The Random Recipe Adventure

2018 will in future be known as the year of the Great West Norwood Cookbook Cull. But which books to get rid of, and which to keep? The Random Recipe Adventure will help us decide (you can read a bit more about the premise here). Each week, a book will be taken from the shelves, examined, and cooked from. Losers go to Oxfam – winners stay on the shelves, with a promise that they will no longer be neglected quite as much as they have been for the last decade or so.

WEEK 1

The book

The River Cottage Meat Book, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

How/where/when did I get it?

Honestly can’t remember. A Christmas present about ten years ago, I think – either from my brother or my wife (sorry to both…).

Have I used it since then?

Yes, quite a lot.

Is the book any good?

If you want an exhaustive 500-page volume which incorporates not only a rational, passionate and eloquent treatise on the ethics and morality of the way we raise, buy, cook and eat meat, but also a thorough-going examination of the different ways to cook meat from the standpoints of both deliciousness and thrift, and, further, includes a wealth of recipes both original and classic, all of which have clearly been thought about and tested in the writer’s own kitchen, then YES YES YES a thousand times YES. If, on the other hand, you just want some ideas for your next barbecue, then STILL YES.

Here’s part of HF-W’s own introduction: ‘I’ve written this book because I believe that meat, at its splendid best, helps us achieve [a] sense of shared contentment perhaps better than any other food. But I’ve also written it because of my feelings about meat eating at its worst: an ignominious expression of greed, indifference and heartlessness.’

He goes on to lay out his Meat Manifesto, which exhorts us to think about the meat we eat, to consider how it arrived on our plate, not to shirk the moral dimension in our dealings with meat. For this alone, let alone the detailed examination he then embarks on (including personal but nuanced examinations of vegetarianism and the game industry), I would recommend this book as not just good, but crucially important.

The recipes maintain that high standard. There are sections on roasting, slow and fast cooking, barbecuing, preserving and processing, and meat thrift, plus a useful appendix on ‘the trimmings’.

Crucially, all the recipes I’ve ever cooked from this book work well in our kitchen. The bane of my existence are recipes that have clearly been written by people with no understanding of how normal people cook or what non-professional kitchens look like. So a big thumbs-up there. And it remains the book I turn to if I’m in any doubt about the benefits and drawbacks of any meat-cooking technique, as well as an excellent reference tool if you want to brush up on cooking times.

What did the Random Recipe Generator throw up?

Pan-to-oven pork chops with garlic.

It’s not the most exacting recipe you’ll ever come across, and as one who regularly goes off-piste with this kind of thing, I found it a bit of a struggle to remember that it was the recipe we were testing, not my powers of improvisation. But it’s clearly written, easy to understand and to execute, and provides excellent results.

Possible variations (lamb and anchovies, for example) are given, and it’s made clear that this is more a method than a stick-to-it-every-step-of-the-way-at-all-costs-or-the-world-will-cave-in recipe.

The Verdict: Keeper or Chucker?

A bit of a cheat, this. I always knew this book would survive. KEEPER.

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