Summer's Lease

- Blurb -

From the author of the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book of 2019, Summer' s Leaselooks at the cooking techniques we use instead of heat which, in letting us step away from the stove, lend themselves perfectly to summer eating: breaking, salting, souring and ageing. The long dog days of a tiring summer are no time to be a cook. A few charred sardines are of course a wonderful thing, but there the grill sits, pouring out heat into the already-hot kitchen; anyone with any sense who wants charred sardines is somewhere close to the seaside. . . . It is a time when you might, if you weren' t so hot, wonder what it means to cook at all. Is there cooking without fire. . . ? We understand that when we say something is cooked, we mean it has been heated; but we also understand that a cook does much more than just cooking. The chopping, the beating, the marinating, the dressing . . . What cooks do is best defined not by the word ' cooking' , but by the idea of metamorphosis. Cooks transform ingredients. Through recipes and meanderings, award-winning food writer Thom Eagle explores what it means to create dishes without a reliance on fire and flame, and offers a unique and tantalising glimpse inside the mind of a chef.