cook, and it can take a toll on the reading. This is true even if the prose is excellent, as in the case of AT ELIZABETH DAVID'S TABLE: Classic Recipes and Timeless Kitchen Wisdom (Ecco/HarperCollins, $37.50). A collection of dozens and dozens of David's simple, beautiful and bullet-proof recipes, tied together with a few essays and top-notes, it was compiled by Jill Norman and photographed by David Loftus. Anyone who has spent time thumbing through the thin, smudged pages of a paperback edition of one of David's books, looking for instruction and finding joy, will be shocked by the result. Absent are the spare pages gone yellow with age, the words ticking by beneath covers showing only a watercolor image, solid advice from this sensible, writerly woman, who died in 1992 at the age of 78. Gone is the experience of reading a description of a dish and then creating it yourself, with no physical model, no expectation that it must look like this or that: her marvelous pork in milk, for instance, or shoulder of lamb. Here instead is the food rendered in blooming center-focus color, the images as soft at the edges as a dream, instantly recognizable to all those who have seen Loftus's photographs before, in Jamie Oliver's cookbooks. It is weird, and disconcerting, for those who know the source material. The feeling is similar to the one that can arise when lush movies are made from favorite books. But for those who have never heard of David, who have never experienced the joy of her chicken baked with green pepper and cinnamon butter? This title serves as a good introduction - to be followed by trips to the used-book store for the originals, best consumed with an omelet and a glass of wine. Oliver's influence can be found up and down the cookbook piles this season. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the puckish seasonal-cooking advocate and champion of British food television, has turned directly toward Oliver's aesthetic in his RIVER COTTAGE EVERY DAY (Ten Speed Press, $32.50). With marvelous (Loftus-like!) photographs by Simon Wheeler, and a layout that owes something to 2008's "Jamie at Home," this book is more readerfriendly and useful than some of Fearnley-Whittingstall's past River Cottage offerings, and the food is ace. Start with the chicken and mushroom casserole with cider for dinner, or a celery root Waldorf salad for lunch. There aren't many days that can't be served by the rest. A reissue of Richard Olney's 1970 classic, THE FRENCH MENU COOKBOOK (Ten Speed Press, paper, $22), is emphatically not for everyday use, as its Dickensian subtitle may attest: "The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season - in Beautifully Composed Menus for American Dining and Entertaining by an American Living in Paris and Provence." But there are some excellent recipes in here all the same, for poached eggs and beef stew, stuffed artichoke bottoms and roast saddle of lamb, saffron rice with tomatoes, a pure and simple sauce ivoire. From the simple (peaches in red wine!) to the complex business of stuffing calves' ears for service with béarnaise sauce, this is a project book, best for cooks seeking intermediate badges or ju=nior-pilot wings. More accessible for the new cook and the exhausted, overworked experienced one alike is FRENCH CLASSICS MADE EASY (Workman, paper, $16.95), by Richard Grausman. Also a reissue, from a 1988 original, it combines smart advice for streamlined versions of timeless French dishes with a simple, reader-friendly and Workman-specific layout and type style that will be familiar to anyone who has cooked from the Silver Palate cookbooks. Here's a top-notch blanquette de veau darkened (to the good!) with morels, as well as fine instruction on making a truffled roast chicken, fast soufflés, aU the great French egg-yolk sauces, an onion tart and crêpes suzette. For those interested in, if slightly intimidated by, the intricacies of French cuisine, this book will be a balm. Jonathan Waxman's ITALIAN, MY WAY (Simon & Schuster, $32), seeks to do something similar for Italian cuisine. The book is slightly slap-dash, with recipes that can at times seem padded (two pages on arugula salad with olive oil and shaved Parmesan!) and black-and-white printing that does no justice to the legendary Christopher Hirsheimer's photographs. But if you can overlook the filler (recipes for peas with pancetta and mint, or smashed new potatoes) and the steep price tag, Waxman does have some excellent ideas for pork ribs, chicken and a seven-hour braise of lamb. And the instruction on how to make his salsa verde is worth a peek. Better value, though, can be found in THE FOOD OF SPAIN (Ecco/HarperCollins, $39.99), by Claudia Roden, a sweeping and tightly edited overview of the varied cuisines of the Iberian Peninsula. After a series of fascinating essays on the historical forces that