Blagger » Reviews

Dig on for Victory by C H Middleton

Nik — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 10:35:56 +0000

A lot of retro reprints are pretty useless as anything other than curiosities. This one, though, is genuinely useful. First published in 1945, it is a week-by-week guide of what you need to be doing and when in your vegetable garden.

Dig for Victory was a big wartime drive to get the population digging up their gardens and communal green spaces to grow the produce so vital to keeping the country fed in the face of German blockades. There was always a risk as the war drew to a close that the country’s new army of gardeners would hang up their shovels and forks and shortages would follow. This book – Dig On for Victory – worked towards ensuring that didn’t happen.

Split by month and by week, it is perfect for first-time gardeners who won’t know what they should be looking out for, or whether they are planting their seeds too soon or too late. It’s full of common sense advice, and at the back there’s a short almanac taking you through seeds and crops, outlining how much seed you need to plant for a given area and what each one will be when it has grown.

For the nostalgic reader there are also more than a smattering of vintage ads scattered throughout. They’re dated, but look great on account of the more primitive design tools available at the time.

Pair this with our other retro favourite, Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps and you have the only two books you need to start on the road to self-sufficiency.

ISBN: 978-1-84513-499-0
Price: £9.99 (£5.76 from Amazon)

Dig on for Victory

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Stitch n Bitch by Debbie Stoller

Nik — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:39:29 +0000

If it wasn’t for this book, I would never have knit that scarf. It’s the ultimate beginners’ guide, written in such a clear and concise way, and so well illustrated that you’d have a tough time getting it wrong.

Stoller is clearly a knitting devotee. Her enthusiasm for the subject really shines through the witty prose and amusing sidebars that talk as much about the culture and history of knitting as they do about how to knit yourself.

Stitch ‘n Bitch isn’t expensively produced – there are only two colours on its square pages – but the mix of orange and black line art is clear and well drawn, making it easy to follow the flow of the yarn and copy it on your own needles.

It’s billed as ‘instructions, patterns and advice for a new generation of knitters’ and it really does start from the absolute beginning with bags of information on needle gauges, different styles of knitting and, most importantly, casting on. It’s the next best thing to having your grandmother standing over you showing you how it’s done.

Stitch n Bitch

Stitch n Bitch has become something of a phenomenon, with groups of the same name meeting around the world, and it’s been followed up by two companion volumes: Stitch ‘n Bitch Nation and Stitch ‘n Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker, the latter of which I’m very keen to try out.

Rating
Author Debbie Stoller
Price £10.99 (£6.20 from Amazon.co.uk)
ISBN 0761128182

Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps

Nik — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:15:11 +0000

Sometimes you need something straightforward, no-nonsense and down to earth. That’s exactly what you get with Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps. Written in 1941, when wartime rationing meant that every scrap of food had to be put to good use and throwing out your trimmings was an unforgivable waste, it’s a crash course in cutting down the amount of paid-for chicken food you use while at the same time making sure your hens don’t go hungry.

To keep them in optimum laying condition, your chickens need to get a large part of their daily nutrition from dedicated poultry feed – most often layers pellets or mash. Supplementing this with kitchen offcuts greatly enhances the quality of your eggs, giving you richer yolks and tastier cakes. This books switches that around, though, explaining how to massively cut your food bill by upping the scrap quantity without depriving your flock of its essential nutrients.

From a practical standpoint, it’s excellent. It isn’t sentimental (who could afford that during the war?), explaining how to identify and deal with chickens that aren’t producing an adequate supply of eggs in return for their food, and how to raise your own flock, either from eggs or from very young chicks.

It’s as relevant today as it was when it was first written, and massively under-sells itself with that title. We only knew how wide-ranging it was because we found a copy in a shop and had a flick through, or else we might have thought it was literally about managing your hens’ feed. In reality it covers housing, illness, injuries, how to humanely kill your birds and so on.

All of this is done without frill or fuss, explaining all you need to know in a slim 97 pages, with the rest of the book given over to keeping rabbits.

For the first time chicken keeper it’s essential reading, along with Henkeeping by Jane Eastoe (click the link for review).

Price £6.99 (£4.45 from Amazon)
Authors Claude Goodchild and Alan Thompson
ISBN 0141038624

Victory Cookbook by Marguerite Patten

Nik — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:35:36 +0000

Self sufficiency wasn’t a fad during the war. It was a necessity. People had to make do, to use whatever they had to hand, and to battle waste wherever they could.

