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.
The book
Garlic: The Mighty Bulb by Natasha Edwards
How/where/when did I get it?
Last summer, from the Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight, as part of a garlic shopping binge in which we also bought a metric fucktonne of garlic (for eating and planting), garlic cheese, garlic beer, garlic vodka, garlic jam, and (one of the few products in their shop that doesn’t pertain to garlic in any way at all) a really good and stout walking stick.
Have I used it since then?
There was an initial flurry of garlicky meals, but now the book languishes on the shelf, sandwiched between Nigel Slater and Marcella Hazan. When I take either of those volumes down, which I do often, I’m sure I hear a pitiful whelp of anguish and loneliness from their neglected neighbour.
So what about it then?
The single ingredient cookbook is an oddity. Dependent almost entirely on the attractiveness and versatility of the core product, they can go right (In Praise of the Potato, by Lindsay Bareham, is one I’ve somehow never got round to buying but is, by all reports, an absolute cracker) or they can go horrendously wrong (the less said about The Joy of Kale!, Kohlrabi All The Way, and 1001 Ways With Horseradish, the better).
In the case of garlic, the devotion of 160 pages – about a third of them recipes – to extolling its virtues is completely understandable. Garlic supplies base notes for such a wide range of dishes that to do any kind of cooking without it is, to me, unthinkable. So my exploration of this fine book had an air of coals to Newcastle (garlic to the Auvergne?) about it. Do I need an actual recipe for hummus? For pesto? For garlic bread? For spaghetti carbonara?
In the interests of completeness and research, I decided to make the first three of the above, and the answers to those questions are, as it turns out, yes, yes, yes, and no absolutely not thank you very much I’ll have my carbonara without spring onions parsley and basil what the hell are you thinking?
Of the final recipe of the week, slow-cooked lamb with garlic, I cannot yet report, as it is puttering away in the oven (four hours down, one to go) as I write. But it will, I know, be splendid. And as for the magnificent Chicken with Forty Garlic Cloves: soon, soon.
You might want to steer clear of me for a week or two.
The Verdict: Keeper or Chucker?
Keeper.
Yes, you’re right – it does look as if we’re not going to get rid of any of these books, but at least we’ll have used them all by the end of the year, and that is at least part of the point.
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