I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

I’ve decided that today belongs to the brave little bird, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. And in that spirit I reached for blood oranges, both tart and sweet; for fennel, full of aniseedy crunch; and for Pontack sauce.

Pontack sauce? I knew nothing about it until I discovered Forage, a group of gatherers and foragers from Herefordshire who pick natural ingredients from hedgerows and woodlands and turn them into delicious-tasting products like Pontack, wild rose spice mix and wild herb rub.

I had no idea what to expect when I ordered a bottle online. Pontack is made from cider vinegar, elderberries, onions, root ginger and allspice and apparently dates back to the 18th century. It’s a rich, deep red in colour and tastes like a rounded, fruity vinegar with a hint of cloves. Having tasted it, it seemed to me to be the perfect ingredient for a vinaigrette, although I discovered that a couple of spoonfuls were also delicious stirred into a slow-cooked beef casserole.

BLOOD ORANGE AND FENNEL SALAD WITH PONTACK VINAIGRETTE

For each person you will need:

• One quarter of a fennel bulb, sliced very thinly
• Half a blood orange, peeled and thinly sliced. Any surplus juice can be added to the vinaigrette
• Handful salad leaves
• Handful walnuts
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Pontack sauce
• Salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar

Whisk 2 parts of Pontack with 1 part extra virgin olive oil. Add salt, black pepper and a generous pinch of sugar. Once emulsified trickle the vinaigrette over the salad, oranges and fennel and top with walnuts. Serve this sharp, citrus salad with char-grilled salmon. The two balance each other perfectly.

Such a vibrant, bright, fresh-tasting salad would, I imagine, have cut no ice with the perennially gloomy Thomas Hardy. But that plucky little thrush would have loved it — especially the elderberry Pontack. That’s probably what he was singing about.

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I love the concept of the canape. All the flavours of an entire plateful, heaped extravagantly into one perfect mouthful. But I’ve just discovered something I love as much as the canape, and that’s the derivation of the word. Canape was coined in 18th century France  and means ‘sofa’ — a welcoming, capacious, inviting seat on which to place a host of convivial partners. The perfect description of the best kind of canape, in other words. I haven’t enjoyed a word so much since I discovered sesquipedalian — a very long word which means a very long word.

Idle thoughts about sofas took me to Elizabeth Gaskell, the Victorian novelist and biographer of Charlotte Bronte. In 1859 Mrs Gaskell combined a group of stories under the collective title Round the Sofa. Characters gather around the sofa of Mrs. Dawson to hear her account of Lady Ludlow. The subsequent story of the Countess, her feckless son Lord Septimus and her loyal companion Miss Galindo became one of the most compelling strands of the brilliant BBC television adaptation of Mrs Gaskell’s work, Cranford.

This is the canape I’ve devised in honour of Miss Galindo, the spinster daughter of a Baronet. In Mrs Gaskell’s story she struggles uncomplainingly to support herself and I figured it was time she was treated to a little luxury. So in tribute to the valiant Miss Galindo, here’s an edible sofa to enjoy while sitting on a sofa, reading Round the Sofa.

CANAPES OF SCALLOPS ON A JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE CRISP WITH ARTICHOKE PUREE AND PANCETTA

• 500 g Jerusalem artichokes, scrubbed but unpeeled
• 200 g fresh scallops
• A little lemon juice
• 1 large knob butter
• 100 ml single cream
• 200 ml groundnut oil
• Seasoning
• A few fresh thyme leaves
• Around 6 slices pancetta

Reserve one large, evenly shaped artichoke — put the others to one side to use for the puree. Slice the reserved artichoke very finely with a mandolin. As you slice, place the pieces in a bowl of water which has been acidulated with lemon juice. The lemon will stop the artichoke from discolouring.

Dry the artichoke slices. Heat the groundnut oil in a pan until very hot — it should be about 1.5 cm deep. Test the temperature by putting a cube of bread into the oil and checking that it fries crisply.  Lower the artichoke slices carefully into the oil for around two minutes until crisp and brown. Remove from the oil and place them on kitchen paper while you prepare the other ingredients. (The crisps are delicious on their own, with a little sea salt, but you want to end up with enough crisps to partner the scallops, so count carefully.)