During World War Two, the Ministry of Food made sure the nation was fed, keeping the distribution lines open and showing people how to make best use of the limited ingredients at their disposal. Its most famous employee, whose influence has lasted longer than the ministry itself, is Marguerite Patten, latterly TV cook, author and brains behind Victory Cookbook: Nostalgic Food and Facts from 1940-1954.

This is an excellent guide to low-cost meals that use very few ingredients, perfect for less ambitious or truly penny-pinching chefs.

There are plenty of old favourites, like currant buns, egg custard and apple turnovers, plus a lot of dishes we don’t generally cook any more, such as sheep’s head roll, black pudding hot pot and piquant tripe.

But it’s more than just recipes. This is a fascinating history book that explores wartime conditions, the points system that ensured everyone received the same amount of food, and the way that some of the dishes came about. For example, Patten explains as follows how (and why) she came up with a recipe for stuffed pigeons:

In the early 1950s when grain was so very precious there was a plague of pigeons, who were eating it.

Farmers asked me to demonstrate pigeon dishes to persuade the public to make use of this very edible but, at the same time, tiresome bird.

Halve young pigeons lengthways; remove as many bones as possible; spread sausagemeat against the cut side, then coat in beaten egg and crisp breadcrumbs.

Fry in hot fat until crisp and brown all over; lower the heat and continue cooking for 10 – 15 minutes. Serve with creamed potatoes and a green vegetable.

It sounds like a heart attack on a plate, doesn’t it. I like the way that all the fat and meat is balanced out by ‘a green vegetable’. Fortunately not all of the recipes are quite so old fashioned, and there’s plenty here that you’d happily cook and serve up for visitors today.

This book is a bit of an anomaly. Amazon has a copy under this cover for £13 (or used for just under £3), but it’s also available as ‘Feeding the Nation‘ for £6.22.

You’ll probably also find it in second hand bookshops as We’ll Eat Again (1985), The Victory Kitchen (1995) or Post-War Kitchen (1998). So, it’s got staying power, which is testament to the value of its content.

Rating
Price £6.22 under the title Feeding the Nation at Amazon UK

Tender by Nigel Slater

Nik — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 09:12:44 +0000

Tender – never has a food book been more appropriately named. It took writer and TV cook Nigel Slater five years to write this two-volume homage to fruit and veg, the fruit part of which will be published later this year, and it’s a work in which his tenderness towards the subject in hand shines through.

Slater is no less accomplished a writer than he is a cook. How many other cook books could evoke such imagery as this when introducing a starkly simple recipe for slow-roasted tomatoes with thyme and mozzarella?

Late summer, the sun high, the vegetable patch is filled with slow-moving bees and tiny, piercing-blue butterflies. The day stands still, baking in the sunshine. The cats lie silently on the dusty stone terrace, too hot to move. It is the day for a lunch of melting softness. I wander into the kitchen on bare feet to roast tomatoes and break open a milky, silky buffalo mozzarella.

Who could resist any recipe that follows an introduction like that?

The layout is as beautiful as the prose. Lavishly illustrated, laid out using Adobe Garamond, and even with a font note at the back, it is almost too good for use in the kitchen, and I’m sure I’ll end up copying out the recipes I want to follow onto scraps of paper rather than propping it open on the worktop.

Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patchis a book for reading more than using, so it’s as well that the prose is as flowing as a well-written novel.

But it’s more than just a cook book. Tender is organised vegetable by vegetable, each chapter opening with a short essay on the vegetable in question, followed by advice on both growing and cooking. It is a wonderful inspiration for anyone who – like me – wants to try new vegetables in their garden but isn’t sure which to choose. Perhaps that’s because you know you can trust Slater’s advice. He’s been there and done it himself: he famously dug up his lawn to plant a series of vegetable beds although, as he himself admits, not quite enough of them to be truly self-sufficient.

There is a refreshing honesty to what he writes, too, that should give us all hope, as if he can’t grow a decent cauliflower, then why should we?

The cauliflower is regarded as a bugger to grow, or at least to grow well… With luck and a fair wind, you could have a vegetable to be truly proud of. I have never grown one good enough for a soup, let alone a show. But I will keep trying.

