The book is structured around seven essays — significantly longer than traditional chapter introductions — on topics ranging from ‘What is a recipe?’ to ‘A loving defence of brown food’. There are several pages devoted simply to rhubarb. It’s easy to forget, given her fame, that Lawson made her name with just such long prose in her first book, and it is a treat to read her writing again without the usual constraints of cookbooks. She is expansive and discursive without being baggy. She tackles the big topics that have roiled the food world in recent years: authenticity, provenance and ownership; comfort and guilt. And she does all of this without either preaching or boring you.
