My five favourite cookbooks for cooking seasonally

The most dog-eared, food-splattered and well-loved books on my shelves.

The open hearth at Chez Panisse, whose books are legendary.

Hello and welcome back to Salt and the Earth, a weekly newsletter about the ingredients that are in season RIGHT NOW, and exactly what to do with them. I spend most of my time in the kitchen and on farms, market gardens and allotments and this newsletter is my way of bringing you along, too.

This week I share the five cookbooks I turn to most when seeking inspiration or looking forward to the produce in the seasons to come. These are absolute essentials and offer something new to consider or think about every time I turn through their pages. Most importantly - I always use them - the only real criteria for a recommendation that matters.

If you’d like some recipe inspiration and an update on the ingredients that are shining brightest right now (delivered straight to your inbox) then please consider subscribing to the newsletter. Next week… my go-to pastry recipe for (almost) anything, and why it works every time.

Hugo xx

A bookcase is like an address book. Each time my head tilts and eyes sharpen for a spine-scanning side step I wonder who’s best placed to help me with the task at hand. The shelves are full of many voices, with a great many thoughts, opinions and ideas on an even greater number of subjects. Below are the five authors (and my favourite of their titles) I keep on speed dial.

If I was efficient in any way I would have grouped these books together on the shelf long ago, but there’s something magical about searching for a book.

Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook by Alice Waters

If cooking truly seasonal food has taught me one thing, it’s that older titles are an absolute guiding light. They’re seasonal, more often than not, because at the time of publication the term seasonal wasn’t even used - it was all just cooking! There were no out-of-season alternatives. This, one of the many titles to come from the hand of Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse kitchen, was published in 1999 - not particularly fitting into the aforementioned category, but beating the drum for seasonal produce nonetheless.

The café at Chez Panisse, nestled above the more formal Berkeley restaurant, has an open kitchen framed with Japanese-style redwood joinery and a wide wood-fired oven. In the evening golden light pours through the branches of the tall bunya-bunya tree in the front courtyard, passing through the stained-glass windows and filling the dining room. Every detail is relaxed and effortlessly simple and each recipe in this book rings true to those defining factors. The café menu is filled with food you want to eat, and recipes for many of the greatest hits are documented in this book.

Wild nettle frittata, morel mushroom toasts, King salmon in fig leaves, grilled skirt steak with anchovy and garlic sauce, home-cured pancetta, Meyer lemon éclairs and peach leaf crème brûlée - these are dishes you’ll find on the menus of many of your favourite restaurants today, and there’s a reason for that. They’re delicious, timeless classics, explained in beautifully written detail. If I want to cook something that centres around a wonderful seasonal ingredient and delivers big flavour, a recipe from this book is where I start.

Other titles from the Chez Panisse library that are worth taking a look at are; Chez Panisse Vegetables, Chez Panisse Fruit and Chez Panisse Desserts.

Five Seasons of Jam by Lillie O’Brien

Lillie is the owner of cult favourite London Borough of Jam, and this book is packed-full of her knowledge and recipes for fruit-driven, rather than sugar-driven jams (and aperitifs, fruit wines and vinegars). I am yet to make a recipe from this book that I haven’t immediately fallen in love with. Each one is a masterclass in balancing flavours with sweetness and aromatics - an endless school of lessons that can be transferred to no end of uses in the kitchen.

This is one of the first books I had ever seen that not only eluded to but drove head-first into the subject of ‘many seasons’. As anyone who has seen a place change over the course of 12 months will know, seasons can rarely be boxed-in to just four categories. Lillie instead offers five seasons, each named not only to embody the produce within them but how each one feels - ALIVE (mid to late spring), HOT (summer), BLUSH (early autumn), BARB (late autumn) and FROST (winter to early spring).

There is magic in this book. It centres around fruit (and at times vegetables), so you may think calling it seasonal is a little obvious. Where this title goes one step further, however, is helping you to make that first step towards truly seasonal cooking, and it’s one that leads you away from the kitchen and into the great outdoors. Lillie’s writing will send you to the hedgerows, coastlines and pick-your-own fruit farms - those glorious rabbit holes where cooks who love flavour, and connecting themselves to it, seem to loose themselves.

