A beautiful book, and one which makes me want to cultivate my garden
just as much as scurry to the kitchen. - Nigella Lawson
At its core this book is about cooking, but it's an essential and
valuable resource for folk who love to grow their own herbs and cook.
Sorted by individual herbs with detailed notes on how to grow and use
them, it's going to be a book I will turn to a lot over the years. - Nik
Sharma
Herb is a plot-to-plate exploration of herbs that majors on the
kitchen, with just enough of the simple art of growing to allow the
reader to welcome a wealth of home-grown flavors into their kitchen.
Author Mark Diacono is a gardener as well as a cook. Packed with ideas
for enjoying and using herbs, Herb is much more than your average
recipe book. Mark shares the techniques at the heart of sourcing,
preparing and using herbs well, enabling you to make delicious food that
is as rewarding in the process as it is in the end result. The book will
explore how to use herbs, when to deploy them, and how to capture those
flavors to use when they might not be seasonally available. The reader
will become familiar with the differences in flavor intensity,
provenance, nutritional benefits and more. Focusing on the familiars
including thyme, rosemary, basil, chives and bay, Herb will also open
the door to a few lesser-known flavors. The recipes build on bringing
your herbs alive - whether that's a quickly swizzed parsley pesto when
short of time on a weekday evening, or in wrapping a crumbly Lancashire
cheese in lovage for a few weeks to infuse it with bitter earthiness.
With a guide to sowing, planting, feeding and propagating herbs, there
are also full plant descriptions and their main culinary affinities.
Mark then looks at various ways to preserve herbs including making oils,
drying, vinegars, syrups and freezing, before offering over 100
innovative recipes that make the most of your new herb knowledge.