Bring the remaining artichokes to a simmer in a pan of salted water and cook until soft.
Puree the cooked artichokes, along with the butter and cream. Season to taste and keep warm.

Fry the pancetta until crisp and remove from pan. Using the same pan, add a little olive oil and fry the scallops for a couple of minutes each side, until golden. Don’t overcook them or they will become tough.

Assemble your sofas by heaping a teaspoon of puree on a crisp, placing a generous shard of pancetta on top and crowning with a thyme-topped scallop. Squeeze a few drops of lemon over the scallops if so inclined. Eat immediately — no-one likes a soggy sofa.

I thought of my grandpa as I walked around David Hockney’s new exhibition A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy in London. The exhibition is vast and overwhelming and throbs with wild colours and patterns. It’s generous, showy and utterly independent in spirit and yet it’s meticulous and somehow dogged too — qualities that pretty much sum up my grandpa.

Walking through Oxford’s University Parks later that day, I felt somehow let down that the winter branches didn’t have the vibrancy of David Hockney’s trees.

But turning 180 degrees so that the sun was shining on the trunks, the colours jumped into life. I got a whole new perspective. And if that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.

Muted, restrained food is the last thing I wanted after the Hockney tidal wave. I craved the idea of eating a riot of colour. When in that mood and at this time of year, there’s really only one choice — full throttle, lip-staining, finger-smearing, red and yellow beetroots. I found a bag of just such a thing for half price at Wholefoods, along with a silver foil hickory smoker from Finland for £2.29.

I have a disastrous record at home-smoking. The last time I tried we had to evacuate the house. But I figured I’d be safe in the hands of the Finns. If you want a really strong smokey flavour, this bag will disappoint you. But for a delicate hint of smoke, without the need for a full evacuation plan, this bag works fine.

SMOKED RED AND GOLDEN BEETROOT WITH GOAT’S CURD AND SMOKED GARLIC

Serves 4

• 2 red and 2 golden beetroot
• 4 small red onions
• Salad leaves
• Goat’s curd
• 1 head garlic
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• Bunch thyme
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• Blackberry vinegar — I bought mine from Womersley Foods
• 1 disposable foil smoker — bought from Wholefoods for £2.29

Wash the beetroot, but don’t bother to peel them. Slice into rounds about 1.5 to 2 cm thick. Peel the onions but leave whole. Toss the beetroot, onions, whole head of garlic and thyme in the olive oil and balsamic vinegar, season and place in a single layer inside the foil smoker. Seal the foil and place in a pre-heated oven at 250 degrees C. After 15 minutes turn the heat down to 190 degrees C. Cook for a further 45 minutes. Remove the package from the oven and allow to cool for 15 minutes before cutting open the foil. Peel the beetroot and slice into thinnish circles.

Make a salad dressing from a little olive oil, blackberry vinegar and seasoning and dress the salad leaves. Pile the beetroot, onions and scoops of goat’s curd over the leaves and trickle over a little of the balsamic and olive oil from the smoker. After its hour of baking, the garlic will be rich, sweet and unctuous — perfect when spread on a little sourdough bread.

 I ate my riotous salad and bread with beetroot soup that I made by baking beetroots and apples for an hour and blending with vegetable stock and a little grated fresh horseradish.

My grandpa was wild with his colour schemes but exceptionally timid in his tastes. He would have hated this recipe. But he would have loved the ideas that lie behind it, and that’s good enough for me.

Few things give me as much pleasure as a still life painting. Giorgio Morandi, Alice Mumford, Ben Nicholson, Edouard Vuillard all do something magical to a jug of milk, a white vase and a pot of jam and turn the mundane and everyday into something magnificent. I even like the term itself — ‘still life’ — capturing as it does the glories of sitting peacefully and simply looking at something for a minute, a day, a month, forever. Poor old Italy and France have been cheated out of the true glories of the still life — their translations for the term are ‘la natura morta’ and ‘la nature morte’. ‘Dead nature’ is a terrible definition and misses the point completely.

Still life, as well as being a glorious art-form, is the perfect synonym for soup. Eat a bowl of home-made soup and life will stand still for just a moment, as you savour the glories in the bowl. I’ve written before about the joys of soup, and few can beat this one. Its ingredients are like the components of a Vuillard painting — until they’re combined you have no idea how perfectly they go together. And don’t be put off by the length of this soup’s name. It’s quick, easy and effortless, unlike for example Osso Bucco which has a short snappy title but takes forever to make.