The Modern Cook’s Year by

Anna Jones

As a book of vegetable recipes, The Modern Cook’s Year is of course inherently seasonal. This beautiful title is full of over 250 recipes - but in actual fact can boast a great deal more beyond the titles and ingredients lists. There’s a guide to making your own kombucha, a flavour map for seasonal fritters, notes on what flowers are in season and when, tips on creating the perfect green salad, how to lay a celebratory table and much more besides.

Anna’s writing is incredibly warm and has the ability to make you feel immediately comfortable. She recently described the cooks who prefer asparagus cooked and served simply as purists and I feel, for the most part, I definitely fall into that camp. Whenever I embark on a recipe that requires me to widen the contents of my cupboards (and my palette) it’s usually one of Anna’s recipes that has lured me into doing so. When I grow tired of peas or courgettes as the warmer months trundle on, it’s within the pages of The Modern Cook’s Year that I search for new ways with the ingredients I already know and love.

It’s testament to Anna that this book is FULL of recipes (nearly three times that normally included in a common cookbook) and each one makes you dwell on the page; beet salad with orange blossom water and curd cheese, buttery aubergines with toasted couscous, red cabbage and juniper sauerkraut, summer pudding… Apple, rye and walnut bundt! Marvellous.

The Last Bite by Anna Higham

Why is it that when our sweet tooth has lured us into the kitchen it never occurs to us to approach whatever it is we’re making in the same way we would something savoury? Rarely do I consider making a mid-week pudding, nor do I reach for the salt, pepper, oil or vinegar to season a bowl of something sweet (well, now I think of little else when sugar is nearby thanks to Anna Higham’s writing). This book details a new approach to making desserts through the year and one that will truly change the way you cook.

The Last Bite, referring to the final moments of a meal, is a deep-dive into seasonal produce (through the lens of pudding!) and exactly how to use it. It’s extremely clever, incredibly detailed and wonderfully approachable all at the same time. It’s a bible for professional chefs and home cooks alike and has taught me more about cooking than any other book I own. It will teach you how to source an ingredient - and to tell the difference between good and extraordinary examples of them - and make them taste infinitely more of themselves. Always a special proposition.

There’s a recipe for rhubarb juice, compote, granita, powder (later used for a sherbet-like sugar) and rhubarb chewies. It’ll expand your perception of what can be done with an ingredient, and guide you through every step therein. It’s worth buying just for the rice pudding recipe. If I encounter an ingredient for the first time (or really crave rice pudding), The Last Bite is what I reach for.

You can listen to a podcast I recorded with Anna on the publication of this book. She talks about how she wrote it alongside cooking full-time and where the recipes came from while we pick magnolia together in Hyde Park. You can also taste many of these recipes IRL, at her bakery, Quince.

Fern Verrow by Jane Scotter and Harry Astley

Of all the books on this short list, this is the one I struggle to find on fellow cook’s shelves - and I have no idea why. Opening it’s pages is like tumbling onto the very pasture of the book’s eponymous 16-acre farm in Herefordshire. In the depths of winter when I long to remember what spring and summer feel like, the photography in Fern Verrow (by Tessa Traeger) is as close as I can get to smelling scrunched herbs and feeling the sun on my back.

The book is split into four seasons and the pages lead you through each one - not just with recipes but with beautifully-written stories and guides that give you a true feeling for this biodynamic farm’s character. Almost 10 years ago, when I first read-through the book, it was one of these guides that helped me plant my very first collection of herbs and flowers; valerian, lemon balm, fennel, sweet cicely and lemon thyme - all grown on the guidance of these authors, for their flavour and fragrance when brewed as a tea or tisane.

Whether you’re hungry for guidance in the kitchen or garden, the pages here are brimming with information. In this past month I have flicked-through thoughts on making compost, notes on varieties of radicchio to grow this year, a recipe for rhubarb cordial and a number of recipes for those first few blooms of elderflower (there’s a cake I have my eye on). In whatever month this book may eventually find you, it’ll give you guidance for the present and much excitement for the future.