Book review: The Farm Table by Julius Roberts

Seasonal eating and cooking are concepts which humankind has lost in the last 150 years or so since the advent of industrial farming practices

Seasonal eating and cooking are concepts which humankind has lost in the last 150 years or so since the advent of industrial farming practices; the expectation to enjoy strawberries in January or butternut squash in May has muddled chefs’ and consumers’ understanding of what is available when and the optimum time to consume produce.

Former Noble Rot chef turned social media and television personality, Julius Roberts’ debut cookbook The Farm Table offers a valuable introduction into the world of seasonal cooking.

Roberts includes over 100 recipes, a compilation of three years’ worth of work at his Dorset small-holding, in this weighty 300-page tome. He aims to educate the reader (although not in a sermonising fashion) on the millennia-old relationship between the seasons and produce.

The book is broken into four chapters – winter, spring, summer and autumn – with each offering a mix of vegetarian, fish and meat dishes, as well as smaller plates and puddings. The narrative he attaches to each season and its produce is highly evocative; winter is “still and peaceful, yet wild and ruthless”, perfect for pork belly braised in cider, whereas summer is an “eternal slumber” of long hazy days and scorched cracked earth, ideal for a courgette frittata with goats’ cheese, lemon and mint.

Recipes can be scaled up or down, such as his lamb stew with pearl barley and wild garlic, or fish cooked in spiced tomato sauce (see opposite), and he also encourages substitutions depending on what is seasonally available. For example, his dish ‘spring on a plate’, a mixture of broad beans, asparagus and peas with gem lettuce and whipped ricotta, can be turned into an autumnal dish of roasted squash, carrots, and turnip with herbs and ricotta.

With the increasing demand from chefs and consumers on provenance and the accompanying desire to cultivate a kitchen garden, this book could well become a go-to for any chef who wishes to embed greater seasonal practice in their work and cooking.

The Farm Table by Julius Roberts (Ebury Press, £27)