BUTTERNUT SQUASH, MAPLE AND GINGER STILL LIFE, WITH SPICED BUTTER AND PUMPKIN SEEDS

Serves 4

For the soup

• 1 butternut squash
• 2 tablespoons maple syrup
• Seasoning
• 2 white onions
• 1 scant dessert spoon fennel seeds
• Olive oil and knob of butter
• 1 piece fresh ginger, about 3 cm in length
• 1 litre good vegetable stock

Wash the butternut squash — you’re going to be using the skin. Chop it into medium-sized pieces, de-seed it but don’t bother to peel it. Put the pieces in a baking tray and sprinkle with the maple syrup and a little salt and pepper. Dot with small pieces of butter and  a small quantity of olive oil. Bake in a moderate oven at about 170 degrees C for about 40 minutes until the squash is soft and slightly caramelised. While the squash is cooking, chop the onions finely and put in a pan with the fennel seeds, some salt and pepper, a little olive oil and a knob of butter. Cook at the gentlest possible heat for about 30 minutes, stirring every now and again. The onions should be a rich, golden brown, but not burnt. About five minutes before the squash is ready, finely grate the peeled ginger into the onions.

Tip the squash, skin and all, into the onions, add the litre of vegetable stock, bring to a simmer and liquidise with a stick blender.

For the spiced butter

• 20g unsalted butter
• Good pinch smoked sea salt (ordinary sea salt is fine too)
• Half teaspoon chilli powder
• Half teaspoon smoked paprika
• A few fresh coriander leaves

Make sure the butter is soft enough to mix in with the other ingredients. Snip the coriander finely with scissors and combine everything well. Put the butter in a piece of cling film, roll it into a small sausage about 2.5 cms in diameter and put in the fridge for 15 minutes or so to harden. Serve the soup with a disc of spiced butter, a sprinkling of pumpkin seeds and a sprig of mint or coriander. Sit, eat and ‘have a minute’ as my Granny used to say. It’s still life in a bowl.

It’s the season to take stock, count up, measure out, pledge, promise and decide. I’ve made resolutions for the first time in five years and on my list is ‘read more poetry’. Expert resolution-makers say that simply vowing to do more of something is cheating. But I’m happy with my slightly vague ‘more’ and whoever said that poetry consumption should be calibrated, anyway?

Stems of fresh red berries on my kitchen table are throwing a new shadow on the wall, but the silhouettes of the Christmas candles are still there too. It’s that time of year when old passes to new and, for once, we actually take note.

With all the frenzied mental measuring that’s been going on, I wasn’t in the mood to do too much weighing and measuring in the kitchen. For times like this, I have the perfect recipe.…. Chocolate and Crunchy Peanut Ice-Cream. It’s an adaptation of a David Lebovitz recipe, from his inspiring but dependable book The Perfect Scoop. In fact, while I’m on the subject of New Year’s resolutions, to aim to be both inspiring and dependable sounds ideal.  I may add that to my list.

This is the kind of recipe that you can make while reading a book of poetry at the same time, so easy and memorable is it. A cup of this, a half cup of that and you’re almost there.

CHOCOLATE AND CRUNCHY PEANUT ICE-CREAM

• 1 cup double cream
• 1 cup semi-skimmed milk (you can use full cream if you prefer. I’ve even tried it with skimmed. All three grades of milk work perfectly fine)
• Quarter cup pure cocoa powder
• Half cup caster sugar
• Pinch of salt
• Half a jar of crunchy peanut butter — this equates to roughly 175g, but a little more or a little less really doesn’t matter

Tip all the ingredients into a pan and while stirring with a whisk, bring briefly to a hearty simmer. It will bubble up in the pan, at which point take off the heat. Stir in the peanut butter, allow to cool and churn in an ice-cream maker. It’s as easy as that. My children have asked if I will make a New Year’s resolution to create it even more regularly than I already do.

If in fanciful mood, make some almond brittle to poke in the top. Toast the almonds in a small non-stick frying pan. Put to one side. Pour half a cup of caster sugar into the same pan. Without stirring, heat the sugar and swirl it around the pan until it melts to a light caramel liquid. It burns easily and also gets ferociously hot, so be careful. Stir in the nuts and quickly spread out onto a piece of baking parchment with a palate knife. It will set almost immediately. Snap off a piece to suit your appetite and your conscience.

