Country kitchen cookbook for the self-sufficient will see you through Covid-19 lockdown
- Written in 1979, Notes from a Country Kitchen covers the essentials of preserving, baking and other make-it-yourself food locked down cooks are rediscovering
- Jocasta Innes shows readers how to preserve meats, smoke fish, can fruit and vegetables, and make sausages, pasta, butter and cheese
Although Notes from a Country Kitchen was published in 1979, it takes us back to an era when people were self-sufficient as a matter of course. They didn’t bake their own bread or preserve fruits and vegetables only because they were bored at home during a pandemic – they did it to survive.
In the introduction, Nanjing-born British author Jocasta Innes (who died in 2013) writes, “Everyone has a picture of how a country kitchen should look […] Usually it is an old settled place which comes to mind: a flagged floor smoothed into hollows by the passing of countless feet, vast plank table scoured to pale straw colour, a round faced clock companionably ticking and set into the chimney breast, and that tyrant of the old style country kitchen, the cast-iron range whose needs, moods and eccentricities must be faithfully served if bread is not to scorch and kettles refuse to boil.
“Some features of this imagined kitchen would change from one part of the world to the other, but not the essentials: a certain old fashioned air, the use of honest materials like brick, wood, stone, the sense of an ordered way of life linked to the changing seasons, the good feeling which comes off places where people are generously fed, warmed and cherished, and the squirrelling impulse to store good things away, tucked into pots and jars.”
But there’s something to be said for the conveniences of modern life, Innes continues. “This archetypal country kitchen is frankly a nostalgic creation. By comparison the typical modern country kitchen is smart, colourful and briskly labour saving. And why not? Stainless-steel sinks and drainers are hygienic and practical and you can wipe them down in a moment which certainly was not the case with the old porcelain sink and wooden draining boards.
“Yet links with the old traditions survive in a contemporary kitchen. Ropes of onions, shallots and garlic still hang by the stove, parsley and chives sprout from pots on a sunny windowsill, the unmistakable smell of working yeast shows that a batch of dough is rising in the big earthenware jar beside the range, bundles of dried herbs from the garden are pinned close to the worktop and there is possibly a keg of homebrew propped on bricks in one corner.”
This sounds like the kitchens that pop up almost daily on my Instagram feed.
Innes’ subjects include making your own pasta, butter, cheese, smoked fish (including building a smoker oven), preserved meats (brined, pickled, salted and smoked), sausages, dried and canned fruits and vegetables, beer, wine, yogurt and bread (although not the high-hydration sourdough loaves that are so popular now; these use commercial yeast). There are also recipes for potted shrimp, pickled herring, feta, rillettes, Argentine chorizo, dry-salted beef, strawberry jam, parsnip wine, mozzarella and clotted cream.
