Herb Gardening by Claire Loewenfeld

I didn't think I could possibly need another general book on herbs but I bought Herb Gardening (at the very wonderful Slightly Foxed Bookshop on Gloucester Road) because it's one of the more comprehensive I've found.

The book starts with some brief chapters on herbs in general, then each individual herb is described under several headings: Virtues, Description (or Appearance), Growing, Harvesting and Uses. Several headings are self-explanatory; Virtues covers folklore, medicinal properties and other interesting facts, while Uses gives directions on the preparation of simples (medicinal and cosmetic) and, in the case of the kitchen herbs, a recipe, or other comments on its culinary uses.

There are two useful charts at the back, on growing and usage. There are a couple of inclusions which might be slightly unexpected - for instance, rose hips, which were much used as a source of Vitamin C during WW2* - and the range considered is wider than the usual kitchen-garden list: there are some plants here which we'd normally consider to be wildflowers or weeds. If you wanted to create a herb-garden like those of earlier centuries this, in conjunction with one of the early Herbals, like Mrs Grieve's, would be an excellent and practical reference work.

* As a child in the early 1960s, our school took part in a national scheme to collect rosehips - we would go out every evening with bags and, at the end of the week, the total would be weighed. There were lots of wild roses growing around the small Scottish torn where I grew up and we collected huge quantities which were sent off to be made into delicious rosehip syrup. I think the practice had stopped by the time I left primary school.

Easter eggs

Today's "new look" post is specially dedicated to Nan, of the wonderful Letters from a Hill Farm which I always read with pleasure.

I think I have mentioned before that one of the Bluebells approaches egg-laying with a good deal of enthusiasm. This was her Easter offering: you can see beside it a normal egg, which weighs 68 grams. The big egg weighs 102g and has a shell which looks as though it might suitably house a baby ostrich. Recalling Walter Wangerin Jr's Book of the Dun Cow I wouldn't be surprised if it would hatch a basilisk – be prepared to read in the newspapers that Northumberland has been laid waste!

Faced with such largesse I have been baking. I had been planning to whisk up a few peanut butter cookies, as recently made by Cornflower, but my son – briefly home for Easter - mentioned peanut butter brownies so, between cleaning windows, watering houseplants and generally trying to prepare for a frantic week, I went for speed, and measure-not-weigh.

Being so proud of the Bluebells' achievements, I had to photograph the eggs as I added them:

Turning the mix into the tin I got carried away: the chocolate sprinkles happened to be in the cupboard, although I can't imagine why!

The end result was greeted with approval, and I still had time to do some serious work. I'll try the cookies next time.

Spring purples

I picked this glorious selection of leaves for dinner, and we had them just lightly steamed, with roast chicken and Rooster potatoes roasted in goose fat. The outer leaves went to the Bluebells, who greeted them with their usual enthusiasm. We were rewarded with five eggs, one of them the largest I think I have ever seen from a chicken - it will be a double-yolker for sure.

Lark Rise to Tea Bread

I've been – belatedly – catching up with Lark Rise to Candleford on BBC1. Having reached episode 3 I'm quite enjoying it, but I was a bit surprised to find that it started about 3/4 of the way through Flora Thomson's memoir, with young Laura's move to Candleford to work at the Post Office. Having seen how the stories for each episode have been created from incidents a few lines long in the book, I'm not surprised that there doesn't seem to be a credit for the author at the start (or am I missing it?), or that a second series of feel-good Sunday telly has apparently been commissioned. Oh well, it's all quite pretty, and there's little enough to watch otherwise.

I've been hunting for tea bread recipes on the internet. We don't each much in the way of cake or pudding in this house, though muffins sometimes happen when both sons are home. When they were small I baked almost daily, and tea bread was a staple for days when I was in a hurry, for instance, if it was a butter-making day, as that was time-consuming. My preference in baking has always been for the "hearty" kind – I can't do light-as-a feather sponges, and never really felt much urge to, but a good solid fruitcake packed with sultanas and raisins, an applecake all unctuous and sticky in the middle or a classic gingerbread were all turned out regularly and disappeared about 10 minutes' later. My tour de force, I reckoned, was a date loaf served with home-made ice-cream. Unfortunately, a vital ingredient of the loaf was Kellogg's bran buds – at some point during the 80s, these were changed, and never produced the right result again. I think they subsequently disappeared in the UK, though they seem to be available elsewhere. I still make good ice-cream, though, on the rare occasions there is any room in the freezer.

