The Ethicurean Cookbook Recipes, Foods and Spirituous Liquors, from Our Bounteous Walled Garden in the Several Seasons of the Year

This cookbook was a gift from Betty Mahoney of The One Mile Bakery to Mark for his birthday (really a gift to me as well as I am the one who enjoys cooking from it!). This is Betty’s fave cookbook for the year.

This is simply a beautiful book with glorious food celebrating modern British seasonal cuisine. In this cookbook the team of 4 friends, from the multi award winning Ethicurean restaurant just outside of Bristol, share their ethos, stories and recipes. The restaurant serves a menu using only local and seasonal produce made by local artisan food and drink producers or grown within their walled garden. They use many traditional techniques and recipes and some have been adapted to the modern kitchen.

The book contains 120 innovative and exciting recipes in four chapters: Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. This book celebrates not only seasonal, local produce but their local food and drink producers.

Beetroot Barley

You will find an abundance of recipes for salads, soups, main course, salads, drinks, cocktails, pickles, cakes, and pies using local and foraged foods. But this is not just a book of recipes. Each recipe tells a story and each story gives you some idea of the inspiration behind the recipe. Some recipes may be difficult to recreate at home as they call for ingredients that are not common, or that you need to forage; such as pineapple weed, lovage, liquorice basil, goat meat. Where they can, they give more common substitutes.

You will find innovative recipes such as Rabbit Confit with lovage breadcrumbs or St. Georges Mushrooms with Asparagus, Ribwort Plantain, Mushroom Jelly and Apple Jelly. But as well there are twists on simple recipes such as asparagus with toasted sesame and hollandaise sauce where an artisan cider vinegar is used instead of lemon juice as they cannot grow lemons.

Chicken Thighs with Beetroot Barley and Bordelaise Sauce, with Broccoli

As I had a glut of beetroot, I took inspiration from the recipe: Pigeon breasts with beetroot barley and bordelaise sauce. As I did not have pigeon, I substituted chicken thighs and was happy with the result. The barley has a nutty edge which works really well with the earthy and sweet beetroot and the lovely rich bordelaise sauce tied the dish together.

This is not a cookbook I pull off the shelf for an easy week night supper. It is one that I use when I have time to cook and want to expand my horizons in cooking truly seasonal and British food.

You can find this book at good local book stores and on Amazon by clicking the image,

*If you want to know more about Carol’s adventure with food or even join her on one then check out Food Adventure Ltd.