The Real Food Handbook

Roz Denny's Real Food Handbook is a thoroughly useful guide to quality produce, and will be of great benefit in helping the inexperienced or intimidated cook/shopper choose wisely and well. It provides a down-to-earth, no-nonsense description of the proliferating variety of foodstuffs to be had from today's supermarkets--at least the more upmarket ones--and specialist food shops. Covering fresh and cured meats, fish, dairy produce, vegetables, fruits and nuts, grains and pulses, pasta, herbs, spices, sauces, pastes and a host of other ingredients both familiar and exotic, it offers basic information that will not only help you to know what to buy, why and when, but give you an idea of what you might do with it when you get it home. The emphasis throughout is on quality and seasonality. This is a very friendly book and one that invites prolonged browsing (what, for example, is a pitahaya?). Roz Denny is patient, thorough and unfazed. She seems to have tried everything in the book at least once (except durian, perhaps unsurprisingly) and has an agreeably breezy style that allows her to describe Korean pickled cabbage, kimchi, as "a bit on the whiffy side". However, it is a shame that she has not been ideally served by her publishers: the editing is irritatingly sloppy and someone has neglected to complete the cross-references (all to page 00). --Robin Davidson

View other editions of The Real Food Handbook.
View books by Roz Denny.