Product Description

The New Covent Garden Food Company was founded in 1988 to make homemade quality soup using entirely natural ingredients, and despite many imitators over the past eighteen years New Covent Garden are still the bestsellers in the fresh soup market. This enduring popularity is a result of New Covent Garden's continuous passion for fresh soup, which they expound as the ultimate, easy-to-make, healthy, delicious meal. Now back with their third book of soup recipes, New Covent Garden have even more new and exciting soups for us to try, from the exotically tangy to the comfortingly wholesome, and this time the recipes are sorted according to when their ingredients are seasonally available to ensure that they taste as fresh and vibrant as possible. Continuing the practical series-style format of a spiral-bound hardback together with the fun and approachable design and tone, this book is an essential addition to even the most reluctant chef's kitchen shelf.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1518 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 122 pages

About the Author

The New Covent Food Company was established in 1988 to bring quality, homemade soup onto the shelves of our supermarkets. They remain the leading brand in fresh soup.

Customer Reviews

Useful wire-bound format, so it lies flat on the kitchen counter
is an added bonus to this superb book of seasonal recipes.

From a passionate company, whose employees obviously take their job very seriously, a useful selection of recipes where the more well-known, such as a simple 'Vegetable Stock', and 'Bouillabaise' mingle with the more intriguing 'Christmas Dinner Soup' or 'Love & Hearts'.

122 high quality pages, split over 8 chapters:-

Intro
Larder Ingredients
Simple Stocks
Our Philosophy
Autumn Recipes
Winter Recipes
Spring Recipes
Summer Recipes

completed with a concise index.

Opening with the comment:-

'To those who believe the world can be put to rights with a simple bowl of soup..........Soup is easy, down-to-earth, one-pot cooking. It's friendly, too. The aroma draws people into the kitchen as casually as it calls them to the table. They come because soup is different every time: bubbling with winter comfort, ripe with summer growth, mellow with autumnal plenty, bursting with the vibrancy of spring............'

Simply presented with a cheery bright cover, one is drawn to the charming black and white illustration on page 8, introducing each member of the 'New Covent Garden Food Company', from the guy who 'tends to the kitchens' big soup saucepans', to the lady who 'does a bit of everything and keeps us on our toes' .......to the chap who 'does the figures', and gets the feeling that this is a 'homely' book which stands out from the crowd, purely by taking the making of a largely misunderstood dish - SOUP - so seriously.

'Our year - the soup-maker's year - starts in Autumn. That's when friends and families retreat to the kitchen, and root vegetables - the soup-cook's most dependable ingredient - come into season.........Autumn also marks the start of our recipe-testing cycle. Some we invent, some arrive by post or email from friends and strangers; some we adapt from foods we've seen on our travels; and some are from the army of cooks who rise to the annual challenge of our Student Chef and Create a Soup competitions.
This book contains recipes from all those sources. It represents the collective soup-fuelled wisdom of the wider New Covent Garden Food Company community - our chefs, our friends, our relatives, our suppliers, our supporters and our fellow cooks.'

Imagination quickly forgives the fact that the subtle colour opening plate which heads each season, along with the odd black and white drawing is all the 'illustration' that is really required in a book of this type.
Following on from 'casual' text (usually dedicated to a member of the staff relevant to the recipe) at the start of each recipe, is a clear ingredients list, cooking time and method.

A taste of the recipes:-

Parsnip, Apple & Chestnut
Venison, Apple & Blackberry
Beef, Ale & Wild Mushroom
Leftover Soup
Cullen Skink
Duck & Pomegranate
Russian Beef Borsch
Wood Pigeon & Morel Mushroom
Crab & Artichoke
Haggis, Neeps & Tatties
Broad Bean & Smoked Chicken
Roasted Fennel & Somerset Cider
Runner Bean & Braise Ham Broth

Absolutely Souper
Every kitchen should have a copy of this book. With a wide range of choice for every season it has something for everyone. The 'Beef and Ale Soup' is absolutely delicious as are the other winter warmers, and I look forward to trying some of the summer recipes. I will definately be buying the other Covent Garden recipe books.

Good variety, not run of the mill
Easy to follow recipe instructions, layout easy on the eyes when cooking in a hurry, most soups are a meal in themselves (best way really), no exotic ingredients, and always a yummy taste!! But as a vegetarian, I would have prefered fewer non-veggie ones.