The most unusual tea bread recipe I've found uses lavender; I shall have to try making it when the lavender comes into flower, even though I shan't be able to eat it (lavender makes me wheeze). This is one of the kind which is simply a loaf-shaped cake which might be served with butter, as is The Dormouse's excellent banana and date loaf. The other kind is made by soaking the dried fruit in tea – I rather favour this type and plan to experiment with different kinds of tea, Russian caravan for starters, I think. The huge advantage of the breads-made-with-tea is their speed. Soak the fruit in advance (overnight if possible), chuck in some honey or muscovado sugar, flour (not forgetting the baking powder if you're not using self-raising!) and a beaten egg or two, turn it into a tin and shove it in the oven. Go and watch an episode of Lark Rise..., and it should be about ready by the end.

Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons by Diana Henry

Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons is essentially a companion volume to Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, which I reviewed recently here, and considers summer, as opposed to winter, food. It's subtitled "Enchanting Dishes from the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa" and certainly fulfils its brief. I'm enchanted. It follows the same format as the other book, with sumptuous illustrations, apposite literary quotations and introductions to both sections and individual recipes which convey practical information and sheer delight in the food described:

[T]here were dishes whose poetry came from their evocative names or stories, as well as from their taste. Think of Ice in Heaven, a Middle Eastern milk pudding of rose-perfumed ground rice; Pearl Divers' Rice, honey-sweetened rice from Bahrain to be eaten with lamb, so-called because its high sugar content was thought to help pearl divers stay under longer; or the Crazy Water of the title, an Italian dish of seabass poached in a salty, garlicky broth, cooked by the fishermen of the Amalfi coast.

Makes you want to head straight for the jar of olives in the fridge, doesn't it? I was delighted to find a recipe for socca, the delicious chickpea pancake sold in varied forms in street markets around the Riviera. There are three wonderful orange salads – we tend to use oranges mainly in desserts, but the two savoury ones here are superb with grilled meat, and much my favourite way to eat oranges. The recipes are all straightforward, and well within the compass of the average cook; I don't think an absolute novice would have any real difficulties although someone who has never made bread before might need a little practice.

The introductions to each section don't just comment on the recipes, but offer additional ideas and sensible advice; in some cookery books these are the bits that you skip but here they are both informative and seductive, and encourage you to experiment. Her comments on lavender, for instance, acknowledge that it can be hard to get fresh if you don't garden yourself so, after intriguing suggestions for ways in which the herb might be used, there is advice about substituting dried lavender if necessary.

This is real summer food, nothing is included that looks too heavy to eat on the hottest of days, and everywhere the use of the freshest ingredients is encouraged, not in a "preachy" way, but by the author's evident pleasure in her subject:

We tend to think much more about basic ingredients – a good chicken, a fresh fish – than the additions. But just as you might deliberate over a plain string of pearls, a pair of gaudy glass earrings or a fine silver chain to go with that little black dress, think about how herbs can create a totally different mood and tone. They are the invaluable accessories of the culinary world – both for everyday wear or for dressing up.

Need I say more?

Food and drink meme - comfort food

This came from Ted at bookeywookey, and seemed appropriate as the next review here will be another cookery book. I'm a great believer in comfort food as will probably be obvious from my answers below, so I'd just like to mention that I love vegetables and really have quite a healthy diet!

What did you eat/drink today?

Leftover chicken with green pepper and noodles, with a Chinese omelette on top made with a home-laid egg. The omelette was a rich gold and tasted unbelievably good. Thanks, girls!

What do you never eat/drink?

Most seafood, to my eternal frustration, because it makes me ill. There are so many delicious-looking recipes which use mussels, scallops, oysters and so on, all of which I would love to eat, and can't. And I prefer not to eat rocket, which I hate, but it's always turning up in salads and catching me out, even at home.

Favourite failsafe thing to cook (if you cook) or defrost if you don't

Spaghetti with chillies and chorizo for an almost instant everyday meal, or macaroni (or cauliflower) cheese; if there's more time Indian butter chicken with naan. My younger son always used to request that for his birthday.

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find

Cheese – we never run out of cheese – bacon, milk and yoghurt. Salad ingredients going limp. Something left over from dinner the previous evening, which will form the basis of lunch.

What is your favourite kitchen item?

I like my hand-held blender, great for whizzing soups (I like making soup, it's very satisfying, instant warmth and comfort). I also like the breadmaker, which turns out delicious naan bread with almost no effort. We always have home-made now. My son uses it to make wonderful pizza dough too.

Where would you recommend eating out - either on home turf or elsewhere?

