National Trust - The National Trust Cookbook

The National Trust

Cookbook

The National Trust

Cookbook

Introduction

If youre anything like me, no visit to a National Trust property would be complete without stopping by the caf or tea-room to rest the feet and recharge the batteries.

Every year, our visitors tuck into over one hundred thousand plates of sausage and mash, almost seven hundred thousand bowls of homemade soup and well over a million scones, all washed down with almost seven million cups of tea and coffee.

Youll find some of these dishes in our cafs all-year-round after all, when is it not the right time to bite into a slice of flapjack? But one of my favourite things about our places is how each season brings something unique to the gardens, estates and houses. This is reflected in our cafs changing dishes. After a stroll through a frosty winter garden, I like to warm up with a bowl of our warming rich and creamy roast onion and garlic soup. For fresh spring days, a delicate goats cheese tartlet with pickled cucumber. In summer, a slice of green vegetable and mozzarella quiche with a crunchy salad enjoyed from a sunny terrace. Or a satisfying Sissinghurst honey, walnut and cobnut tart to fuel a long ramble through a kaleidoscope of autumn leaves.

These dishes were all developed by us and tried and tested by all our National Trust kitchen teams. They are also simple enough to whip up in your own home no industrial kitchen equipment or hard-to-find ingredients required. For the first time, were bringing together favourite seasonal recipes, including many vegetarian and gluten-free options, in this cookbook, along with some of the best local recipes from our chefs across the country. So now you can whip up a taste of the National Trust in your own home.

I have visited National Trust properties since childhood. We didnt travel much when I was a kid (my mum and step-dad didnt drive), but wed often go on family days out to Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire; it was so close to an industrial area, yet walking through its gates felt like stepping into another world. My grandfather took me on trips to National Trust places further afield and I have cherished memories of long sunny days picnicking by the lake or riding my bike through the woods.

My grandparents also fuelled my interest in food and its provenance. My grandmother never bought anything pre-packaged: everything was made from scratch, whether bread, pastry or ice cream for treats. My grandfather was a keen gardener; he worked with his simple patch to grow vegetables and soft fruit. In spring, Id pick sticks of rhubarbs to dip into a bag of sugar, my lips soon coated with the sticky granules. In winter, I gathered greens with my grandmother, who insisted that sprouts always taste better after a frost.

So I have a fascination with food and how it works: how the sun completely changes the flavour of a tomato; what does pepper taste like on a strawberry? At school, I was always adapting the recipes we were told to cook. I cooked at home for friends and family and when I left school I went on to catering college. Its this passion for food and its origins from that led me to work at Clumber Park in 2007. I still lived locally and felt that the Trusts ethos around food was fantastic: in the busy world we live in, here was an organisation still using raw ingredients and cooking from scratch in their kitchens.

I loved how we didnt just receive a delivery of ingredients that could be from anywhere; if possible food was sourced locally or even from Clumber itself. The property has a huge walled garden growing a vast range of fruit and vegetables, and you could pick food from it in the morning and be serving it by the afternoon just like my grandparents used to do.

Clumber isnt our only property with a kitchen garden or orchard that supplies food for the caf. Others include Attingham Park, in Shropshire, where many of their intriguing crops, such as the long, prickly cucumber, established in the eighteenth century, are used in the Carriage House Caf. At Beningborough Hall, in Yorkshire, their home-grown beetroot is made into a moist beetroot cake. Wimpole Estate, Cambridgeshire has a two-hectare (four-and-a-half acre) walled kitchen garden, which grows around fifty types of tomatoes and provides over 450kg of fruit and vegetables for the caf each year.

In some cases, our kitchen teams also work with the estates tenant farmer, who supplies the caf with often award-winning produce from the surrounding farmland. For anything beyond their capacity to deliver, we work with local and regional farmers and suppliers who not only provide great-quality ingredients but also share our values around sustainability, animal welfare, looking after the land, and nature. There are inevitably commodities and ingredients which arent grown in this country that we have to bring in from further afield, but we make sure these too are sourced and delivered responsibly.

We couldnt have a National Trust cookbook without including the recipe for our celebrated fruit scone, best served warm from the oven with lashings of strawberry jam and a generous dollop of fresh, clotted cream. Or (to avoid upsetting any Devonians) a thick spread of Devon clotted cream topped with a dollop of strawberry jam! There are also some dishes you might not have come across before. The brioche sausage Wellington, developed by Josh Hopkins at Calke Abbey, is well worth trying and much more interesting than the traditional sausage roll. And you might not expect to see a spiced star anise pork stew on the menu at a National Trust caf but its a delicious, aromatic and warming one-pot combining free-range pork with spices from the far east.

With such a wealth of ingredients and recipes at our fingertips, we wanted our cookbook to celebrate some of the very best recipes from our 200 restaurants and cafs and to tell some of the stories behind them, such as Churchills stew from youll find a variation of Agatha Christies favourite, crab and lobster bisque, which she enjoyed as a birthday treat at her holiday home, Greenway. We hope that they will inspire you to share a taste of the Trust at home with your friends and family.

PS. I love cooking all the recipes in this book, but if I had to recommend just one for you to try, its got to be the . The quintessential English cake, its the perfect balance of everything and yet so simple to make perhaps thats why its the bestselling cake across the Trust!

Clive Goudercourt

Development Chef,

National Trust