Product Description

’Some things are better cooked in restaurants: that’s why people go to them. But the converse is equally true. There are plenty of dishes that no restaurant does properly.’ Distinguished chef and food writer Rowley Leigh places these dishes at the heart of his first book. Home cooking is celebrated for its simplicity, seasonality and the delights of eating at home and cooking for friends. This encompasses the art of making good gravy, sautÉing potatoes and grilling sea bass, as well as digressions into Euro food, Australian cricket and the strangeness of rhubarb, amongst others. Menus are based on events such as Boxing Day lunch, Hallowe’en Night and a May birthday lunch for a ‘fishetarian’ aunt. Beautifully written and illustrated with original line drawings and colour photography, this is an elegant, witty and irresistible invitation to keep those home fires burning.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #668539 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
Rowley Leigh's stylish No Place Like Home is a vigorously argued treatise in praise of home cooking. Strange, perhaps, for a metropolitan restaurant chef--but Leigh's food is noted for its simplicity, seasonality and truth of flavour. Here he concentrates on food that is better when done at home than in a restaurant. A roast leg of lamb rather than a piece of grilled chump; summer pudding rather than a Grand Marnier soufflé. Cassoulet; breast of veal with pork, spinach and garlic stuffing; baked quinces with cinnamon and Vin Santo. This is wonderful food--rich, savoury, elegant and designed to bring out the best in the ingredients. Leigh covers all the basics--roasts, stews, perfect mash and so on--but also gives himself room for a welcome idiosyncrasy. The book is cleverly structured: it falls into four seasonal parts, each of which contains a number of complete three-course meals for different types of occasion--Easter Sunday Lunch, Alfresco Dinner, Halloween Night, Boxing Day Lunch are some of these exemplars. (Leigh acknowledges that few people care nowadays to cook three courses for every meal, but as he says, the recipes are there if you want them.) Additionally, three starch Interludes contain meditations on potatoes, rice and pasta. Leigh is devoted to British food, as you can tell from his flag-waving spring meal to impress foreigners: sea kale with blood orange hollandaise; sea trout fillet with a horseradish crust, served with Jersey Royal potatoes; and rhubarb fool. The book is greatly enhanced by good photography (good in that it actually shows what the food should look like) and by Lucinda Rogers' witty line-drawings, so reminiscent of Elizabeth David's early illustrators. --Robin Davidson

About the Author

After a variety of schools, Cambridge, a spell of dairy farming and a misspent youth in the snooker halls of Fulham, Rowley Leigh got a job at the Joe Allen restaurant in Covent Garden as a grill and short order chef. He migrated to Le Gavroche and learnt classical French cooking under the inspired tutelage of Albert Roux before spells as baker, butcher and buyer to the group. He returned to the kitchen as sous-chef and then head chef of Le Poulbot in the City of London before opening the trailblazing Kensington Place in Notting Hill with Nick Smallwood and Simon Slater in 1987. He is still there, and is a director of Moving Image Restaurants; he is now food correspondent of the ‘Sunday Telegraph’ after a spell with the ‘Guardian’ and has won a Glenfiddich Award for the quality of his newspaper writing.

He has three children and lives with his partner Kate in Shepherd’s Bush in West London. ‘No Place Like Home’ is his first book.