The Botanical Kitchen by Elly McCausland

The Botanical Kitchen by Elly McCausland ISBN-13: 9781472969453 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Bloomsbury Absolute Released: April 28th 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Elly McCausland guides readers through cooking with botanicals, looking at their culinary history and diverse uses over the years. Weaving through this compelling text will be 90 delicious recipes including relishes and bakes, salads and soups, noodle bowls and breads and everything in between, offering unique and insightful flavour pairings. With chapters including fruits (tropical, Mediterranean and orchard), leaves, flowers, seeds and berries, this beautiful book places botanical ingredients at the fore and showcases exactly how plants can transform your food.


My Review:
The Botanical Kitchen is a cookbook using bought ingredients, some of them potentially hard to find. For some reason, I thought the focus was going to be more on the leaves and flowers (like how to prepare and use them) than on recipes that happen to throw in some herbs, spices, seeds, fruit, or flowers. She did spend a couple of paragraphs on each of the focus botanicals explaining how to know when a fruit is ripe, where to find some of the more exotic ingredients, some cooking tips, and some history of the fruit or herb or a personal recollection about using it. I'm an American, so I will point out that her recipes use milliliters and grams and her oven temperatures are in Celsius. She also referred to some ingredients in a way that will be unfamiliar to Americans (like linseed instead of flaxseed or rapeseed oil instead of canola oil).

Her recipes note how many it serves or makes, and many recipes included a full-color picture of the finished dish. She included some recipes for salads and such or meat dishes (fish, duck, pork, chicken, beef, etc.), but there were also a lot of recipes for tarts, crumbles, cakes, cookies, and ice cream. She used a lot of dairy.

The "botanicals" she focused on were apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, quinces, figs, apricots, dates, oranges, lemons, bergamot, mango, pineapple, papaya, banana, grapefruit, persimmon, lychees, pomelo, gooseberry, strawberry, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, black currants, red currants, blackcurrant leaves, tea leaves, banana leaves, lemon and lime leaves, basil, thyme, rosemary, lemongrass, and other herbs, saffron, rose petals, chamomile flowers, lavender flowers, vanilla beans, elder flowers, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, cardamon, and nutmeg.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.