led to the creation of various Spanish cuisines (among others: Celts and Jews, Frenchmen, monks, peasants and royals), Roden slips into the kitchen to deliver the goods. Here are basic dressings and sauces, simple tapas, complicated empanadas, ways to cook fish. Start with baked rice with an egg crust: a casserole of browned spare ribs, chicken, sausages and chickpeas, bound by arborio rice, flavored with paprika and served below a duvet of scrambled egg. Then run with the bulls. Those who thrill to Roden's work are not the audience for MY FATHER'S DAUGHTER: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family and Togetherness (Grand Central Life & Style, $30), by the actress, professional famous person and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow. This is a beginner's book, appropriate to first-apartment dwellers who have found sophistication in wardrobe and employment but not yet in the kitchen. But it isn't bad for that, if you can keep the snark about a stick-thin celebrity who used to be a vegan writing a book on what she learned about cooking from her wealthy television-producer father at bay (which is, let me tell you, difficult). Paltrow's recipe for rotisserie-style roast chicken, pulled in equal measure from the chef Joël Robuchon and the Brentwood Country Mart in Los Angeles, helps a great deal. If Paltrow's book is aimed squarely at a particular subset of the young female population, Esquire's EAT LIKE A MAN: The Only Cookbook a Man Will Ever Need (Chronicle, $30), edited by Ryan D'Agostino, shoots for the fellows who try to hook up with them at parties, and who are unlikely ever to read this far into a critical roundup of summer cookbooks. (It's a gift book, then!) The subtitle is of course a lie: there is not a single recipe for salad in the book, and only a few for vegetables, and a man is eventually going to need some of those. But this handsome, chef-ish collection still provides a decent foundation for dudes trying to better their kitchen game without being doctrinaire about it. An excellent roasted chicken from the Manhattan chef Jimmy Bradley makes an appearance, along with a fine Coca-Cola-brined fried one from John Currence in Oxford, Miss. Ted Allen, the television cooking-show host, offers a solid primer on how to entertain. I found a good treatment for potatoes fried in duck fat and another for Sunday gravy. That's not nothing, bro. James Oseland, the editor of Saveur, also has a magazine cookbook out: SAVEUR. THE NEW COMFORT FOOD: Home Cooking From Around the World (Chronicle, $35). Wide-ranging and beautifully photographed, it makes for marvelous visual grazing. Here is an amazing view of the smoked pork and sauerkraut stew known as bigos, made by a scion of the Bobak supermarket family in Chicago, and another of the spoonbread served at Boone Tavern in central Kentucky. A cook wok-fries Beijing noodles on one page, while on the next a fisherman stands by the shore in Tanzania, posing with a day's catch. "The New Comfort Food" is a book for dreaming, and for the ignition of appetite. The magazine's Achilles' heel remains exposed, however: the book's too-brief, too-simple recipes are not nearly as strong as the photographs. (Red food coloring for the chicken tikka masala? Corn starch in the filet mignon with mushroom sauce? Only a dozen sentences on how to make Korean fried chicken?) This is saddening. These are recipes that can leave home cooks far from home, in a rough position, with no cellphone service. Little such short-cutting is to be found in Sanjeev Kapoor's exhaustive and unillustrated 600-page manual, HOW TO COOK INDIAN: More Than 500 Classic Recipes for the Modern Kitchen (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $29.95). Kapoor, a huge television star in Asia, where his cooking show, "Khana Khazana," has run for almost two decades, is relatively unknown in the United States. "How to Cook Indian" marks an attempt to change that state of affairs. To a large degree, the book works. Clarity of instruction is paramount to the recipes, which range all over the subcontinent in taste and technique while remaining rooted in simple, declarative sentences. I found a wild though uncomplicated recipe for clam curry from the Malvanis of western India, and another for Tamil fried chicken, sour, peppery and addictive. Roasted eggplant with mustard seeds? Parsi vegetable stew? These are worth making more than once. Those interested in expanding upon their collection of (brilliant, essential, important) books from Madhur Jaffrey, or of adding a reference work to accompany Suvir Saran's terrific "Indian Home Cooking," may do well to make Kapoor's acquaintance. That said, it would be hard to imagine a warmer, more easygoing introduction to Indian cuisine in North America than the one put together by the Vancouver restaurateurs Meeru Dhalwala