My copy of Tender was a gift, and one that was so well chosen. It is beautiful, engaging, and an inspirational read through the darker winter months.

Rating
Price £30 (£12.99 from Amazon UK)
ISBN 0007248490
Publisher Fourth Estate Ltd

Cheese Making by Rita Ash: Review

Nik — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:26:19 +0000

One of the projects we’re going to start in the new year (or before the end of December this year if we get time) is making our own cheese. We’ve bought a press, which we can also use for cider making next autumn and, apart from a goat or cow, that’s pretty much all the equipment we need (pans and thermometer aside).

So, obviously, we’re reading up on the subject beforehand, and this book – Cheese Making by Rita Ash – is proving to be an excellent starting point. It’s written with beginners in mind by someone with over 60 years’ experience.

It’s split into two distinct halves, with a general interest backgrounder to kick it off, and then specific recipes for various cheeses in the second. There are a lot of familiar favourites to try, such as Cheddar (one of the most difficult, it warns), camembert and halloumi. I hadn’t expected so many cheeses to be suitable for home making, so it’s been a real eye-opener.

We’ll probably kick off with House cheese, which it says is an easy one to start with, but I have to admit to being very tempted by the idea of Wensleydale, which is a Christmas favourite in our house as it goes so well with fruit cake.

It’s not all the recipes that make this book so good, though, so much as the enthusiasm of the author, and the fact that she makes it sound so easy and approachable. That, as much as anything, will give us the confidence to give it a go, and that makes it a good buy indeed – especially at less than a fiver.

Rating:
Author: Rita Ash
Title Cheese Making
Price: £4.98 from Amazon
ISBN: 978-1-84773-461-7

The Bike Book by Haynes: review

Nik — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:35:54 +0000

I could probably live without my car more easily than my bike. Quite simply it’s my primary means of transport. It gets me to the station and back each work day, and it takes me to the market and back at the weekend.

Love it though I do, my car gets driven twice a fortnight, and then sits on the drive for the next two weeks, looking pretty but feeling a little forgotten.

The bike is a key component in the whole idea of self-sufficiency. It doesn’t take petrol, doesn’t eat oats like a horse would, and is an efficient, low-impact means of transport. The shocking thing, though, is how little I know about how bikes work and what to do when things go wrong.

This book fixes that.

Its 192 full-colour pages walk you step by step through common tasks like fixing a puncture and replacing a chain, and tackle more complex tasks – like changing your gear cogs – with well-delivered, easily followed advice that gives even a dunce like myself the confidence to tackle the job. It could be a real money-saver, keeping you away from the nearest repair shop.

Perhaps the best thing about it, though, is the fact that it’s completely model-agnostic. This isn’t like a Haynes car manual, which relates to only one line from a set period from a single manufacturer; instead it treats bikes as a general mode of transport, meaning that whether you’re riding a mens’, womens’ or kids cycle you’ll still be able to follow along and get years of use out of the book.

I’ve got the fifth edition here and while it’s unlikely I’d be upgrading every time a new edition comes out, it’s good to know that should I want to buy some new kit for the bike it’ll most likely be covered in this single volume.

Highly recommended.

Title: The Bike Book
Author: Fred Milson
Publisher: Haynes
ISBN: 978 1 84425 421 7
Price: £14.99 (£10.49 from Amazon)

Grandma's Remedies by Cherry Chappell

Nik — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 06:38:42 +0000

You can grow your own fruit and veg, and keep chickens in the garden to make great strides towards self-sufficiency. But it’s not nearly so easy to cater for yourself when you want to treat an illness.

It wasn’t always that way. Mass-produced drugs are a relatively recent phenomenon, as for centuries anyone with an ailment would look to nature for a fix. It’s those fixes, handed down from generation to generation, that Grandma’s Remedies records.

The range of problems it tackles is impressive: from diarrhoea to dog bites, earache to flatulence, and asthma to leg ulcers. And the fixes aren’t always as simple as ‘stew up some nettles and drink the liquid’, often requiring several ingredients from a store cupboard or gathered from the hedgerow.

Each remedy has been collected from someone who was given it by an older family member, or who remembers them from their childhood, and the most impressive thing is how many times several treatments for any one particular problem use similar ingredients, despite coming from all around the country.

