The Natural Cook

As an allotment-holder, I’m sucker for any cookbook that promises a more imaginative approach to eating seasonally. While I love the simplicity and the discipline of magicking something good to eat out of whatever’s chosen to grow on my plot, it’s easy to get stuck in a flavour rut. Thanks to Tom Hunt’s ‘The Natural Cook’, I’ve already learned two new things to do with radishes (sautéed with butter and caraway seeds, and lightly picked in rice vinegar) and a neat trick for heightening the flavour of broad beans by pan frying them with garlic, coriander seeds, mint and lemon.
For each season, Tom picks out a handful of ingredients and gives you two or three simple ways to prepare each one (I’m looking forward to chargrilling some more broad beans on the barbecue this weekend) using store-cupboard ingredients. He then shows you how to build on that basic recipe – in the case of my pan-fried beans, by incorporating them into a pilaf with lamb, rice and Middle Eastern spices. It’s a dish I’ve made 100 times before, but Tom’s method infused that little bit of extra flavour that really made it sing.
He’s good on leftovers too. I could have added a handful of my beans to a minestrone, or, if we hadn’t been quite so greedy (and the pilaf had been a bit less delicious), we could have freshened the leftovers up the next day with nuts, pomegranate seeds and parsley. These are definitely recipes as starting points rather than prescriptions which puts the emphasis where it should be, on choosing the freshest and best ingredients rather than buying (or picking!) something second-rate, just because the recipe says so.
Tom’s philosophy – eating local, seeking out ethically sourced ingredients and making connections with growers, producers and stall-holders – is one that resonates with me. It’s a simple, sensible approach to eating, with ‘healthy eating’ as a happy side benefit. But the real clincher, as he points out in his introduction, is that it’s these seasonal foods that taste best too.
The Natural Cook: Eating the Seasons from Root to Fruit is available at Amazon, £13.60