and Vikfam Vij in their VIJ'S AT HOME: Relax, Honey (Douglas & Mclntyre, paper, $35). "Ours is a whimsical, loud and very social cuisine that practically begs for you to share it with as many people as possible," the couple write. "Its aromas will go through your entire home, the floor of your apartment building or your entire neighborhood block." True, as it happens! The book is hardly encyclopedic or even authentic to anything other than Dhalwala and Vij's heartfelt desire for families to eat together from the larder they use at their excellent restaurant on Vancouver's West Side. But they will eat well for that: spicy cauliflower "steaks" with rice; mung beans in coconut curry; the restaurant's justly celebrated fiery lamb "popsicles." No such exoticism will be found in SARA FOSTER'S SOUTHERN KITCHEN (Random House, $35). Foster, the proprietor of the Foster's Market cafes and prepared-food stores in Durham and Chapel Hill, N.C., offers a paean to her Tennessee roots and a love letter to the matter-of-fact cooking of her forebears: "Fresh, local ingredients, simple preparations, and a deep appreciation for pork." Lavishly illustrated and approximately the weight of a small country ham, as befits something very likely destined for kitchen shelves in coastal weekend homes and rentals from Montauk to Hilton Head, the book (written with Tema Larter) mostly succeeds, if sleepily. The recipes are neither surprising nor problematic - "Crispy Chicken Cutlets With a Heap of Spring Salad" is exactly that - but they're good enough for holiday work and, just as important, can all be made with some combination of farm-stand produce and standard supermarket ingrethents. They're not going to change your life. HUNT, GATHER, COOK: Finding the Forgotten Feast (Rodale, $25.99), by Hank Shaw, very well could, and is worth reading even if you suspect that it won't. Shaw, a self-described omnivore who has solved his dilemma, is a former newspaperman who has become a blogger, a hunter, a fisherman, a gardener, a forager and a cook. In "Hunt, Gather, Cook," he makes a powerful argument for joining him in a few of those pursuits, if only to become aware of the great bounty that surrounds us in the natural world, even when we live in urban environments - and perhaps particularly then. So here is a splendid introduction to the world of wild greens - dandelions and chicories; lamb's quarters; nettles; wild mustards - all of it generally more nutritious than anything available for retail sale, and just as delicious as when Euell Gibbons first started hustling this line during the hippie years. There are suggestions about where to find and what to do with wild berries and fruits, with the fat hips that come off the rugosa roses you see in the sandy dunes of Rockaway Beach, with black walnuts and acorns and sassafras root. There are good fishing tips and better fish recipes, and a long treatise on the (few) joys of eating oyster toads. And there is, too, a smart and level-headed primer on the hard and sometimes horrifying business of hunting animals for food - "the primary pursuit of humans," Shaw writes, "for more than a million years." Sensitive to the emotions and politics of those who might thrill to foraging mushrooms but express revulsion at the idea of taking the life of a deer or a duck or a bear, he writes clearly and with passion about what really happens when a person kills an animal to eat. The speechifying can get in the way of the recipes. (If you have 75 pounds of deer to cook next winter, Shaw's one recipe for venison medallions is going to get old.) But "Hunt, Gather, Cook" is not really meant for old-timers with elk in the freezer alongside the duck breasts and the whole pheasant, looking for something new to do with the meat. It is instead a book that provides a glimpse of the inevitable byproduct of life spent at the farmer's market railing at the evils of industrial agriculture while spending huge amounts on organic food. Eventually, some are going to take up arms. ONLINE Still hungry? Consult the capsule descriptions of 25 more new cookbooks at nytimes.com/books. Sam Sifton is the restaurant critic for The Times.
Library Journal Review
