Herbfarm Cookbook - More Useful as a Garden Manual
Written: Jul 25 '09 (Updated Jul 26 '09)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very detailed guidance on growing and harvesting all sorts of culinary herbs.
Cons: For the most part the recipes aren't terribly exciting.
The Bottom Line: I ended up buying a copy after borrowing it from the library. And I'm watching my pennies these days.
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| lyagushka's Full Review: Jerry Traunfeld - The Herbfarm Cookbook |
Like many people who become progressively more serious about gardening, I've been drawn recently to herbs. These plants are a boon for the gardener in several ways. A great many culinary herbs are perennial in most temperate climates. Those that are perennial come up very early in the spring, often before much else is stirring. As a group they aren’t too particular about soil quality and need little tending once established. All of these qualities have convinced me to plant about a dozen different kinds of culinary herbs, and I haven’t even considered medicinal herbs yet.
Obviously, if the herbs are out there growing, it makes sense to have some good uses for them. That's where The Herbfarm Cookbook came in handy. I found this book earlier this year at the library, and I was impressed enough with it to end up ordering a copy for myself. The odd thing about this is that my purchasing decision had little to do with the recipes in this book. I was far more impressed with the detailed descriptions of the herbs, the growing conditions each one prefers, and the directions on when to prune, how to transplant, and how best to harvest for storage. I have plenty of gardening books, and not one of them covers culinary herbs in this much detail. Usually all the varied herbs are treated either as a single kind of plant, or divided into hardy perennials, biennials, and annuals and described in very general terms.
The Herbfarm Cookbook includes recipes and describes the cultivation of all the familiar culinary herbs, as well as quite a few that are less than familiar, such as anise hyssop, sweet cicely, sweet woodruff, meadowsweet, angelica, and lemon balm. Other fragrant herbs not always associated with cooking are included too, such as lavender and rose geranium.
I have prepared a few of the recipes in this book, and I was especially pleased with the chapter on appetizers and "small bites." I liked these recipes because they tended to be vegetarian (or at least not reliant on meat to hold center stage) and interesting. I tend to take such recipes and turn them into main courses, as I did with the smoked trout and roasted corn pudding, which turned out well. Many of the other recipes in the book simply rehash old familiar dishes (pasta carbonara, tuna steaks) and add a few herbs to them. While these ideas are fine, there weren't too many heavy-on-the meat dishes that gave me new ideas. Almost every recipe however does include substitutions in case you can’t find the herb or herbs called for in the recipe.
The dessert section though - I liked some of the novel ideas there, such as peach pie with anise hyssop, which turned out very nicely, and the lavender shortbread which will feature regularly on my cookie list from now on. However, the simple syrups that I made with first with anise hyssop and then with lemon balm turned out very medicinal in character. I don’t think I will try that method of preserving the harvest again. But I am going to try the lemon verbena ice cream at my earliest opportunity. There’s a short chapter too on condiments and candies that includes recipes I intend to try.
There’s an add-on section which briefly describes the use of edible flowers, but these are not covered nearly so fully as the herbs. There are a few color plates with excellent botanical drawings of herbs, and a few pictures of the prepared recipes from this book. The Herbfarm Cookbook offers no information about the medicinal qualities of any of the herbs mentioned therein.
I doubt that I would recommend this book to any non-gardening cook. For one thing, half the herbs in the cookbook would be hard to come by if you weren’t growing your own. Secondly, it's not the recipes that I found particularly useful, but the more technical information on the herbs themselves. If you're a gardener and you’ve caught the herb bug, I think you'd find this book extremely informative and valuable.
Recommended:
Yes
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