For an ever-growing army of admirers, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall can do no wrong. The River Cottage Year seems sure to follow the commercial and critical success of his previous book, The River Cottage Cookbook, which was something of a publishing phenomenon, selling by the bucket-load and winning every major cookery book award.

The format of this new book is intriguingly different: this time we are given (in chronological order) the author's insights and observations on life and food as the seasons and months go past, interweaving cookery with the cycles of the natural year. These sections aren't all the book has to offer: the new volume is crammed with 100 original seasonal recipes, all beautifully detailed. Of course, we may look at the results of these mouthwatering delights in the new Channel 4 series that accompanies this book and lament how we're not quite in the same cookery league. But Fearnley-Whittingstall has a gift not possessed by some of his rivals: we are always made to feel that the delights offered here are within our grasp, provided we follow the helpful advice we are given.

The food is a mixture of the ambitious and the achievable, and looking through The River Cottage Year is a blissful experience, whether your intention is simply to dream about dishes or to actually get down to the nitty-gritty of making them. The illustrations are as tempting as anything in the text, and the book will unquestionably raise the author's profile still higher.

--Barry Forshaw

2007-12-01 Informative, easy reading and educational.

Buy this book with the intention of becoming more seasonally aware of our uk produce, or simply for inspiration in great seasonal recipies. I'm not going to bang on like others have re. the politics of this book, ulitmatley, the recipies are
(a) VERY easy reading/following
(b) Eye opening (who'd honestly have thought that roast cod's head could look as mouth watering as it does in his book)
(c) Clean, fresh, "Un-pimped" every day food!
One particular massively favourite in my family has been Decembers, Chocolate & Chestnut Cake. I urge you, while chestnuts are in the supermarkets fresh, and its that comfort food time of year, buy this book for that recipe alone. It is jaw droppingly simple but devistatingly delicious. One tip, you need to roast off approx 500g uncooked weight, to get the 250g of chestnuts you need, but the end result is SO worth the peeling, HONESTLY!