Wednesday, June 18, 2014

A Year at Otter Farm - Mark Diacono

The best thing about amazon, the thing I'd really miss, and the one thing which has probably done everyone in the book trade a favour (or at least no harm) is the advance notice of upcoming books. I spend a fair amount of time looking for new titles - especially from favourite food writers - and then quietly looking forward to publication with an ever growing sense of anticipation. That was most certainly the case with 'A Year At Otter Farm', I've been a fan of Diacono's writing ever since the River Cottage Veg handbook came out in 2009 (I can't praise that series enough) and also really liked 'A Taste of the Unexpected'  in 2010 which covered more of the unusual things that Diacono grows at Otter farm and what to do with them once you have them.

Part of the anticipation attached to 'A Year at Otter Farm' was to see what would be new about it, or at least how it would expand on the excellent books Diacono has already written - the rest of the anticipation was all about the simple pleasure of looking forward to a book by an author whose writing I enjoy. I haven't been disappointed in either score.

First things first - it's a lovely book to look at; the pictures are glorious, they don't cover every recipe but they do show livestock and plants in a way that really sells the pleasures of small holding. I'm particularly taken with some winsome looking sheep (not at all how my dad's looked, his always had a fairly disdainful come-on-then-if -you-think-your-hard-enough thing going on - quite often from half way down some ridiculous cliff from where they required rescue) and there's a particularly beady eyed cockerel who's a thing of beauty as well. Apart from looking good having pictures of the live animal is a useful reminder that meat does in fact start out as a living animal and if you're going to eat it you should want it to have had a decent life first. (Not that the core market for this book will need that reminder.)

The substance of the book is part memoir, part manifesto, part growing guide, and part cookbook all arranged by season. Something I really like about the styling here is that the recipe pages have coloured borders so they're easy to flip to - details like that always make me happy. I've looked at the recipes, bookmarked a few for use (particularly later in the year), and am really pleased to find quite a few cocktails and alcoholic infusions included. Having (responsible) fun with drinks is basically how I make my living and something I'm always happy to read about. Over all though it's the manifesto/memoir part of the book that's really sucked me in and that I've spent most time with.

I don't have a garden of my own anymore though I do have the use of one at weekends. Not being in it much has limited my planting ambitions, and seriously limited my ability to make use of what's been grown but it's better than nothing. Meanwhile I have a daydream where I win the lottery (or similar) and buy one of those huge Victorian walled gardens - ideally one with a gardeners house built into one wall - and plant it full of amazing things. A book like this absolutely feeds that fantasy, not least by adding hitherto undreamed of possibilities into the mix. Most intriguing to me is the concept of a forest garden, quickly followed by the perennial garden. The forest garden apparently mimics woodland, mainly using perennials which starts at a subterranean level carrying on up through ground cover, shrubs, and trees all linked together by climbers and planted to maximise mutual benefit. It sounds like a beautifully low input system. The perennial garden basically takes that concept and downsizes it to allotment or garden size losing the tree canopy. I'm not in a position to nurture a veg patch but I could (and to some extent do) have a garden which concentrates on things which are useful as well as beautiful. Smallholding isn't easy but the possibility of having some small part of the dream - well that's attractive.

What I really love about this book is how unbelievably easy it is to lose hours at a time in it; it's a page turner - which isn't necessarily what you expect from a cookbook - but then it's so much more than that. I find it thoroughly exciting that people are out there doing new and interesting things on the small holding/crofting/farming front; that it isn't all big business supplying supermarkets at terrifyingly low margins. We take cheap, industrially produced food for granted but I don't believe it's sustainable - or particularly desirable. There's to much waste and not enough understanding of how food arrives on the plate, not enough variety and not enough consideration for the wider environment, to many air miles and to much plastic packaging. (Can you tell this is a bit of a hobby horse for me.) Any book that makes people think about that a little bit more, which I feel this one does, and which provides inspiration and instruction for growing and cooking has to be a good thing, that it's also entertaining and engaging is a massive bonus.

6 comments:

  1. How fab, thank you xx

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    1. It's a really good book. Intended to make the wild strawberry pancakes today but woodlice had hollowed out all the strawberries so I was screwed on that score.

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  2. Now the cooking part of this doesn't interest me terribly but the small-holding part does. Very much! How fascinating. I recently forced one of my English classes to watch part of this film, I don't know if you've seen it but it's about a woman who inherits a farm and wants to make it 'fit for the future', which involves as it turns out forest gardening and permaculture. Not only is it sustainable but, in Britain at least, it's also more productive than current conventional farming practices (or at least so the people in the film say!). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixx1c3RSw_8 is the link to the film.

    It's hard not to get arm-wavey about this subject.

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    1. Very hard, I still need to watch the film but feel there's so much more we could be doing in Britain both small and large scale. The cooking part goes hand in hand with the small holding bit, food culture in the UK worries me. We're not great at thinking about what we eat in terms of where it came from and the terrible search for novelty really winds me up sometimes. It seems so obvious to value quality seasonal produce and to want to know where you're food comes from to me, and clearly not at all obvious to a lot of other people. She says getting very arm wavey...

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  3. I'm not a gardener but I'm so grateful to those who are. It's inspiring to find such creative and healing work being done.

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