Product Description

Winter cooking comes with its own unique pleasures. Shutting the door on the rain, snow and cold outside, to gather around the stove and cook for friends and family brings an all-encompassing feeling of warmth. Diana Henry has put together an irresistible collection of enchanting winter dishes from the Northern Hemisphere that celebrate the magical and evocative nature of winter foods.

Food is as much to do with the imagination as it is with flavour. A dish is more than a collection of ingredients. Diana's quest for foods from the colder climates was inspired by the memory of `sugar snow' from her childhood reading. Sugar snow is made by tapping the sap of a maple trees in snowy conditions. If the temperature went below freezing at night but above freezing during the day, the sap turns into sticky amber syrup, by pouring it on to snow - there it sets to a cobwebby toffee. Here was a magical food that you could get from inside a tree and make into sweets.

This book isn't just about ingredients. It's also about weather and the seasons, and the kind of food we want to want to eat and cook in colder months. Life slows down and so does cooking. Diana Henry has spent five years travelling, and eating in search of the tastiest dishes from the snowiest climates -exploring many cold climate countries from Georgia, Austria; Switzerland; Hungary and Scandinavia to Northern Italy; America and France collecting recipes as she went.

In Roast Figs Sugar Snow this unique collection of recipes celebrates some of the worlds most overlooked cuisines by using produce that can be found on our doorsteps. `Snow Food' uses much the same basic autumn and winter produce as we do in the UK - root vegetables and brassicas, orchard fruits, pork, game and cheese - but their flavour combinations are different. The dill in Scandinavia brings a breath of chill air and pine forests to the table; the pairing of horseradish with pork, as in Austria and Russia, makes you see the potential of a root we only bring out for roast beef; peppers and tomatoes cooked with blood-red paprika produces a Hungarian ratatouille that is more suited to winter consumption than the Mediterranean version.

Diana lets us taste and experience this traditional home-cooking from all over the snowy world, there are potato and cheese dishes from Italy's skiing slopes, pastries from the coffee houses of Vienna and Budapest, and little appetizers that have been eaten at Russian celebrations since the days of Tsar. Classic ingredients such as nutty-fleshed pumpkins, earthy wild mushrooms and pungent cheeses sit alongside less commonly used foods such as cranberries, quinces and juniper berries in this beautiful wintry book

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #138279 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-15
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

The Guardian
“A lovely collection of winter recipes”

The Spectator, December 3, 2005
A new Diana Henry book is an occasion. Her dishes are never less than delicious.

Wine International, January 2006
Henry's evocative prose and Jason Lowe's beautiful photography with smatterings of wintry poetry, make this ideal for a Christmas gift.

Customer Reviews

Fantastic
There are not many books that I would cook a whole dinner party from without doing a trial run. This is the only one I can think of. I totally respect Diana Henry for her brilliant, beautiful book and her delicious recipes. Really she is far more reliable than Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, and in fact surpasses Delia Smith too in my opinion. Absolutely delicious. Try the roast squash with porcini cream. Very, very easy, sublimely delicious.

Stunningly beautiful
This cookbook didn't seem to get the recognition it deserved. As Diana Henry isn't of the "celebrity chef" culture, it's no wonder why. A shame, as it's one of the most beautiful cookbooks I've ever seen and one of my personal treasures. In her wonderful recipes and photos she captures New England, and especially the Vermont of my childhood, perfectly.

Beautiful
This is a beautiful book , the photography is stunning and all the recipes just make you want to cook everything in the book.