Inspiring The Weekend: Book Recommendation

I was given The Little Library Cookbook as a birthday gift earlier this year.  I have loved it so much,  I have been meaning to share it with you for some time so it seemed the perfect way to begin my new series ‘Inspiring the Weekend’

The Little Library Cookbook is written by Kate Young, a London based food writer and cook.  As the title of this book might suggest, she loves food, she loves to cook and she loves books. This book is an inspired combination of all those things.  I have been reading and on occasion cooking my way through it over the last few months.

As fellow book lovers and i’m guessing food lovers too,  I thought this might be a book to inspire you this weekend.  Weekends are made for books and eating and relaxed cooking of food, as I’m sure you’ll agree?

Kate Young describes The Little Library Cookbook  as “a bringing together of recipes that made my mouth water when I first read of them”  With that in mind she has created a recipe book featuring recipes from her favourite books.  She found comfort in books (me too!) and re reading many of her favourites after moving away from home, discovering the passages which stayed with her the most were those featuring food.  She gradually found her self trying to create the food she read about in her own kitchen.

This is a recipe book you will want to sit down and read through.  It is helpfully divided into sections called ‘before noon’, ‘around noon’, after noon (tea)’, midnight feast etc. And in these sections you will find recipes from an eclectic collection of books.  An enormous round chocolate cake in Roald Dahl’s Matilda; Cinnamon Rolls from Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’; Crumpets from Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ and of course Marmalade from ‘A Bear Called Paddington” are just a few of the delicious treats within these tantalising pages.

The recipes vary in complexity.  The Christmas Dinner from Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’ may take some time to prepare whereas An Egg boiled very soft from Jane Austen’s novel ‘Emma’ takes merely minutes!  The joy of this book is not just the recipes but its the accompanying extract from the book they are taken from, along side Kate Young’s mouthwatering explanations for their inclusion and anecdotes from her own cooking story.

The photography is beautiful too, clean and simple images of food you will definitely want to read about and probably cook too.  I have been so inspired by this book and it has made me more aware of descriptions of food in the novels I am reading.  

The day I read the ‘recipe’ for Porridge inspired by The Secret Garden, I just had to make it.  I know, you will be thinking why do you need a recipe for porridge, but it was not just the recipe, it was the link it had with a book I  had loved but not read for many years.  Toasting oats before cooking them slowly with milk and water, and finishing off with a handful of blue berries or a spoonful of crunchy peanut butter drizzled with golden syrup became the breakfast I really looked forward to when I had time to enjoy the methodical stirring.  It became my perfect post run breakfast pick me up.

Food and descriptions of food in stories is often so evocative and the combination of both is captured perfectly in this gorgeous book.

Now far be it from me to mention C******mas, but if you were thinking along those lines, The Little Library Cookbook might just be the gift inspiration you need in the weekends to come.