Author: Tom Aitkens
Published by: Ebury Press
Rating:
The youngest chef in the UK to receive two Michelin stars Tom Aitkens runs his flagship restaurant Tom Aitkens, the less formal eatery Tom’s Kitchen in Chelsea and most recently added another branch of Tom’s Kitchen to Somerset House.
For being his first foray into cook book writing this is an extremely accomplished effort. The book is set out in an extremely helpful and manageable way – vegetables, meat, fish, desserts and baking. The intro is of interest and largely sets out his thoughts on good produce being the basis to good end dish; he has however not chosen to drone on for too long or fill up reams of paper with self-indulgent rambling.
Again very helpfully the recipes are all graded easy, medium and challenging – having tried a number of recipes these gradings seem to have been worked out quite sensibly. The selection of dishes has also been put together intelligently, in the section dealing with pork the recipes make use of shoulder, belly, loin, liver, knuckle and cheeks – providing suggestions for most of the cuts you are likely to pick up at a butchers.
If you want a picture of every dish then this is not the book for you, the pictures are excellent however less than a fifth of the dishes have an accompanying picture. When I have used the book I have not however found this to be a great problem – the dishes are often about the cooking and the produce rather than the presentation. Many of the meat dishes revolve around larger joints or slow cooked items such as oxtail; which require less direction anyway when coming to plate.
The size of the book is perfect, it isn’t too large as to be a pain to navigate and it fits well into cookbook holders.
Throughout there are little notes and tips included which are interesting and helpful, as well as a short introduction to each section. I don’t like the silver colouring at the top of the pages however this is a minor design criticism that has no bearing on the utility of the book. The only real annoyance I had was being told rather too often to dunk vegetables into iced water – again maybe it is purely a personal thing. Whilst I appreciate that benefit is taken from swiftly cooling the vegetables surely it isn’t necessary for it to be done with pretty much all recipes.
Overall this is a great book that includes a mixture of British and French dishes. There is a good selection of those dishes that you could do for a simple supper or equally other dishes for a great dinner party. Many of the dishes would best suit larger groups; making it helpful and informative.