It’s logical, isn’t it. If you grow your own food you also want to eat it, so what could be better than a book that combines both disciplines? Well, that’s the theory, anyway.
The Allotment Cookbook is a strange mix: part harvesting and part cooking, but barely any gardening. It feels like two books stapled together, and is perhaps best treated as such.
But why does author Kathryn Hawkins stray so often from the kind of ingredients to which most people will have access on their allotments? Roast lamb with garlic and celeriac mash; peppered steak with fried cabbage and turnip chips; venison with blackberry sauce… they’re all main courses with vegetables thrown in. You could get the same from any good cookbook.
There are some meals in there you could cook entirely with your own home-grown produce, but including meat and fish in the mix is like writing a hiking book where the walks require the use of a car.
What the Allotment Cookbook suffers from is lack of focus, and while all of its constituent parts are very good (we particularly like the freezing advice on each recipe) it sits in an uncomfortable space, hemmed in on three sizes by recipe books, gardening books and self-sufficiency books.
Yet it is a rich resource for anyone looking to make their harvest last through the year, as the excellent glossary is packed with tips for using the vegetables you’ve grown, and storing them for later use.
Sadly, though, it’s a hybrid and as such it suffers. It skips whole chunks on preparing your plot, sowing seeds and tending your young plants. Each section starts out with the harvest, as though Hawkins can’t wait to get her crops into the kitchen, and into a pan.
It’s hard to recommend when you know that a combination of good second-hand books would cover off each base much more effectively. Dedicated tomes on preserving and storing, sowing and raising, and then finally cooking, would serve the home producer far better.
Price £12.99
ISBN 978-184537-719-9
Pros Excellent coverage of freezing your produce.
Cons A strange mix of subjects in one book.
Verdict A chunky volume containing some true gems, but ultimately one whose lack of focus lets it down.
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