Book review: The Weekend Cook by Angela Hartnett

In The Weekend Cook Angela Hartnett shares the recipes she serves friends and family when they pop over for lunch, dinner or just a snack after a few drinks in her local pub (a venue she is so effusive about, you may be tempted to pop a bookmark in and rush down to Spitalfields).

When you return, having wetted your whistle to The Weekend Cook, you will find a celebration of beautiful produce prepared in a relatively simple manner, that will allow you to impress without realising at the end of the night that you haven’t actually spent any time with your guests.

Hartnett was encouraged by a friend to write a book about “the joy of quality time spent with friends and neighbours”, and her love for all such occasions screams from the page. Candid photography shows long lunches in the garden, street parties and suppers by candlelight.

The recipes are equally inviting. Take soft confit garlic and goats’ curd toast; a simple Sunday chicken with root vegetables, garlic, lemon and parsley; and red mullet served with tomatoes, chili and garlic. There’s also an osso bucco with risotto Milanese; the image of which could have any carnivore salivating, and potato gnocchi with wild garlic and morels – one of only a few recipes that extends beyond a single page.

Chapters are also dedicated to pasta and rice, vegetables, street parties and the dishes friends and neighbours have made, including Basil’s Christmas ham and James’ haggis.

Hartnett is not prescriptive, inviting the reader to make their own alterations and confessing that her own menus are often changed at the last minute after realising that time has slipped away or an ingredient or two are missing from the larder.

This isn’t a book of cheffy techniques and ground-breaking flavour combinations, but a reminder that good food and great company can, as Hartnett says, “put your working life into perspective and [provide a chance to] reconnect with family and friends”. With many in the industry spending their working lives surmounting chronic staff shortages, it seems a pertinent message for our times.

The Weekend Cook by Angela Hartnett (Bloomsbury, £26)