To my mind, the true measure of a good piece of brittle is that it should be translucent enough to read a poem through it. That way, if your New Year’s resolution is the same as mine, you can have your cake while reading it at the same time.  And who could argue with that?

It’s an Eggs On The Roof tradition that at this time of year I toast you with a cocktail. Last year I saluted you with a pomegranate creation I called Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.  This year I’d like to say thank you with a quince vodka and clementine juice affair.

I’m full of gratitude for your loyalty, your solidarity and your shared sense of fun. In fact, I’m just so glad to have enjoyed your company this year that I was going to call my cocktail Pollyanna, after the gloriously cheerful character from children’s fiction. But since my cocktail has a zesty little kick to it, I’ve decided to call it Longstocking, after the fearless, feisty and life-enhancing Pippi.

LONGSTOCKING COCKTAIL

• 1 part vodka — I used the quince vodka I made this  year, inspired by The Quince Tree. But standard vodka will do
• 1 part freshly squeezed clementine juice
• 3 parts Prosecco

Here’s to you all.

Do you remember when I wrote about ‘nowness’? In the final weeks of his life, it was the word Dennis Potter used to describe his intense love for the present moment. My Granny’s way of describing ‘nowness’ was what she called ‘having a minute’ and this morning I found yet another version. In 1817 John Keats wrote a letter in which he said that ‘…if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence…’ 

It was with thoughts of Keats’ sparrow that I set off on a walk, a piece of cheese and an apple in the pocket of my coat. You’ll know by now that I love picnics, especially ones that fit into my pocket.  An apple and a piece of cheese have an easy compatibility. Each has its own special qualities and neither tries to outshine the other. Their happy camaraderie makes them the perfect companions for a ‘nowness’ walk. Inevitably, though, when I got home I stopped thinking about now and started thinking about ‘what if?’ instead. What would happen if I gave an apple and cheese new, glamorous outfits and invited them to a party?

APPLE SORBET IN PARMESAN CONES

Serves 4

FOR THE SORBET

• Ikg cored, unpeeled apples — a sweet, full flavoured variety such as Cox’s Orange Pippin
• Juice of a clementine
• 1 cup water
• 375g caster sugar

Grate the apples, skin and all. Squeeze the clementine juice over the apple and put in a pan with the water and sugar. Bring the mixture to a simmer and keep on the heat for 5 minutes. The beauty of grating the apple is that you don’t need to cook it for very long, so you will retain the goodness and flavour of the fruit. Tip the cooked fruit into a sieve and allow to drip into a bowl. While it’s dripping through, start to make the parmesan cones.

FOR THE PARMESAN CONES

• 8 tablespoons finely grated parmesan

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C. Using 2 tablespoons of parmesan per cone, pat the grated cheese into four flat circles, on a baking tray lined with baking parchment. Cook in the oven for 4 to 5 minutes. Remove from the oven and after one minute, lift the melted cheese circles off the paper and roll between your fingers into a cone shape. Don’t leave them to cool before you do this, because the parmesan biscuits will simply snap. Once rolled, the cones will be about 6 cm long, rather than full-sized ones. This recipe is better in miniature.

By now the apple juice should have dripped through. Cool the juice and then churn in an ice-cream maker. Don’t panic about its amber colour at this stage. The churning and freezing process will turn the juice a pale, creamy pink.

Place a scoop of sorbet into each cone. If you think that an ice-cream cone isn’t properly dressed without a chocolate flake, decorate your sorbet with a tiny celery stalk, its leaves still attached. The combined flavours are perfect. And after all, if apple and cheese are going to the Ball, they have to be given the right accessories, don’t they?

The news that scientists have recorded subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light has been greeted with astonishment. I’m no doubt missing out a million links in the scientific chain here, but in its simplest form it shoots craters into Albert Einstein’s sacred principle that nothing travels faster than light. It might be possible to watch these particles, known as neutrinos, leaving after they’ve arrived in the place where we’ve already seen them. Roughly translated, it raises the possibility of going backwards in time.

