Lindsey Bareham's "Roast Chicken and Other Tales of Culinary Delight"

Michael Haydon: This should become a classic!
A lovely account of life using simple recipes which transformed my appreciation of good ingredients and basic techniques.

United States on Dec 17, 2023

Debbie: Great used book, quickly shipped. Thank you so much!

United States on Nov 12, 2023

Seymour Clifford: yummy, elegant, unfussy recipes.
Nicely written, enjoyable to read.
Great illustrations and short, pleasant anecdotes.

Australia on Jul 22, 2021

Mr. I. K. Riley: That Simon Hopkinson has worked with Conran shows he knows his stuff. Why I like this book is that for each food he writes about there is an interesting general introduction making it more than just a list of recipes. This helps in thinking about choice of menu for a dinner party. The recipes are simply explained and reading them already makes me feel they will be delicious. His references to the greatest influence on him, his mother, assures the reader that his ideas spring from good English traditions rather than on foreign foundations and unlike so many recent cookery books is not a photograph album with writing or a resume of a TV presentation. So the book is enjoyable whether you wish to read about food or cook it.

United Kingdom on Jan 17, 2016

Jeremy R. Worthington M.D.: some great cooking hints . The recipes are rich in flavor and high in calories for the most part

United States on Nov 05, 2015

Marlene B.: Simon Hopkinson schreibt auf liebevolle Art und Weise. Kochen mit seinem Buch macht Spaß, ist informativ und es schmeckt einfach herrlich.

Germany on Mar 03, 2015

A415: As promised this is an excellent cookbook and very well produced. But there is one problem, the version that you can look at on the Amazon web site is the European edition; however, the one that you buy is the American edition with all the delights of the American weights and measures like “cups” of butter and no conversion table. So you have to edit all the recipes before they can be used.

France on Jun 26, 2013

TringEagle: So how do you judge a good cook book:
The most spectacularly creative dishes?
The most accurate recipes?
Great photography?
In the fullness of time there is surely one really sure measurement - how often it gets used.
For me Simon Hodgkinson's classic is a clear favourite. It wouldn't be in the top three in my cook book collection for any of the three aforementioned criteria. However, it is the one that I return to time and time again. The author's remarkable 'feel' for food shines through the descriptions and helps the reader get the dish right.
The book is laid out by key ingredient in alphabetical order - Anchovy through to Veal - which is a big help if you've already decided what that ingredient is going to be for the meal you are planning.
There are no photos and no heart trending autobiographical notes. Therefore it is a rubbish coffee table book - but it is a marvellous cook book.

United Kingdom on Dec 02, 2012

Stephen Foster: (My 5-star reviews are few and far between.)

I got this book three years ago; read it cover-to-cover in one sitting, loving every page, but for some reason never cooked from it until last week, when I made the roast chicken. It's no doubt best to start with a chicken that actually had a life, rather than the factory-raised and infinitely-parsed "free-range organic" bird that I had to resort to, but the result was brilliant, anyway. (See Michael Pollan if you need help understanding "free-range organic", "naturally-nested", "cage-free", or any other of the all-but-meaningless terms the American Food Machine has lobbied and muscled its way into ownership of.)

But the roast chicken is just excellent roast chicken. The parsley soup is beyond imagining. Here's the ingredient list: butter, parsley, leek, chicken stock, potato, cream. But the parsley is actually three ingredients prepared in different ways, each designed to play up a different chord of the full parsley sound. The result is ... parsley, as imagined by God. My two guests (rather sniffy food-snobs, much like myself to be candid) were struck dumb, and declared it the best thing I'd ever...

United States on Sep 09, 2011

M. K. Foley: I happened to stumble on a description of this book somewhere and read it was recently reprinted and was rated the most popular cook book in England. I can see why it's so popular. A pleasure to read, not just for the recipes, which are a mixture of western European classics, English 'comfort foods' and a few more contemporary recipes from the 70's era. It's the stories in this book that make it so endearing. This book is an obvious labor of love.

I like that the author chose to share his favorite foods with us. In my opinion the best part of this cook book is the stories he tells about each recipe, how he discovered it and his experiences in the pleasures of enjoying a well made meal. This is not a book meant to impress, it's a sharing of the joys of cooking and eating from the author's heart.

A few of his recipes will seem very foreign to the American palate and some of his cooking directions may take a bit of getting used to for the less experienced American cook. In some cases he gives very clear directions and in other cases he assumes you know what you're doing and the directions are more sparse. Still, don't be intimidated by my description...

United States on Feb 16, 2006