Most of these remedies were handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, hence the name, and over time the measures in use have changed. Chappell has updated these measures, retaining the original inscriptions and accompanying them with the modern-day metric equivalent.

An excellent how-to section at the back gives instruction on making a tincture, poultice and so on to dispense your home-made drugs, and there’s an interesting biographical section highlighting women who made a big contribution to the development of traditional medicine through the ages. There’s also a directory of places to visit to further your understanding, with an impressive British focus.

Even if you don’t use any of the suggested remedies, this book is a fascinating read, and for anyone who wants to be truly self-sufficient it’s a must-have addition to your bookshelf.

Price £14.99 (£9.69 from Amazon)
Pros Truly comprehensive, a great piece of research, and genuinely interesting.
Cons None.
Verdict A fascination addition to any bookshelf, and doubly so for anyone who wants to be truly self-sufficient.

Vegetable Growing Month by Month: the best veg-growing book ever?

Nik — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:14:39 +0000

I’ve read a fair few vegetable how-tos over the last few years. Carol Klein’s Grow Your Own Veg was a favourite for a long time, and it’s still a beautifully produced volume, but it seems to be out of print right now, and only available on Amazon from ‘New and Used‘ sellers. Perhaps my copy will be worth something one day.

At completely the opposite end of the scale to the beautiful, hard-backed Klein book, with its colour photos and thick, arty paper, is Vegetable Growing Month-by-month by John Harrison. It’s a 256-page paperback with a handful of mono line drawings and page after page of common, good sense.

The main draw, as the name suggests, is the monthly planting calendar, which takes up the middle part of the book, telling you what to plant throughout the year, when you can expect to be harvesting different crops and what other jobs you need to be doing in the greenhouse and garden. The price on the cover is £5.99, but Amazon is selling it for £3.99 right now, and it’s well worth it.

Harrison has 30 years of vegetable-growing experience, yet he assumes no knowledge on his reader’s part, and the style in which he has written this approachable tome is friendly and non-threatening.

But the content goes beyond mere month-by-month methodology and advises on how to choose a greenhouse, how to construct a polytunnel, which tools to choose and how to spot (and avoid) diseases. It’s everything you could need in a book small enough to carry around in your work bag, and cheap enough to read in the potting shed without worrying about getting it dirty.

Is it the best veg-growing book ever? Possibly. And if not, it’s certainly one of the best I’ve read.

Price £5.99 recommended (£3.99 from Amazon)
Pros Clear advice delivered in a friendly, approachable manner. Small and cheap enough to carry around.
Cons Not a glossy book.
Verdict If you need clear, easy-to-follow instructions on growing your own vegetables, you won’t go wrong here.

The Concise Guide to Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour: review

Nik — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 08:15:17 +0000

John Seymour’s Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency is the best book I’ve yet read on the subject of self-sufficiency. It’s a comprehensive guide to growing your own food, raising animals and maintaining your home and property on your own, largely using natural resources.

The Concise Guide to Self-sufficiency is a slimmed-down, but no less useful version of that same book. It has the same beautiful production values, with hand-drawn and coloured illustrations on every page illustrating the management of a fruit and veg plot, showing how to build a farm gate, the differences between different chicken breeds, and which mushrooms you can pick and safely eat.

Much of what it covers is forgotten by the vast majority of homeowners these days. The In the Kitchen section, for instance, tells not only how to bake bread and preserve fruit, but also how to clamp potatoes, keep carrots and build an outdoor storeroom to keep your produce fresh and edible through the winter without using a fridge or freezer.

At the same time, though, the book has been sensitively edited to keep it up to date. Kilos and Celsius take precedence over ounces and Fahrenheit, and there is acknowledgement that most of us now have a freezer, so it’s by no means a book for dreamers alone. Instead, it’s a practical, helpful and relevant guide for the aspiring self-sufficientist of the 21st century, and as such is required reading.

We’d not hesitate to recommend The Concise Guide to Self-sufficiency as it covers most bases, but check out our review of the larger, fuller edition, The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, also by John Seymour. The Concise edition will cover most bases for the majority of small-scale homesteaders, but for comprehensive coverage the Complete version is hard to beat.

Price £12.99 (£9.09 from Amazon)
Author John Seymour
ISBN 1405320206