Time travel is something cooks have been able to do for generations of course. Nothing will transport you back to a moment in your childhood, a summer’s day or a perfect birthday, like the taste and aroma of the food that you ate at those golden moments.

Without fail, the sight of a poached pear takes me back to Italy circa 1991. A softly spoken, elderly chef called Benito told me that the only way to check if a poached pear is perfectly cooked is to pierce it with the quill of a wild Umbrian porcupine.  To make sure that I’d always cook perfect pears in future, he gave me a quill as a present. (Benito didn’t speak a single word of English, so it’s perfectly possible that I completely misunderstood him and that what he was really saying was that the sharp point of a porcupine quill is the perfect weapon to attack people stealing pears from your tree.)

This morning, I was transported back to my conversation with Benito when I found some beautiful Concorde pears at the market.

So, completely unaided and without a single neutrino in sight, I take you back 20 years. Until neutrinos really prove their stuff, this is the finest time travel I know — the culinary kind.

POACHED PEARS WITH BUTTERSCOTCH ICE-CREAM AND PEAR CRISPS

Serves 4

For the Poached Pears

• 4 ripe, firm pears such as concorde
• 300ml red wine
• 100ml water
• 1  cinnamon stick
• 1 star anise
• 80g caster sugar

Peel the pears, slice a piece off the bottom so they will stand up straight once cooked, Remove the core from underneath, or leave it in if you prefer. Combine all the other ingredients in a pan, heat until the sugar is dissolved and then add the peeled pears. Make a cartouche out of greaseproof paper. This is simply a circle of paper the same diameter as the pan with a small circle cut out of the middle to allow steam to escape. Press the cartouche onto the pears to keep them in the liquid as they cook. Simmer gently for around an hour, until the point of a knife, or a porcupine quill of course, slides in easily.  Allow the pears to cool in the poaching liquid. When the pears are cool, remove them from the liquid. Reduce the liquid to a rich syrup.

For the Pear Crisps

• I pear
• 25g caster sugar
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 100ml water

Heat the oven to 110 degrees C. Boil the water, pour into a bowl and add the sugar and lemon juice. Stir until dissolved. Slice the pear finely using a mandolin if you have one, or a very sharp knife. Dip the slices in the sugar water. Bake in the oven on a tray lined with baking paper for around 1.5 hours, until the slices are dried out, but not yet brown.

For the Butterscotch Ice-Cream

Butterscotch

• 225g unsalted butter
• 170g brown sugar
• 50ml water
• Pinch of salt
• 150ml cream

First make the butterscotch, by combining the butter, sugar, salt and water. Simmer for 15 minutes, until the colour darkens to a pale caramel brown. Keep stirring so that it doesn’t burn. Take off the heat and stir in the cream. It will bubble and churn up. Put to one side to cool.

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together until they become pale, creamy and form trails when you lift the whisk and let the mixture drip into the bowl. This is called the ‘ribbon stage’. Combine the cream and milk and bring almost to the boil.

Whisk a spoonful of the cream mixture into the egg and then transfer the egg mixture into the pan of cream. Keep whisking constantly to avoid it turning to scrambled eggs. Continue to heat gently and when the custard is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. sieve the mixture onto the butterscotch, stir well and pour into a chilled bowl to cool down. Once cold, churn in an ice-cream maker.

Assemble the pear, crisp, ice-cream and syrup. While you eat, speculate about the possibility of eating poached pears which haven’t been made yet. That way you get to eat them before the washing-up even exists.

.

I was captivated to hear that the work newly attributed to Leonardo, Salvator Mundi, was only firmly established as being his by its ‘pentimenti’. Loosely translated, pentimenti are ‘marks of repentance’ — in other words, adjustments, mistakes, rethinks, alterations.

As a metaphor for life, what could be better than the realisation that we’re defined by our mistakes, rather than by our breezy successes? You can take the gloomy view and assume this means we can never shrug off our failures. Or, like me, you can take the Pollyanna line of argument that we’re shaped, tempered and fortified both by our imperfections and by the things we elect to change.

One of my most precious possessions is a silver ring made for me by one of my children. Look closely and you will see its ‘pentimenti’ — the fingerprint glancingly captured in the silver before the metal hardened. It wouldn’t fetch much at auction, but it’s priceless to me.

