Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Veg: 200 Inspired Vegetable Recipes is 1/3 cup richness, 1/3 cup indulgence, and 1/3 cup pizzazz.
Appetite – Random House, 2013
The introduction explains that “this is a vegetable cookbook”. It depends on your politics and your point-of-view whether it’s a vegetarian cookbook, he maintains.
For his point-of-view? “I still believe in being a selective omnivore, casting a positive vote in favor of ethically produced meat and sustainably caught fish. However, I now understand that in order to eat these two great foods in good conscience, I have to recognize, control and impose limits on my appetite for them.”
The recipes are divided into Comfort food & feasts, hearty salads, Raw assemblies, Hefty soups, Bready things, Pantry suppers, Pasta & rice, Meze & tapas, Roast, grill broil and Side dishes.
“Just ask yourself if you, or anyone you know, might be in danger of eating too many vegetables. Or if you think the world might be a better, cleaner, greener place with a few more factory chicken or pig farms or intensive cattle feedlots scattered about the countryside. Surely it’s close to being a no-brainer.”
Each of the sections opens with a couple of solid pages of text, discussing the contents and various related subjects (from the importance of a quality peeler to the process of selecting top-notch veggies).
The first, Comfort food & feasts, explains that these recipes “are the first to turn to if you want to eat less meat but are a little bit wary about the prospect — perhaps because you can’t help feeling some degree of sensory deprivation may ensue. It needn’t.”
There truly is a sense that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is striving towards another perspective. And, sure, he might now believe that cooking more often with vegetables is “…more democratic — there’s no longer a tyrannical piece of meat dominating the agenda, making everything else feel like a supporting act” but it would appear that he believes his audience needs convincing.
“It’s also how we like to feed our extended family and friend. Of course, it isn’t always a meat-free table. But it often is.”
Almost every pair of pages includes a full-page photograph (the photography is by Simon Wheeler), but the pages are not glossy, so the 400-page cookbook remains a reasonable price. It’s an oversized volume (not suited to take to the market with you) and begs for a shopping list (because the ingredients are in an even smaller font than the instructions).
Even the salads are beautiful.
“In a ‘hearty salad,’ a well-tuned mixture of the raw and the cooked, the chunky and the leafy, perhaps the nutty and the cheesy, creates an enticing, self-contained plateful. Big, gutsy salads like these are fun to eat, full of color, with lots of different flavors and textures competing for attention. You can taste the ingredients one at a time, or make each forkful an original cocktail. Each mouthful will be different, but all will be good.”
Aesthetically, River Cottage Veg is lovely. Each chapter has a new colour theme, and the ingredients and title and illustrations (the illustrations are by Mariko Jesse) are all in synch.
Depending on the cook’s preferences, this might be viewed as being as the expense of use-ability. The theme is attractive, but sometimes one recipe nestles in with another on the same single page; the font is appealing but slightly cramped, text-heavy.
The recipes are followed by sections for the Pantry and Veg on the go, for simple recipes.
“There will always be occasions when you’re really pushed for time, or tired and hungry, and you crave something filling and satisfying but simple and quick. When you are in that frame of mind, the temptation can be strong to reach for the sausages or bacon. But really, you don’t have to default to meat just because you’re in a hurry.”
There is a single index, with a V for Vegan marking the salient recipes. (Many of the recipes do contain dairy, the typical new-to-veggie cookbook approach, meaning drown-it-in-dairy-instead.)
The measurements appear in imperial first (metric second), are more often to include generous amounts of oil and cheese and less likely to include generous amounts of garlic.
(This makes for a flavour appreciated by the masses but, in our family, we prefer more rather than less when it comes to garlic.)
A Fainter Footprint: Fridays, this autumn
Recipes tried:
Shaved summer vegetables (100)
Radishes with butter and salt (102)
River Cottage summer garden soup (132)
Curried sweet potato soup (166)
Green beans, new potatoes, and olives (222)
Cambodian wedding day dip (299)
Caponata (307)
Patatas bravas (322)
Steamed veg with a hint of garlic (372)
Leeks (and greens) with coconut milk (378)
Cheat’s cauliflower cheese (378)
The recipes call for common ingredients, no substitutions required. They turned out as they appear in the photographs (although the serving ware and place settings are nicer than anything in our family kitchen – we spend on ingredients, not decor).
Even those with only Basic Vegetable Experience are likely to succeed. This really would make a fine introduction for those omnivores who are freshly interested in some cozy moments with vegetables.
Note: This is the fourth of a series of posts in my new Friday Fugue, which will focus on a series of books working towards A Fainter Footprint (on the Earth).
This sounds like just what I need! I’m so tired of cooking veggies the same way over and over. Thanks!
Browsing through a variety of cookbooks in recent weeks has been great; we all fall into ruts at times, and I, for one, regularly forget how inspiring cookbooks can be. I should make more of a habit of it.
I actually gave away my copy of this as there wasn’t much that tempted me as a vegan and most recipes weren’t really adaptable since the flavour was coming, as you say, from the hefty amounts of dairy and fat included for comfort. I’m finding his Three Good Things cookbook much more interesting though as it’s built around flavour profiles and far more adventurous, even skipping the meat, eggs and fish sections I’ve got far more recipes and ideas from it than Veg! gave me. 🙂
As for the bandwagon possibility, I suspect it started out that way but think you’re close with the idea that he then realised that actually, yes he could with more fruit, veg and grains in his diet…
This is a cookbook that I would have loved when I was new to cooking, because I used to rely heavily on cheese then too, and I would have appreciated the simplicity of it and not minded the emphasis on dairy. Even now, I’m still big on the idea of comfort food, and do occasionally substitute with Daiya products for the cheese called for in conventional cookbooks, but I have found other cookbooks which manage to fill that comfort-food gap with non-dairy options, which is now our preferred approach rather than substitutions.
Not that I know the “true story” behind the author’s decision to sway towards veggies, but I know how much my own eating habits have changed in the past 20 years, and Mr BIP’s have changed far more dramatically than mine (he was a carnivore through and through), so I can see where a chef could do a 180 on his position regarding various food families, leaving a chunk of his cookbook readers puzzled.
I watched the TV show that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall did on factory farming and I think a lot like him on them. I think this recipe book would suit me very well. Thank you for sharing. I have been really enjoying these posts on food related books.
Thanks, Jessica. I’m enjoying them too. Very much!
I’m a big fan of Hugh. I love his TV series and have a few of his books. I agree about the above comment – in the past Hugh has been a meat expert and his book ‘Meat’ is one of the best cookery books I own. But he does seem genuine about his passion for a better environment (his fish fight campaign is well-worth investigating) and I am tempted to buy this book. It is good to know that the recipes in this book are as reliable as the ones I’ve tried. This might be one for the Christmas list 🙂
That’s good to know about his other cookbooks and, if you’ve enjoyed them so much, I’m guessing this would be just as pleasing, Jackie. What I do appreciate about the recipes is that we found them to be satisfying for all members of the family but depending on the pairings and overall menu plans, the same recipe can shift from simple to sophisticated, so that the accompanying dish to, say, the Cheat’s Cauliflower Cheese could move it onto the plates of a casual dinner party just as easily as it filled the kids’ plates the night before.
Some lovely-sound recipes there – although I am a little wary of Hugh as I think he may be trying to jump slightly on a veggie bandwagon. He’s been very meaty in the past!
I hadn’t heard of him previously, and the “bandwagon” theory does seem to be a possibility. Nonetheless, he’s getting older, and might simply be realizing (as Mark Bittman did) that his earlier dietary habits were having enough of a physical effect that he needed to rethink some?