Bath Thrifty Cookery Book
‘A Winning Idea’
As reviewed by Justin Yates
When it was suggested at a recent Off The Wall team meeting that we should write a review for DHI’s ‘The Bath Thrifty Cookery Book’, I immediately raised my hand & offered my services to write the review. Not because I’ve any real experience at writing reviews, in fact usually if there’s a book to be reviewed the task falls to OTW’s regular contributor Jim Timoney. So rather selfishly I raised my hand because I thought writing a review would be quite easy. I thought if I didn’t offer to write this review I may end up being lumbered with a much harder or longer piece to write! Having been involved with the book from its original conception right through to the finished product - although I’d have to admit that I had very little to do with the actual compiling of the book (though I did provide a recipe) - I figured it should be quite easy to write why this is such a great recipe book. Obviously I wanted to give a good review, being that the proceeds from its sale go towards supporting such a great charity & one that is so very close to my heart, and a poor review may influence any potential customers against purchasing a copy. I received a free copy in order to review it and I was most impressed with the professional look of the publication. If the contents were even half as good as the way the book looked then writing a good review was going to be a breeze.
However after briefly flicking through it, the cynical voice in me started to get louder. Firstly I couldn’t imagine who the book would appeal to - half the recipes were provided by amateurs and half provided by professionals. I couldn’t help but think that inexperienced cooks would find half the recipes far too challenging, whilst more experienced cooks might find that half the recipes were just not challenging enough. Then there was the costings. Some recipes it seemed to me after some quick mental arithmetic were shown as being far cheaper than I thought they should be, admittedly I’m sure they all would come in at under £5, take though as an example Potato Gnocchi with Ragu (p.5) in order to buy all the ingredients from scratch to make this dish it would definitely cost more than the £3 stated by the price guide.
Oh dear, maybe this wasn’t going to be quite as easy a task as I’d first thought... I decided that I would leave thinking about it for a few days in the hope I’d return to the review in a more positive frame of mind. Also, having never really used cookery books or recipes, I decided to take a few out from the library and check out the cookery sections in some of the local book shops, so as to have something with which to compare.
After looking at the books from the library and local shops, I started to realise just what a unique little recipe book ‘The Bath Thrifty Cookery Book’ really was. Apart from its obvious strength of providing thirty cheap recipes, which was always going to be a strong selling point in these recession hit times. Compared to all the other cook books I’d viewed, all of which stuck to one particular style of cooking; French, Italian, Thai ect..or all desserts, or all main courses, or all cordon bleu recipes, or all beginners recipes aimed at students who‘ve just learnt to boil an egg! ‘The Bath Thrifty Cookery Book’ had them all! No other cookery book I found had such a unique selection of recipes, and far from being my original thought that it was a recipe book that suited neither beginners or the more experienced cook, I could now see that it was a cookery book that suited cooks of all standards and levels of experience. In no other book I came across were there both cheap main meal restaurant quality recipes suitable for impressing guests at a dinner party and also quick and easy low-cost snacks suited to eating off your lap whilst sat on the sofa enjoying your favourite TV show!
Another thing that struck me whilst comparing ‘The Bath Thrifty Cookery Book’ against other cook books was the simple, straight forward language that it was written in, one of the reasons that I rarely use recipes and don’t own a single recipe book (until now!) is that often they are written in such a way, with the use of specialist terminology, that they become difficult to follow. Because half the recipes in ‘The Bath Thrifty Cookery Book’ are written by service users, you can be sure that they are wrote in plain, simple English. The recipes provided by the top chefs from the best of Baths local eateries are guaranteed to be of good quality. With their names, as well as those of the establishments they work for plastered all over the cover as well as inside ‘The Bath Thrifty Cookery Book’ you can be sure that their recipes are going to be winners. The more I thought about & looked at ‘The Bath Thrifty Cookery Book’ the more I could see just what a great recipe book it is. Not only does it provide good, cheap food ideas at a time when we’re all watching what we spend. Go into any of the local book shops & compare the price of it with any similar sized recipe book and you will realise what great value it is at just £4.99, especially when you consider that all profits go to support DHI a charity from whom many that are reading this review have benefited. Obviously the price of printing a book of this quality is not cheap & it will take the sale of many copies to start to see a profit, but as a way of getting the message out there to those who otherwise would never know what DHI provides to many local communities, makesthis book a great tool for advertising the services of DHI. That to me is why this book is such a winning idea.