In this latest addition to the award--winning River Cottage collection-named after Fearnley-Whittingstall's (The River Cottage Cookbook) farm in Devon, England-the renowned British food personality maintains his commitment to good food prepared from fresh ingredients. An advocate of a back-to-basics approach to cooking and sustainable agriculture, he delivers thoughtful insight and colorful narratives that celebrate the joy of good family food, which will inspire and compel readers into the kitchen, book in hand. Simple ingredients become brilliant when combined in fresh and easy recipes like Baked Breakfast Cheesecake, Curried Fish Pie, breads, boxed lunches, and frittatas. VERDICT Wholesome and hearty recipes in a book to be savored. For those who have never experienced the River Cottage series, this is a great place to start; for fans, it's essential.-Graciela Monday, Johnson City Lib., TX (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction Good food prepared from fresh ingredients -- ideally seasonal and locally sourced -- can and should be at the heart of every happy, healthy family kitchen. Yes, I genuinely believe that cooking from scratch (or with your own leftovers) is a possibility for everybody, pretty much every day. I realize, when so many of us are always in a hurry, and when easy access to fresh, local ingredients is not a universal privilege, that that's a controversial position. But I stand by my conviction, and I've written this book to show you how I think it can be done. It often seems that there is a divide between people when it comes to food. A crude way of describing the divide is that we fall into two broad categories: those who care about food and those who don't. I have been accused at times of writing only for the first group or, to put it another way, of preaching largely to the converted. I can see why some would say that. I propose a degree of involvement with food -- knowing and caring where it comes from, perhaps even growing some of it, or gathering some from wild places -- that to many seems patently absurd. To some, I am "that weirdo who eats anything." Of course, to me, eating nettles, rabbits, and such makes perfect sense. It's completely normal. But it has been quite a journey for me to discover and embrace that kind of normality. As a child, I was one of the fussiest eaters you can imagine. If it didn't come out of a Birds Eye package and get fried up and served with ketchup, then I really wasn't that interested. So I have no qualms imagining that others can make journeys with food -- even journeys they haven't yet imagined possible for themselves. In the twenty-odd years since I first became involved in the food business, I have seen entrenched attitudes to food, on the part of both stubborn individuals and monolithic institutions, shift massively. I've witnessed burgeoning excitement, enlightenment even, as more and more people get involved in cooking real food from fresh ingredients. I've seen people's lives and family dynamics transformed by the discovery of good food and by a change of approach to acquiring and preparing food. If you have watched any of the television programs I've made over the last few years, you'll know I've spent a lot of time trying to persuade various people to change their way of shopping and cooking and to become more engaged with real fresh food. For the most part, I feel I've succeeded, at least to some degree. The individuals and families I've been growing and cooking food with are now, at the very least, a little more skeptical of frozen dinners, factory-farmed produce, and anonymous, pre-packaged fare. Most of them have developed a determination to cook more with fresh ingredients and to make food a bigger part of their interaction with family and friends. But perhaps the most important thing is that all of them, I think it's safe to say, have had a good time. They've discovered how to cook ingredients they'd shied away from and how to get more out of foods they thought "boring," and realized that some truly delicious meals can be thrown together from scratch in very little time at all. The food media can only do so much to engage public interest in these issues. Luckily there are all kinds of other catalysts that bring about a change for good in people's relationship with food, and many of them can't be marshaled or predicted: a meal at a friend's house; a great dish encountered on holiday; a child coming home with something they've cooked at school; an unexpected gift of a fruit bush or vegetable plant. These can all kick-start a new and exciting future with food -- one that turns out to be more accessible than you might have imagined. Buying your food becomes less of a chore, more of a pleasure, an adventure even, as you steer your grocery cart away from the frozen-dinner aisle and over toward fresh produce. Or perhaps start heading for the nearest farmers' market rather than the supermarket. Suddenly it seems that your friends have discovered cooking too -- though perhaps it's just that you are hearing the food-related content of their chatter when previously you were filtering it out. That's why I think the "us and them" view of our food culture is unduly simplistic. I see not two firmly entrenched camps who can never meet but rather a continuum, with those who are already thoroughly involved with the story of their food at one end and those who are entirely dependent on anonymous, industrially produced food, the origins of which are largely unknown to them, at the other. Everyone, and