Clarissa Dickson Wright - Potty!: Clarissas One Pot Cookbook

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my editor Nicky Ross for her enthusiasm; to my friend and agent Heather Holden Brown for her tolerance and patience as ever. And to Chloe Billington for once again dashing to the rescue.

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Hodder & Stoughton An Hachette UK company

Copyright 2010 Clarissa Dickson Wright

The right of Clarissa Dickson Wright to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 444 72410 3

Book ISBN 978 0 340 99852 6

Photography Howard Shooter

Illustrations by Joe McLaren

Design and Art Direction by Clare Skeats

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

To my goddaughter Dashka
a morsel of joy

The idea of one-pot cookery is as old as time. The minute our ancestors worked out that food tasted better cooked and started stuffing ingredients into a deer bladder to boil, it was up and running. To this day the world is full of people who for reasons of economy or limited fuel still cook their daily meals in a single pot. When China passed its per capita fuel emission tests it was due almost entirely to the wok!

Now that the recession, rising fuel costs and to a lesser degree, if youre truthful the future of the planet have made us concentrate on saving resources, this is perhaps the time to think of one-pot meals again. Leave behind you the era of celebrity chef, with its multiple pots and pans and huge expenditure of fuel, where everything is for show and display and not necessarily about flavour, and return to the single pot. It isnt boring and its certainly both cheaper and easier on the washing up (more fuel saving and less use of chemicals).

For the purpose of this adventure everything cooked will be done in one dish be it wok, pressure cooker, daube or casserole. If your staple is bread, baked potato or cous cous it may be separate, and any vegetables not included will be raw (salads, crudites, and the like). If like me you live on your own or if there are just the two of you either in new romantic bliss or contented domesticity, it is much easier and in some cases quicker to use just the single pot. When I was Lord Rector of Aberdeen University my students would ask me to create delicious supper-time meals and for obvious reasons a great many of them were made as one-pot dishes.

As you will see I have tried to use my imagination to vary the type of vessels you may use for these recipes but of course you are not bound to my choice of vessel and you can use anything you have to hand even damp newspaper! I will give a RUN Pan, my favourite choice of pan, to the reader who first sends in a dish cooked in a single vessel that I havent used in this book.

I hope you have fun with it all.