Claire Thomson - Home Cookery Year: Four Seasons, Over 200 Recipes for All Possible Occasions

Publishing Director Sarah Lavelle

Copy-editor Judy Barratt

Assistant Editor Stacey Cleworth

Head of Design Claire Rochford

Designer Nicola Ellis

Typesetter Jonathan Baker

Photographer Sam Folan

Cover illustrator Marie Doazan

Prop Stylist Faye Wears

Recipe Development Matthew Williamson

Head of Production Stephen Lang

Production Controller Katie Jarvis

Published in 2020 by Quadrille, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing

Quadrille

5254 Southwark Street

London SE1 1UN

quadrille.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Text Claire Thomson 2020

Photography Sam Folan 2020

Design Quadrille 2020

eISBN 9781787134881

CONTENTS

This book is for anyone who wants to be able to cook well, with confidence, every day. Understandably this might be viewed with scepticism by some; after all, there are a great many cookbooks out there what is different about this one, and who says I am the person to enable this?

Home Cookery Year brings together themes that I have previously championed, feeding small children, keeping a well-stocked storecupboard, and how to encourage a new and basic agenda to energize your cooking at home. I am keen on the domesticity the title of this book conjures up. Its not a fashionable title much more an honest one and I love it for this. I want to give you a down-to-earth and intuitive framework of how and what to cook all year round. At its heart is an exhortation to shop and cook in tandem with the seasons, which will inevitably give the cook (and keen mealtime recipients) a sense of anticipation and excitement.

The origins of Home Cookery Year lie indelibly in a series of notebooks I have kept over the past few years. Disaster struck when my car was broken into and my handbag, complete with current notebook and my wallet, was stolen. It was breaking news locally, with newspaper articles and a radio appearance trying to unearth any information on the whereabouts of my stolen bag. It never materialized and was no doubt launched into a hedge or a black bin, to be collected and turfed into landfill. Panic ensued and I had to do my best to catch up; thankfully, I was able to. Those recipes are in this book; I was able to test and write them again, but sadly the drawings in that particular notebook are lost (the kids have always doodled in my notebooks over the years, peppering the pages, each one a timeline of my work and also their eyes on the world). I recall an especially good one of me drawn by Dorothy, my youngest, then aged 6; in it I have great big bright-red lips, high heels and long, dangly earrings a case of wishful thinking on her part.

To begin writing this cookbook, and to remind myself of how I have cooked year on year for so many years now, I gathered all my notebooks together and spent a good long while riffling through them all. And sure enough, since the time when I first started out as a chef cooking in restaurants, to now, as a 40-year-old mum of three, there is a rhythm within these books, a beat to how I like to cook.

I am a professional chef and have worked in many different kitchens, under intense pressure it is a wonderfully enriching and also sometimes stressful job. I will always be glad that I followed it as a career path from the age of 21. Along the way I have met brilliant and extraordinary people working in the field of food; it is an important and ever-changing landscape, one that has a profound impact on everyone, regardless of their occupation.

In more recent years, becoming a parent meant wanting to work less in restaurant kitchens, and trying to recalibrate as someone with a role in food, but one where I could put my children to bed in the evening. Sadly (and I dont think Im unique in saying this), working as a chef with young children at home is not a combination that dovetails all that well, compounded even more so when your husband is also a chef. Asked what my occupation is these days, my default reply is chef, followed by a hastily tacked-on food writer. My role in writing about food is not all that circuitous given that I studied journalism at university. And old student friends delight in telling me that I am now, in fact, exactly who I said I was going to be, back in the days when I would cook vast pots of soup and stews to feed a crowd. My contemporaries all seemed to be on track to becoming doctors, architects and teachers, so my preferred career was certainly viewed as the more leftfield option. Shortly after university I left to go and live in Sydney; fast-track a decade, through more than a few kitchens and quite a few burns, I could call myself a chef. And I still do. Once a week and for occasional events Ill pop on my clogs and button up my whites, lacing an apron tight. Being a chef, being able to cook like one, is an extraordinary skill, and Im lucky to call it my own. But it is also my objective to encourage others to learn to cook, simpatico as a chef.

So yes, I think I can show you how if you would like me to (which, presumably, having bought or borrowed this cookbook, you do). Whilst you dont get the kids drawings, my shopping lists or indecipherable wine tasting notes, you do get a personal account of what I like to cook, and of how and when I like to cook it. A bit like a chef, a bit like a parent, a bit like me, I suppose.

In Home Cookery Year I propose the seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter are governed, comprehensively, by six different cookery occasions: midweek suppers, on a budget & from the larder, salads as light lunches or side dishes, indulgent or treat yourself cookery, leisurely and weekend cooking, and celebration feasts. Using seasonal plenty with enthusiasm is the cheaper, more rewarding way to cook well. Wait just long enough for the new season to come around, and sure enough, prices drop and opportunity comes thundering along in a shopping basket. A year may have passed, but the sudden influx of broad beans or cherries or Brussels sprouts or radishes always takes me by surprise and fills me with a greedy wonder. The novelty is electric, and I find myself shopping for asparagus or blood oranges like theyre going out of fashion. Chefs and those working in food media are mostly quick off the blocks, jostling to be the first to list new season and elusive produce on their menus or in their magazines. I find it reassuring that, no matter what, when certain ingredients come into season, the dynamic and interested cooks amongst us must then do our best to keep up. It is this style of cooking that I feel is most appropriate to the modern-day diet leaving nothing to waste, paying acute attention to the food and ingredients we have at our immediate disposal and ensuring we maximize on local bounty. It makes sense, and it always has done, this is not a principle that can or should be swayed by fashion.