The Good Food Guide Recipes
The Good Food Guide Recipes
Which?, £25
ISBN 978 1 84490 106 7
For 60 years, The Good Food Guide has been directing consumers to the best establishments for great food, up and down the country. The eating out environment has changed hugely from the culinary desert that existed in 1951 to the exceptional quality cooking we have today.
The Good Food Guide Recipes celebrates the culinary journey the UK has taken by featuring recipes from 60 of today's best chefs and restaurants. They include Shaun Hill (The Walnut Tree, Abergavenny, Monmouthshire) and Tessa Bramley (The Old Vicarage, Ridgeway, Derbyshire) who have appeared regularly in The Good Food Guide, as well as new kids on the block like Will Holland at La Bécasse, Ludlow, and Tristan Mason at Restaurant Tristan, Horsham.
Each chef has provided a favourite recipe that has become a mainstay of their menu or which they just enjoy. These appear alongside a brief biography, plus a selection of tasteful photographs providing an insight into the establishment where they work.
The book has an appeal for both amateurs and professionals. For the home cook, there is an opportunity to see inside some of the country's top restaurants and discover the chefs' cooking styles, while chefs will be able to assess whether or not the establishment they work in can compare with the top-flight culinary locations.
The difficulty of the dishes varies greatly from the simple approach employed by Mark Hix in a dish of fried duck's egg with sprue asparagus and brown shrimps at Hix Oyster & Fish House in Lyme Regis to the more involved slow-roasted rib eye of Dedham Vale beef with oxtail croquettes, wet garlic purée and watercress sauce from Laurie Gear of Artichoke, Old Amersham.
This is a great book to dip in and out of, while marvelling at the fact that the 60 chefs featured are only a fraction of the talented men and women now working in the industry, whereas at the time the first Good Food Guide appeared, the publishers would have struggled to gather a fraction of that number.
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