A word from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

"A kind of cooking that's rooted firmly in British soil, and celebrates the liberation and sheer satisfaction that comes from finding, growing and preparing ingredients yourself."

This is not your normal 'A word from' piece. I'm not doing it because I'm uninspired. I'm doing it because yet again I have succumbed to Readings bargain table and have bought River Cottage A-Z - a not inconsiderable tome - about the size of Stephanie Alexander's magnus opus - for a mere $25.00. Now how can you resist that if you a cookery book maniac collector?

It's a fairly plain but classy looking book too, as you can see. But what really tipped me over the edge to buy it, was that it is one of those books that is arranged in alphabetical order of ingredient. Nowadays I find this kind of layout to be very useful on a daily basis. You have a lot of celery (I do) so you rush to your selection of alphabetically arranged books for inspiration. I have heaps of other wonderful books, but increasingly I find myself going to the quick fix of A-Z.

Which is not just a recent thing - there has always been the Larousse Encyclopedia of course - the daddy of them all, but Jane Grigson was an early adopter of the method with her Vegetable Book, Fruit Book and Good Things.

Alas with respect to the celery my new purchase was not helpful. Each section seems to have just one recipe that follows an essay - I guess you would call them that - on the ingredient in question. And the recipe in the celery section, though tantalising, was for a celery and walnut tapenade - which is hardly dinner. The essays are not all by Whittingstall himself - he has a team at River Cottage with whom he regularly works and these have joined him in writing the book. It's a team effort.

It is also beautifully illustrated with a mix of paintings and photographs, but not with completed dishes. So in a way it is retreating to the old-fashioned approach of no pictures just a bit of art here and there. On the right is a not very good scan of the page on maple syrup to give you the idea. (The book is too thick to fit flat on to the scanner.) It's a lovely book anyway and I shall enjoy dipping into it.

The reason I chose to do an 'A word from' kind of article is that he says a few fairly inspiring things in his introduction. Mostly he is a bit preachy about the wonders of home-grown, organic and wild. Which to my mind is all very well if you have time and space and money to do that but if you are poor, working all the hours under the sun, untalented in the garden (me), and living in a flat or a house with no garden, then that philosophy is not for you. Sure you can buy organic and fresh from farmer's markets, and even from the supermarket but they are always much more expensive - well here in Australia anyway. And yes you can grow a few herbs on your balcony but not enough food to be self-sufficient.

However, that said, he doesn't really condemn people for not being as 'earthy' as he - he just wants you to try in small ways - as I do I suppose.

"In my introduction to The River Cottage Cookbook, I wrote, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, about a 'food acquisition continuum' - a spectrum of ways of getting food into our kitchens, or into ourselves. As I envisaged it, this spectrum ranged from those consumers who entirely subsisted on industrially produced food to, at the opposite end, those single-minded individuals who had achieved a state of total self-sufficiency. Of course, as I acknowledged, the vast majority of us lie somewhere between the two polar extremes; my avowed ambition was to nudge my readers along the continuum in the direction of self-sufficiency, to encourage them to get as close as possible to the source of their own food. This remains at the heart of my professional mission in the world of food."

"At the end of the day, there is nothing we enjoy more than sitting down and tucking into something simply delicious - but we want to do so with peace of mind and a clear conscience."

We, in this instance, is not a general 'we'. He is referring to he and his team. But nevertheless I guess most thinking people would probably feel the same way. Or want to. I can't say I can really sit down with a totally clear conscience about where my food has come from. I'm probably nearer his industrially produced end of the spectrum than the ideal. But that's for my conscience.

"Food may be freighted with political significance, but it should never be fraught with personal anxiety."

What he did have to say though which I did find true and worth repeating, was what he said about ingredients:

"They are more than the tools of the cook's trade, more even than the basis of the daily meals we all consume. Ingredients are, quite literally us. They physically become part of our bodies, and the bodies of those for whom we cook. The food we choose is the very matter that underpins our life, our health and our well-being. What could possible by more fundamental than that?

It is the cook's role and pleasure, to take the life-giving materials and make them life-affirming too. Ingredients are our sensory palette - the box of tricks from which we select the flavours and textures we most desire, in order to produce meals that will not just sate hunger, but will delight, comfort, refresh and excite. Once you know your way around ingredients, you have a wondrous power at your disposal: the power to express care, passion or love through a plate of food. That's pretty amazing."

Yes it is and I guess in a rather more modest way it's what I try to do when I cook. I notice that my very first post was about devising a meal out of what was in the fridge at the time and that's what I'm doing tonight. I had hoped my new book would be able to help - celery and chicken being the key ingredients today - but that was not to be. So either I shall just invent or browse some of my other alphabetical tomes.

Now to find a space on my increasingly crowded bookshelves.

POSTSCRIPT - He is very British and says that he is sticking to mostly British ingredients in his book. But you will find imported things that he finds essential - e.g. olive oil, citrus, spices - and interestingly less essential things like mangos and bananas. It also includes things that are very English - such as gooseberries and samphire, that you just can't get here. Interesting that I obviously cannot get rid of my English heritage. When I think about it a very large number of my favourite cooks and the books on my shelf are English.