Tender

I first saw this at a library in a sleepy town in the Adirondacks; saw it again at the Strand last week, and decided I had to have it.

A belated Christmas to myself: Tender by Nigel Slater.

A veritable tome on vegetables; filled with beautiful pictures (all film!) and even more beautiful writing, it has been thrilling to just flip through this 600+ page cookbook/ode to leafy, growing, edible things.

Slater covers every gardenable vegetable imaginable, from asparagus to zucchini, and dedicates over 50 pages to potatoes alone.

You wouldn’t have thought a person could wax so poetic about rutabagas until you read Slater describing its subtle and unusual beauty, “a creamy amber flushed with viridian, violet, and the flat maroon of dried blood.” He follows with a Rutabaga in the Garden, a Rutabaga in the Kitchen, and recipes ike “A slow roast of roots and herbs for when there is frost on the ground.”

Much reading and much cooking to be done from this book over break, and maybe some planting come the spring thaw.