REVIEW: Lavender & Lovage: A culinary notebook of memories & recipes from home & abroad

If you've ever searched the internet for recipes, you may well have visited the blog Lavender and Lovage, where Karen Burns-Booth writes beautifully about food, travel and food-related travel, as well as producing regular recipes.

Karen has now written a book, a collection of recipes and writings about her food and travels. It will be available in Kindle format  and print version on November 13th, and her publisher kindly sent me an ARC so I could review it. (Note - if you go to Amazon to check out the print version and it says "out of stock", just ignore it and order anyway, apparently it is printed to order and that makes the Amazon system think there is no stock).

 

This is a book to sit down and savour - the writing is beautiful, reminding me of Nigel Slater or Elizabeth David, the kind of writing that makes you undecided as to whether you want to grab your pinny or your passport. Recipes are interspersed with anecdotes, memories, photographs and menus reproduced from places she has visited.

 

The recipes themselves are from all around the world, from the many places that Karen has lived or visited, and they all have one thing in common - they are uncomplicated yet delicious, the kind of foods that people eat every day somewhere in the world. Yes, this is a book for reading, but it is also very much a book for cooking from and even a beginner cook can tackle most, probably all, of the dishes. There are no cheffy, showy, inaccessible recipes here, just lots and lots of good, wholesome food.  Many of Karen's travels mirror my own experiences, for instance she too has lived in Hong Kong and  the book includes a recipe for Chow Fan, a comfort food I turn to time and time again. Recipes also come from France, USA, Spain, South Africa and Southern American countries, yet none of them requires exotic or hard to find ingredients.

 

Karen's world includes Britain - the book includes some of our traditional regional recipes that are in danger of dying out. I was particularly pleased to see the recipe for Yorkshire Corned Beef Pie. Although I am from Lancashire myself, it brought back memories of the delicious "Meyt'n'tater" pies of my childhood. Nowadays when I go back home to visit, I sometimes buy a pie to try to recapture that taste, but the mashed potato has been replaced by mechanically sliced potato, the potatoes and onions have not been pre-cooked and the corned beef has been replaced by grisly cheap mince, and not much of it. So that really HAD to be the first recipe  I tried from the book.

 

I knew I'd picked a winner when I smelled it cooking - it smelled just like the bakehouse that my grandmother worked in in the late 1950s, where we would go to meet her from work at lunchtime and she would bring out piping hot pies for us to eat in her house, just across the street.

 

 

Just look at that crust! And at the well-packed filling, just crying out to be served with some beetroot and quick-pickled onions (which it was, immediately after this photo).

The recipe was very generous too - I halved the 6 person quantity and used a smaller pie plate, but there was still plenty to serve two of us twice over, and that was without the traditional accompaniment of chips. (We were big carb fans ooop north in my childhood, we'd have had bread and butter as well, and washed it down with sugary tea. Remind me again why I'm diabetic?)

I couldn't judge the book by just one recipe, though, could I?  Another that caught my eye was Turkish Lentil Soup. I've been on the lookout for the perfect Turkish Lentil Soup ever since my first trip to Turkey, about 10 years ago. I was going away  for a girly break with a friend. The flight was delayed by several hours so we arrived very late at the hotel but they'd kept some dinner back for us and welcomed us with a steaming bowl of delicious lentil soup. If I'd been less exhausted I'd have asked for the recipe there and then, but now I've got it! This is exactly the soup I've been looking for.

Do excuse my photo, I'm not the kind of skilled food stylist that Karen is! But I know what's good - and this soup is very, very good and one I will make many times more. The final touches of chilli and lemon are absolute genius and turn a very, very simple to make soup into a special but sustaining treat that is guaranteed to warm up the coldest, dreariest day.

I'm really enjoying this book and will be cooking many more recipes from it. Now, having apologised for my own photography skills, here by contrast are a couple of examples of Karen's own work, and if they don't leave you craving for breakfast or Welsh Rarebit I don't know  what will!