Times may have changed in the kitchen (as elsewhere), but that doesn’t mean modern cooks want to reinvent the wheel. They still want to make soups and salads, roasts and pasta, pies and puddings.
In Modern Classics renowned food writer Donna Hay takes these traditional numbers and combines them with the best of modern ingredients and techniques to give them a fresh new life.
Old and new are wonderfully intermingled so that as well as explaining how to roast a leg of lamb and make gravy, Hay also shows to make Pad Thai and risotto. Dishes such as risotto, she explains, will be as commonplace to the next generation of home cooks as macaroni cheese has been to the current one.
These delicious and easy recipes are mostly made with ingredients that can be sourced at the local supermarket, a boon for busy shoppers or country residents like this reviewer.
The book is gorgeously illustrated by the photography of Con Poulos, whose images seem so real they make the reader’s taste buds tingle.
The presentation of the book is beautiful. It seems almost too good to live in the kitchen – seeming to deserve to be shown off.
Lovely.
Modern Classics Book 1, by Donna Hay
Harper Collins, 2002