Or examine the pin cushion made for me by one of my oldest friends, who knows all too well that I have an abiding passion for strong tea. It features a teapot, two teacups and a milk jug, all picked out in pin heads, along with my initial. Its pentimenti are a couple of missing pins, and isn’t it beautiful?

Or the hand-made jugs and and bowls I collect, each of them marked by a thumb print, misshapen edge or wonky signature. The pentimenti make them more glorious than perfect versions could ever have been.

The pentimenti argument works with food too. I’ve just made Smoked Salmon Pentimenti, in fact. Not a new, elaborately-shaped form of pasta, but a way of feeding six unexpected guests with only 140 grams of smoked salmon. Logic says that smoked salmon shouldn’t be cooked and that 140g is nowhere near enough to feed so many. But what could have been a mistake turned into a triumph.

SMOKED SALMON PENTIMENTI

Serves 6

• 50g butter
• 75g flour
• 1 litre semi skimmed milk
• 2 bay leaves
• 300g mature Cheddar cheese, grated
• Half cup or 125ml dry white wine
• 2kg floury potatoes
• 1kg white onions
• 140g smoked salmon

Preheat the oven to around 165 degrees C. You will need an oven-proof baking dish around 25cm wide, 30cm long and 10cm deep.

Peel and slice the raw potatoes and onions into 2mm thick rounds. Melt the butter and make a roux by adding the flour. Stir to combine and heat gently for a couple minutes to ensure the floury taste is cooked out.  Heat the milk in a separate pan and once simmering, add the onions to the milk. Keep the milk simmering for a few minutes until the onions have softened slightly before removing them with a slotted spoon and putting them to one side.

Gradually add the hot milk to the roux and keep stirring with a whisk. The heat of the milk will make it much easier to combine with the roux, as well as reducing the risk of lumps. Once all the milk has been added, continue to whisk until you have a creamy sauce which has a custard-like consistency. Stir in the white wine and keep at a simmer. Add the bay leaves and 200g of the Cheddar cheese and whisk until melted in. Check the seasoning and add salt and pepper.

Ladle a scant spoonful of sauce over the bottom of your dish. Then alternate a single layer of potato slices, followed by smoked salmon, onion and then one third of the remaining cheese sauce. Repeat the layers of potato, salmon, onion and sauce, followed by a final layer of potato, sauce and the remaining 100g of cheese. Place in the oven and cook for 1 and a half hours. If you’re worried that the top is browning too much, cover with a layer of foil. Check that the potatoes and onions are soft by piercing them with a fork.

Serve with a simple green salad. Anything more elaborate would be a pentimento too far — trust me.

Tasting India by Christine Manfield
Published by Conran Octopus, November 2011, £40.00
Photography by Anson Smart

Combatants in the fight over e-cookery books versus printed ones have new ammunition. Or should that be heavy artillery. If you believe paper books take up too much room, you’ll no doubt point accusingly at Christine Manfield’s new book, Tasting India. It’s vast — the biggest, heaviest and most lavish cookery book I’ve ever seen. Its turmeric yellow satin cover embossed with vivid pink peacocks is just about as showy as it’s possible to be.

Yes, it’s impractical — one splash from an unruly, bubbling pan of dahl and its gleaming golden jacket would be ruined. And yes, its girth puts it in the super heavyweight class. It’s not a book to amble through so much as rock-climb over. But, call me a romantic if you like, I’ve fallen in love with it.

The Australian chef Christine Manfield has been visiting India for more than twenty years. Her reverence for the country, tempered with a pragmatic understanding of its faults, shines through the text. It’s part travelogue, part encyclopedia, part memoir, part cookery book. Where she’s been so shrewd is to avoid a pedestrian, dogged tramp through each region. That’s not how cuisine works, and certainly not in India. As she says, ‘For me, part of the excitement of contemporary Indian cuisine lies in the way each cook or chef carries the recipes and heritage of their homeland with them, wherever they happen to find themselves.’

Immerse yourself in the pages of this book — there are nearly 500 of them, so it will take a while. Marvel at the stunning photographs by Anson Smart. Savour the recipes for tea-leaf fritters, scallops in spiced coconut, desert-bean koftas with onion curry and curd dumplings soaked in saffron milk. Just imagine what they must taste like, or throw caution to the wind and lug this book into the kitchen and actually cook from it. Either way it’s entrancing.