One of the highlights of the Christmas season this year was receiving a copy of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Cookbook. The book, for the unfamiliar, is a weighty tome, part cookbook, part how-to, part memoir, detailing the practices and eating habits of an ex-top London chef's life in the English countryside. It's an exceptional book. Though I've not yet attempted a single recipe, I've been pretty enthralled by the book so far. Actually, the recipes are the least interesting aspect of the volume for me; it's the rest of the book, the true meat of it, that has proved the most captivating.
More than a cookbook, River Cottage really excels as a homage to and instruction manual for home agriculture. The book is divvied up into quarters: gardening, livestock, fish, and hedgerow (what us yanks might call a hunting and gathering section). Each chapter begins with a lengthy preamble about the pleasures and requirements of gardening, raising, slaughtering, catching, canning, pickling, and serving your own food. This book has reached out to a deep and primal place in my soul, the loam-brown farmer's heart within me; I want my own pigs, I want my own bacon.
It's been a long standing fascination of mine, though one mostly unarticulated. But ever since reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, I've been more and more consumed with the local food movement. I was thrilled this summer, in Oxford, to live across from a cover market, replete with fruit sellers, fish mongers, and butchers, all offering fare from the surrounding countryside.
It's a model we don't seem to have anymore in America, and one I feel is sorely lacking. Fearnley-Whittingstall's book takes the movement one step further, placing the production line squarely between the backyard and the kitchen. It's gotten me excited. I'm already a proponent and consumer of game, and though I'm not quite prepared to run out and get my own flock of spring lambs, a modest garden is a good start. Perhaps with a basket full of my own produce in front of me, with a venison tenderloin waiting in marinade, I'll be ready to tackle those recipes.
