Tom La Dell reviews Nigel Slater's book on cooking with fruit.

Fruit is sidelined in many cookery books except for standard puddings, usually a tart, or on the side as jams, jellies and chutneys, or just simply fresh with something, such as grapes and cheese and figs and chocolate. I suppose that fruit is an unusual ingredient in that there is a balance of sugars and acidity and cooking upsets this, usually by releasing the acids from the flesh of the fruit into the liquid. Baked, rather than stewed, rhubarb, for instance, needs only a little sugar as the juice is retained in the stalk. Some people might say 'why cook with fruit and not just eat it fresh when there are so many fruits, so many varieties and so many flavours?' There are 4000 of 16 kinds of fruit in the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale, but not many of these varieties are available to most people.

Then along comes Nigel Slater's Tender, Volume II focussing entirely on fruit and with a fresh approach in my view. It is linked to the story he has told on television of digging up his lawn, growing his own food and cooking with it. Here we have a cookbook that puts fruit first. A short introduction covers the fruit garden and in a couple of pages about fruit and cooking he says that as far as savoury dishes go there is 'nothing to raise an eyebrow in this collection, no flights of fancy, no strawberry sauce with chicken to upset the family at supper time.' He wants the recipes to be 'useful and delicious rather than extraordinary'. This undersells the steps he is taking in Tender II in bringing the diversity of cooking with fruit into the mainstream, especially for savoury dishes.

You are taken on a tour, chapter by chapter, from apples to white currants via 21 other fruits including one on oddities such as medlars and sloes. Slater's prose is rich and conjures up the qualities of each one to whet your appetite and how it can be used. This general overview that introduces each fruit is an excellent way to understand individual fruits and develop a creative approach to its possibilities in savoury and sweet dishes. Having engaged with the character of each he says a little about cultivating it in a small garden and the varieties he knows. These are not many but it is a great start towards a more discerning approach to the diversity of both flavours and seasonality. The discussion of each fruit in the kitchen leads on to the recipes.

A note in the ‘Introduction’ says that 'Just as savoury dishes made up the bulk of the recipes in Tender Volume I (on vegetables), baking cakes and desserts form the heart and soul of this second volume of Tender' but 'Just as we dipped our toes into the world of beetroot cakes and pumpkin scones’ in the first half, this second part has a host of savoury dishes too. For instance, panfry venison with blueberries, pork with pears and spare ribs with a cooling lime and peach salsa, to name just three.

This sounds promising and is why Tender II is such an important book. It is a step towards bringing fruit into savoury dishes. The note on 'Meat and fruit' opens up the possibilities beyond the tagines and Kashmiri curries on restaurant menus to duck served with damsons, lamb stewed with quinces and quite a few fruit combinations for rabbit, pheasant and partridge. Nigel Slater uses his usual chatty approach and descriptive skills to lead you through the recipe as though he is next to you in the kitchen. The photographs throughout the book are an essay on their own and not the usual glossy shots of dishes with the food stylist to the fore. The recipes speak for themselves. Opening the book at random I find 'Gooseberries with honey and elder flower', ‘Chocolate and chestnut terrine’, ‘Roast guinea fowl with figs’ and much more - a cake of pears, muscovada and maple syrup, a hot-pot of sausages and apples, and a plum tabboulah ….. need I say more?

Tom La Dell.

Tender Volume II: A cook's guide to the fruit garden by Nigel Slater. Fourth Estate, 2010.