Roti, on Rose Street in Edinburgh – Indian food made with Scottish produce. I would like to eat at St John's in London, because I love their cookery book, The Whole Beast. One of the books I plan to review here. It has to be in the right company though.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

That's difficult, there's so many things I like. It would be quite unpretentious though. Braised lamb shank with mashed potato would come high on the list, maybe followed by a really perfect creme brulée. But Piperfield pork sausages could be a strong contender too, or roast beef from the herd raised in the fields around my parents' home in Devon.

I think I'll go and read a cookery book now...

Roast figs, sugar snow by Diana Henry

This book has been my constant companion for the last three days, while I decided what to contribute to Christmas cooking. And it's been a pleasure to spend time in its company - for a start it is beautifully produced, with the most unctuous set of photographs I can remember. More than that, I can't read it without my mouth watering all the time. When I want to cook I generally head for my pasta cookbook, since I love Italian food and the range of dusky tomato-y sauces loaded with basil and other pungent herbs, but a visit to Genoa reminded me how delicious northern Italian dishes are. This book ranges from New England and Quebec, through Scandinavia and Russia through the Alps to northern Italy, celebrating winter food and making me long to create slow-cooked stews of wild boar, Friulian winter salads (spicy sausage, walnuts and radicchio) and melting apple cakes.

The book is subtitled "Food to warm the soul" and it does. Each chapter (with titles redolent of hedgerow and bonfire) has a long, informative introduction discussing the range of dishes which can be made from particular ingredients, the food common to an area, or offering further suggestions; each dish also has a brief preamble, usually a celebration of dish or contents, and there are carefully chosen snippets of poetry and other quotations sprinkled throughout, combining to offer a pleasurable read while curled up in front of the fire (although I usually read my cookery books in bed with a dog, so we drool together).

Some familiar flavourings, such as ginger, allspice, cinnamon, caradmom and dill, can be given a new slant by looking at how they are treated in other cool climates. Dill, for example, is an comforting, non-assertive herb...Or try caraway, once popular in Britain in breads and cakes, and now a signature flavouring in Austria, Hungary and Alsace, rubbed into roast pork or fried with potatoes.

Caraway cake was the bane of my childhood; I can't think how many times we would arrive at a relative's house to be told, "I've just made a caraway cake." You'd know that you would have to eat it to be polite, and that every mouthful would taste of dust and mice. (Why mice? I don't know, but that's what it tasted of.) But Diana Henry persuades me that I might fry a spoonful in with the saute potatoes, just to see. After all, she's convinced me that beetroot is delicious.

If you are looking for a real comfort food book, I heartily recommend this one.

Kitchen Essays by Agnes Jekyll

A syren’s tea-party of two

Clarify 1 lb. butter. When cold beat to a cream, add 12 oz. sugar, 1 lb. potato flour (sieved), 4 whole eggs and the yolks of two, the zest of 1 lemon. Beat the whole mass for 1 hour, when it should form bubbles. Bake in a buttered and finely bread-crumbed mould in a moderate oven. Halve these quantities for a small cake.

[M]ight be served with honey-dew and the milk of Paradise when procurable.

I should think that if I beat a cake by hand for an hour, I would form bubbles.

Lady Jekyll’s charming and amusing book of essays offers all sorts of culinary advice, from preparing shooting lunches to managing without your cook (goodness, unthinkable – but it is she who would beat the Venus Torte for an hour, not the lady of the house). First published in 1922 (and reprinted by the redoubtable Persephone Books), the essays combine humour with practical information, thereby ensuring our lady housewife’s dining table will be a pleasure to all comers, young and old. Should you need to provide a light supper for artists and performers, Lady Jekyll will be your guide:

Mrs Gladstone’s practice of sending her husband into battle on an egg-flip, cleverly produced at the psychological moment, can be imitated with this Frothed Wine Soup, good for a prima donna or pianist soon going into action, and can be made simply by anybody who can whisk an egg.

I have informed OH that, should I be ill, a better recovery will be aided by regular small and tempting meals. For lunch, Lady Jekyll advises a “nicely cut and fried bread canapé, on which may be placed partridge breasts resting on softly-mashed potato and “some mushrooms buttered, grilled and added piping hot”. OH reassured me that he will do his best, and added that he hoped for my sake I would be stricken soon.

I am determined that, over Christmas, we shall dine en famille in grace and elegance; recommended for a first dinner party, for example, is a “very small Selle de Pré Sâle (Saddle of Welsh Mutton) in winter”. The recipe begins “For a saddle weighing about 8 lb. . . .”. We might start with home-made foiegras, perhaps, and finish with Cold Lemon Soufflé accompanied by some delicate Cat’s Tongue Biscuits. Now, if you will excuse me, I am just going to telephone The Lady to place within its pages an advertisement for a good, plain cook.