every household, has a place on this continuum. I see the main challenge of my work as helping people move along it in the direction of more engagement with real fresh food, away from dependence on the industrial food machine. I believe it's a worthwhile enterprise for one simple reason: I'm convinced that a greater engagement with the source of their food makes people happier. This book is my latest attempt to contribute to that happiness -- by writing about the kind of food I eat at home, every day. I describe how bread, meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables are dealt with in our house, how we juggle breakfast for three hungry schoolkids, and how we sort out weekday lunches for two working parents. I reveal why so many of the meals we eat (including some of our absolute favorites) are made from leftovers. I try to show you how to put vegetables and fruit at the forefront of your family cooking, while getting the most from precious foods such as meat and fish. I suggest ways to make entertaining at home less daunting, less expensive, and altogether more fun. And I offer up the recipes I love to cook for my family -- and those that, when I'm really lucky, they cook for me. I make no prior assumptions about where you shop, what you may or may not know about growing vegetables or keeping livestock, whether you can tell the difference between a rutabaga and a turnip, or whether you know what to do with a belly of pork and a breast of lamb. Instead, I show you easy and confidence-inspiring ways with cuts of meat, types of fish, and other ingredients you may not have tried before. And I offer you fresh approaches that I hope will breathe new life into familiar staples, such as rice, potatoes, beans, and your daily bread. Above all, I intend to tempt you irresistibly toward a better life with food, with a whole raft of recipes that I think you will love. I hope some of them will become your absolute favorites, and the favorites of your dear friends and beloved family. I hope the dishes you like best will infiltrate and influence your cooking, giving you increased confidence and fresh ideas. In short, I hope that before long, cooking simple and delicious food from the best seasonal ingredients becomes second nature and a first priority for you, not just once in a while, but every day. A few of my favorite things It's a truism that the quality and nature of your ingredients make all the difference to a finished dish, and I'd expect any cook worth their salt to choose the freshest, finest raw materials they can lay their hands on. However, there are a few staples to which personal preferences (or outright prejudice) also apply. The following basic pantry ingredients appear time and time again in my recipes, so I feel they merit a little extra explanation -- and, since I feel pretty strongly about their provenance, a little recommendation, too. OIL An entire book could be written about oils -- I'm sure there must be several -- but let me cut to the chase and tell you what you'll find in my kitchen. My general rule is to opt for organic and unrefined oils (the refining process can involve heating, the addition of solvents, and even bleaching). Cold-pressed oil is also good because, while heating the seed or fruit increases the yield of oil, it affects the flavor and nutritional value, too. On the other hand, for deep- and shallow-frying you do need an oil that can be heated to a high temperature, and that usually (but not always) means a refined oil of some kind. Canola oil Many British farmers are now producing this wonderful culinary oil, and I use a lot of it. Terrifically versatile, it has an incredible golden-yellow color and a gentle nutty flavor. Canola oil is mild enough to use in mayonnaise but has enough character to contribute to a dressing, or to add flavor when drizzled on bread or soup. In addition, it's stable enough at high temperatures to be used for frying or roasting -- though perhaps not prolonged deep-frying. You may well be able to find a good one produced locally. Olive oil I use quite a bit of olive oil but I don't worship it. I no longer use it much for frying or roasting; canola oil has supplanted it as the first oil I reach for. I'm much more likely to use it for dressings and for general drizzling, and even then only if it's that distinctive olive oil flavor I'm after. That might be in a classic vinaigrette or salsa verde, on sliced tomatoes, or perhaps stirred into pesto. But these days it's always a conscious decision to reach for the olive oil rather than an automatic one. That means I'm happy to pay a bit more for a good organic extra-virgin olive oil (extra-virgin means the oil has a low acidity level and is guaranteed unrefined). I don't use the super-expensive "luxury" olive oils -- although once in a while, when someone gives me an