River Cottage Good Comfort: Best-Loved Favourites Made Better for You

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For millennia, that was the human race's relationship with food, and it was pretty much all you thought about all day. Tip the spuds into the pan. If they aren't already mashed, crush them roughly with a fork or masher, but keep the texture quite chunky. Let the heat penetrate the potatoes for a minute or two then add all the other veg, and any herbs or flavour bombs, with a little more seasoning. Stir together then press the whole lot down into a rough cake. So I am pleased to add River Cottage Good Comfort, to our recipe book collection. (That's the British River Cottage TV series with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (HFW), not the Australian adaptation with Paul West.)

The concept of this book - healthy comfort food with plenty of vegan options - is a perfect fit for the sort of cakes and puddings I want to make: heavy on fruit, lower added sugar, but not full of niche American vegan ingredients. (The best approach I've found so far is to make the cakes in The Seasonal Vegan by Sarah Philpott and reduce the sugar by up to half as per this excellent and methodical advice; see under blended cakes.) But where this book does fall down is in not giving any general advice in the introduction about preferred dairy substitutes, and in which dishes they do and don't work - and in having very few cakes and puddings with vegan options. I don't bother to find fault with older omni cookbooks for being full of dairy with no substitution ideas; it was just the norm before the last few years. But as HFW and River Cottage have already produced a fully vegan book ( Much More Veg), and even early Nigella books happen to contain a few more dairy free or even accidentally-vegan cakes than this one does, I definitely think they could do better in this area.Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage has been re-evaluating its relationship with sugar for a few years now.

For the duration of that meal, everybody could relax, everybody could tell a story and everyone could smile." In the same year, Hugh published The River Cottage Meat Book to wide acclaim and won a second André Simon Food Book of the Year Award. The book begins with an Introduction. It's the usual cook's philosophy section, which in this case is HFW's mission to recreate comfort foods that are not heavy, cloying, too rich or too sweet. His key principle is 'Go Whole: The more whole, unrefined ingredients we can get on to our plates, the better. But he doesn't just mean the grains and pulses we typically associate with the term 'wholefoods'. He means foods that are whole, or very close to it, when we take them into our kitchens. (I heard these described the other day as 'foods your granny would recognise'.) Minimally processed is ok, so he includes dairy foods such as yoghurt and cheese, and some tinned vegetables (such as low-salt tomatoes canned with just water and a little salt.) He stresses that it's important to get the balance right: overdo the pulses and you're in the danger zone of 'padding'. Likewise, full-on wholemeal flour can take you a little far from textures you know and love, so 'half-wholemeal' is a better choice.

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Flavour bombs (optional): 1-2tsp curry paste or powder, or sliced olives, capers and/or chopped anchovies Even as I say that, I'm aware that is a notion that's under challenge at the moment from the really tough times we're having. Dialling down the sugar and the refined ingredients is part of it, but dialling up the whole ingredients is what the book's more about," Fearnley-Whittingstall adds. After a "strange few years", it made sense for Fearnley-Whittingstall to dedicate his latest book to comforting, nostalgic recipes. Cooked greens: About 150-250g cooked kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and/or broccoli, roughly chopped or shredded

This is all part of the 57-year-old chef and food writer's mission to get us eating a bit more healthily - and that doesn't mean you have to miss out on your favourite, stodgy comfort foods. Maybe they are planning a River Cottage Vegan Baking handbook, like they have the Gluten Free one and other food-group specific handbooks like Mushrooms. There is more and more great technical advice out there from the likes of the aforementioned Vegan Baking Bible, and Philip Khoury's upcoming A New Way to Bake, on restaurant-grade patisserie, with restaurant-grade ingredients you can also see listed under his YT videos. But so far as I can tell, there still isn't a high-quality, trustworthy book focused on vegan baking with the sort of fruit and veg grown in the UK and on vegan versions of traditional British sweet recipes.But why are we so drawn to comfort food? "I've got a slightly highfalutin answer to that, I hope you'll bear with me," says Fearnley-Whittingstall. We've been conned into eating more sugar than we even have a genuine appetite for," he says, good-natured outrage bubbling from his words. Good old bubble and squeak is a much-loved dish in my house. Rather than one ingredient being ‘bubble' and one ‘squeak', the name is thought to refer to the sounds emanating from the frying pan as the dish is cooking,” says Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He continues to write as a journalist, including a weekly column in The Guardian and is Patron of the National Farmers’ Retail and Markets Association (FARMA). And Good Comfort is in every way generous, as Hugh makes our favourite foods healthier not by taking stuff out of them, but by putting more in: the best whole ingredients, celebrated in all their colourful and seasonal diversity.

People used to making recipes dairy-free or vegan will already have their own preferred method of making standards like batter, but this book seems likely to interest omni households who cater for vegan guests from time-to-time, or who may have one (perhaps newly) vegan resident who isn't the main cook. (The recipes really suit a relaxed family dinner.) For these circumstances , it would be a good idea to consistently include advice for such things, as is done for the lasagna. I used to make coffee and peppermint creams and dip them in chocolate - and truffles, things like that," Fearnley-Whittingstall remembers. But what I found is even my sweet tooth is completely satisfied by much less sugar than conventional recipes, and certainly industrially produced biscuits, cakes, sweets and puddings tend to include. We definitely need a sugar rethink." Indulge your taste buds and boost your health at the same time with these delicious new recipes, including: It was actually spot-on. (As far as is possible, given they don't have a dairy-free book - although there is a gluten-free baking one.)Recipes in his new book, River Cottage Good Comfort, might have a less tooth-rotting amount of sugar in them, but you won't necessarily miss anything.