Product Description

A distinctly educational cooking primer for the whole family with more than 100 recipes that can be made by children.

The latest addition to the best-selling RIVER COTTAGE cookbook series inspires the entire family to venture into the kitchen to prepare delicious, wholesome food together. THE RIVER COTTAGE FAMILY COOKBOOK features a comprehensive repertoire of more than 100 recipes and kitchen projects that cooks of all ages will enjoy: making butter, curing bacon, planting a kitchen garden, and more. This complete cookbook will show kids how quality ingredients are produced, while teaching lifelong lessons about meaningful cooking and eating.

"Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a brilliant, argumentative British cook and food writer . . . [His] recipes happen to be terrific, for meat and other things: His chocolate-chip cookie recipe in THE RIVER COTTAGE FAMILY COOKBOOK finally released my children from years of sub-standard attempts." --Cynthia Zarin, GourmetReviews

"[A] smart mix of Utopian fantasy and culinary reality."-Washington Post

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #711761 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 10.05" h x 1.75" w x 7.90" l, 3.15 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 415 pages

About the Author
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is well known for his commitment to real food and honest home cooking; his books and series for Channel 4 have earned him a huge popular following. Hugh lives in Dorset with Marie and their two sons. Fizz Carr was a journalist on Vogue before leaving London to farm on the South Downs. She regularly holds farm visits for school children and is a passionate advocate of animal welfare. Fizz and Steve have four daughters, all of them enthusiastic cooks.

Excerpted from The River Cottage Family Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Fizz Carr. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From the introduction: What is a family cookbook?

This is a book that everyone in the family can pick up and use. If you’re around 10–12 years old, we reckon you’ll be able to cook from it with maybe just a little adult help. Twelve-plus and you might be able to tackle most of the recipes on your own. And if you’re an adult with younger children, we hope you’ll enjoy cooking from it too, with your kids alongside, fully engaged in the mixing, sifting, stirring and rolling. In fact, now that we’ve finished the book, we think it will be useful as a kitchen ‘primer’ for cooks of any age.

Starting young
If you are a parent, perhaps you’re wondering at what age your children can begin to take an interest in cooking. The answer is, we believe, long before they could even attempt to read the simplest word in this book. The baby that sits in a highchair watching you washing and steaming some carrots, or peeling a banana, then whizzing his or her food in a blender, is learning that the true story of lunch begins with raw ingredients, rather than with the opening of a jar.

The toddler that walks past a field of sheep and asks what they are doing there should not be fobbed off with stories of woolly jumpers. Far better to pick up some lamb chops on the way home and show your child how you cook them. And the child who has a chance to grow some food, even if it’s just mustard and cress on a wet flannel on the windowsill, has learned a vital lesson about where food comes from.

Not just how, but why
For experienced cooks in a rush, a recipe that is merely a set of instructions may be useful. But children (and adults) who are still learning about food want and deserve something more – the tools and rules for a lifetime’s cooking.

And so in our book the ‘whys’ of cooking are at least as important as the ‘hows’. Why do you rub butter into flour when you make pastry, and why do you have to put so much effort into kneading bread dough? Once you know the answer, you’ll make better pastry and better bread, because you’ll understand the reasons behind what you’re doing.

You may think that some of our recipes look rather long. Does it mean that they’re really hard? On the contrary, we’ve written them longer to make them easier! It’s true that we could tell you how to make garlic mayonnaise in 37 words. We could say: ‘Mix crushed garlic, salt, egg yolks, pepper, mustard. Add half the oil a drop at a time. Add tablespoonful of lemon juice. Add rest of oil in steady stream, beating constantly. Add rest of lemon juice. Refrigerate.’ That would be a short, easy recipe for making mayonnaise. But it would only be easy if you’ve made it before. If you’re going to make really good mayonnaise for the first time, you should know why you add the oil a drop at a time, and why you can add it more quickly once you’ve stirred in some lemon juice. We try to answer the kind of questions that might come into your head as you’re cooking. And that’s why our recipe for mayonnaise is about twelve times as long!

Kitchen-sink dramas
While you’re cooking, we hope you’ll particularly enjoy those moments when, if you stop to think about it, something quite amazing is happening. For example, mixing flour and water doesn’t sound like the most ambitious recipe. But when you come down to breakfast the next morning to find the gluey paste that you set aside the night before is now bubbling away of its own accord, you’re entitled to get excited. Suddenly you’re Dr Frankenstein, and that bowl of fizzing gloop is your Monster. You have created Life! Or, how is it that you can shake a jar of cream for minutes on end and then suddenly it turns, in the space of a second, into a lump of butter sloshing around in a milky liquid? Where did that come from?

You’ll soon discover that cooking and eating engage all the senses – not just taste. Every time you tackle a recipe you’ll be using your eyes and fingertips, almost without knowing it, to keep you on track. Your nose and ears are important as well. Few smells are as good as a chopped onion frying gently in a little butter – and the sound is pretty mouth-watering, too. Should you happen to forget those onions, so they start to burn, it’s your nose that will alert you to the problem – and tell you that it’s probably time to start all over again.

Of course, there will be plenty of times when things just don’t turn out how you planned, but don’t be discouraged. Comfort yourself with the thought that you often learn more about cooking when you get things wrong than when you get them right. And you probably won’t make the same mistake again. In fact, ‘again’ is a very important word in cooking. Cooking becomes easier, more fun and more interesting the more you do it. We hope this becomes an ‘everyday’ book in your kitchen – or at least an ‘everyweek’ book.

Future cooks
We hope that if you use this book often, you’ll soon be experimenting, changing ingredients and thinking about food and flavour, rather than just blindly following recipes. We hope it will lead you to approach other cookbooks with confidence and understanding.

When you’ve learned enough about your ingredients that you often say to yourself, ‘This is a good recipe, but wouldn’t it be even nicer if I . . .’, then you’ve graduated from this book, and the whole world of cooking is yours to explore. Though we do hope you’ll come back and visit us from time to time, like an old friend.