exquisitely peppery, richly flavored olive oil (usually Tuscan), I am reminded what all the fuss is about. Sunflower oil This is a very lightly flavored oil with a high burn point, which makes it ideal for general frying, including deep-frying. This is one case where I definitely wouldn't choose an unrefined oil, as the flavor would be too strong and it would most likely be adversely affected by the heat, but I do usually opt for organic and/or fair trade. After being used for deep-frying, sunflower oil can be recycled by straining it through a coffee filter or cotton cloth (when completely cold) and rebottling it. Don't leave it sitting around in the saucepan or deep-fat fryer, or it will go stale and impart a rancid flavor to the next batch of fried goodies. Peanut oil is a good substitute for sunflower when a neutral frying oil is needed. Hempseed oil People either love or hate the pungent, grassy, throaty flavor of hempseed oil. I love it. Its intensity means it compares to the very best olive oils and makes a great drizzling and dipping oil. It's full of goodness -- loaded with omega fatty acids, which arguably give it the best nutritional profile of any raw culinary oil. I use it on my breakfast toast and in a number of pestos. VINEGAR Vinegar (literally vin aigre , or "sour wine") is a crucial part of my cooking repertoire, as indispensable as lemon juice when it comes to balancing flavors. I use it almost every day, mostly in dressings and mayonnaise, but also when roasting vegetables, in sauces or marinades, or to deglaze the pan after frying meat. English cider vinegar is the type I turn to most, because it is fruity and robust but not overpowering, but white wine vinegar is a perfectly good alternative, if that's what you happen to have in the pantry. FLOUR I like my flour stone ground if possible, as traditional stone grinding involves less heat than modern steel-rolling techniques, thereby preserving more of the grain's goodness. Whole-wheat flour is more likely to be stone ground than white. Different flours vary enormously, not only in quality but in their color, consistency, and the way they absorb liquid. When you're making bread, pastry, or batters, you should feel confident in adjusting the quantity of flour or liquid to reach the consistency you think is right. Note also that whole-wheat flour tends to absorb more water than white, so you might need to increase the fluid content if you're converting a recipe from white to brown. White and whole-wheat flour If I need all-purpose or pastry flour, then I favor one that's produced from organically grown wheat. However, I'm increasingly turning to whole-wheat flour in order to make our everyday meals more wholesome -- I like its toasty, wheaty flavor, too. I've found there are few traditional "white" recipes that can't be adapted to contain at least some whole-wheat flour -- a half-and-half blend of white and whole-wheat flour is often very successful. I'll happily knock out a Victoria sponge using whole-wheat pastry flour, which is fine-ground soft wheat: the result is very nearly as light and fluffy as you get with white flour but with a lovely, nutty flavor that I actually prefer. It also works well with muffins and pancakes. Bread flour This is what you should use for most bread recipes. It is milled from a particular type of wheat that is high in gluten, the substance that helps bread form the correct stretchy texture. Spelt flour A grain I'm very fond of, spelt is an ancient type of wheat with a distinctive nutty flavor. It differs from conventional wheat flours in that it contains a more delicate kind of gluten, which some people find more digestible. Whole-grain spelt flour makes very good bread and can also be used in cakes and even pastry -- or use the refined "white" spelt if you fancy something lighter. SALT Top-quality sea salt -- sweet, flaky, and fresh tasting -- is an essential part of my everyday cooking. It differs from rock salt in that it's harvested from the open sea by traditional evaporation techniques rather than being pumped out of the ground. Fewer of its natural minerals are stripped away and fewer unnatural things, such as anti-caking agents, added. It also tastes much better -- do a comparative tasting and I think you'll agree. Maldon sea salt, a flaky, coarse white salt, is a kitchen classic of long standing. There are times when a fine-grained salt is more appropriate than a coarse one -- when seasoning a delicate cake batter, for instance. In addition, if you need to use salt in large quantities -- when mixing up a cure for pork chops, say -- using top-notch coarse sea salt would be rather extravagant. In these circumstances, I still opt for sea salt but a fine-grained type -- you'll find it at any good natural foods store. Excerpted from River Cottage Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
