The Home Cookbook [Hardcover]

`Good honest home cooking'
-- Living North

With more than 300 recipes, arranged by meal times (Breakfast, Elevenses, Lunch, Tea, Supper), The Home Cookbook is a celebration of British domestic cooking as it has evolved over the centuries and still exists - especially in the countryside. The food that Monty and Sarah Don eat at home at Ivington is more in the tradition of the Women's Institute than the celebrity chefs. They try to eat food that is as local as possible (often harvested from the back garden) and has a good story. Their book is full of things that you really want to eat - roasts and warming puddings for the winter, the most delicious salads and lightest fools for the summer; recipes that use timeless, thrifty farmhouse techniques such as baking, stewing, braising, salting, pickling, bottling and freezing. In short: good, honest home cooking.

Monty Don has presented gardening and travel programmes for twenty years, including Gardeners' World and Around the World in 80 Gardens. A prolific journalist, he was gardening correspondent for the Observer and now writes for the Daily Mail. His books include The Complete Gardner, The Ivington Diaries and, with his wife Sarah, Fork to Fork and The Jewel Garden. A leading organic gardener, he is President of the Soil Association and is now involved in food and farming issues. Sarah Don lives and works in Herefordshire where she gardens and cooks, and is also working on the restoration of a farm. Her interests, other than food, are vernacular architecture and more naturalistic ways of gardening. She has collaborated on many projects with Monty over the past thirty years. They have three children.