The British Larder Suffolk team visited the Hand and Flowers in Marlow a couple of months ago. It was a very special and memorable visit and Tom and his team looked after us very well. Amongst all the special and delicious plates of food, the memory of the delicious and very tasty soda bread has stayed with me.

I was inspired to bake my own version of soda bread. It took a few attempts to get it right, or shall I say, the way I would like it to be. I used a local spelt flour mixed with wholemeal bread flour, and a teaspoon of honey gives the soda bread a rounded, moreish and lasting flavour. I add pumpkin and sunflower seeds for extra crunch to make it more interesting and give the bread another taste dimension too. The crust is superb; bake the bread at a fairly high temperature and the crust will be crisp and the interior fluffy and delicious, exactly as you would expect it to be.

I now regularly bake this bread as I do find it very satisfying, and the best bit of all is that it’s incredibly quick to make. You can have a loaf of freshly baked soda bread on the table in just over an hour and you’re guaranteed to have the best smelling kitchen in the world!

All credit for this recipe goes to Ross. We change our set lunch menu each week and a few weeks ago Ross had left planning a vegetarian starter till the morning, he is quite good with leaving things to the last minute to my despair. After discovering he had not ordered special ingredients for his special he had to go and ‘forage’ in the fridge for something to use for his dish. He found puff pastry trimmings, a few pears and boulangere potato trimmings from the main course section and goats cheese. He came smug as a cat that found the cream into the kitchen and I laughed at him asking what he think he’s going to achieve with his findings. Still smug he shrug his shoulders at me with no word and set to work. I thought to myself he has go his wok cut out but soon to have found to ‘eat my words’ when he pulled this one out of the bag.

The puff pastry potato, cheese and onion pie smells absolutely delicious when he pulled it out of the oven. He made one big one and then cut it into slices and served it with more crumbed goats cheese, crushed roasted walnuts, shavings of fresh pears and dressed salad leaves. It not only make a perfect starter but is equally suited for a main course or even a light lunch.

I feel like a bit of a fraud making a meringue mess, as I feel it’s easy to make and I am concerned that our customers think I am cheating by making something that is so simple, hence, I am adding a few layers of complication to the recipe to ensure that I earn my keep and reputation of being a hard-working chef!

Our famous brown sugar meringue messes take on various different flavours and guises as the seasons evolve. We start the year off with poached rhubarb, then move onto strawberry, followed by gooseberry, then cinnamon-baked damsons or Victoria plums during the autumn, and then back to rhubarb in early January. At the British Larder there is a Meringue Mess for all seasons!

I make the meringues with half soft dark brown sugar and half caster sugar. The brown sugar reduces the level of sweetness and gives the meringues an almost caramelised taste, definitely a winner with us. This recipe makes more meringues than is needed for the messes, but try serving the remaining brown sugar meringues with coffee, which is equally as good. They will remain crisp for up to 1 week if kept in an airtight container in a cool, dry cupboard.

You can use either forced rhubarb or outdoor rhubarb for this recipe, but the colour of the pink forced rhubarb will be prettier.

We are lucky enough to have plenty of good butchers to choose from in our area, we buy our sausages from Five Winds Farm, and I believe their spicy British-made chorizo-style sausages are delicious and the best we can buy in the local area. They are packed full of flavour with an ever so slightly mild spiciness which makes them the perfect ingredient to use in recipes such as this one and also in my very popular Mushroom and English Chorizo Minestrone Soup.

Gurnard is a rather peculiar-looking fish, for me it’s quite pretty, but others describe it as an ugly fish. It’s got a large head with large wing-type fins that help it to stay upright when feeding at the bottom of the seabed. Red gurnard is regularly available in the British waters around our coasts and it’s easy to come by. It’s a fairly bony fish with a firm flesh, that is quite bland, but when cooked with the spicy chorizo-style sausages, it’s delicious and the combination works very well together. Gurnard is fairly inexpensive, which makes this dish a perfect mid-week supper recipe.

If you are super-organised, then cook the Puy lentils and sausages a day in advance and keep them refrigerated until needed. Make sure when reheating the sausages and lentils that the mixture is roasting hot before serving. Enjoy!

I have borrowed Mum’s combination of spices with the squash, but instead of cinnamon and nutmeg, I have used another one of my favourites and that is ras el hanout, which also contains these spices in the blend. It has a slight spiciness that works perfectly with the chickpeas in my version of falafels.

I like falafels and have made many versions with roasted puréed vegetables added to the ground chickpea base, to add interest and flavour, but the idea of deep-frying them has always put me off a bit. By baking them in the oven you still get a crispy outside, not as crisp and crunchy as if they had been deep-fried, but it’s definitely worth the sacrifice as they’re far healthier and in my opinion the flavour is saved.

This recipe is ideal for a starter or light lunch.

The fresh apple, crispy bacon and soft pâté-like texture of the rillettes, plus the silky softness of the smoked eel, all work beautifully together in this recipe. Do not overdo the smoked eel as it could easily overpower the dish and it’s also pricy. You don’t really need that much either.

We have a wonderful smokehouse situated 9 miles from us here in Suffolk, called Pinney’s of Orford. Their award wining oak smoked wild English silver eels are delicious and perfect used in small quantities in a salad such as this one.

Situated in the heart of Suffolk, we are spoilt for choice, as pork farmers in our county are well known for producing some of the country’s finest pork. We love them all and we can vouch first hand for the top quality and taste. We are also in the heartland where fantastic vegetables are grown and our surrounding landscape seems to be one giant kitchen garden!

These baby parsnips are beauties and their taste is superb at this time of the year. We prefer roasting them quickly with skin and all in a hot oven with a drizzle of honey and a helping of good butter.

I love autumn and winter for the range of colours that Mother Nature displays, and for the peacefulness around us, with everything going to rest for a few months, but consequently, the seasonal produce available at this time of year is a bit more limited. I like British apples and pears as the varieties are numerous and there are lots to choose from. We get our apples and pears from High House Farm, where Piers and Suvie endlessly and painstakingly look after their fruits. We also get fantastic outdoor rhubarb and cherries from them.

For this recipe, I used Discovery apples at the beginning of the season, and now I’m using Cox’s Orange Pippin apples. I prefer an apple with a reasonable sweet and sour balance and I think these two varieties are perfect.

At this time of the year, we have an abundance of chestnuts and walnuts, along with pears, quinces and apples, all of which we squirreled away at the end of autumn going into winter. These ingredients will not last long but whilst available can be used to create some delicious and warming recipes.

I am a sucker for a good tart, savoury or sweet, and when the pastry is homemade, it’s even better. I recently made a large batch of my rough puff pastry, a recipe I am very fond of as it’s a success every time. First, I made my sweet fine pear tart for our weekly lunch menu, and then the following week as there was still plenty of the pastry leftover (which I had kept in the freezer), we felt it was time for a savoury number. Keeping the pastry in the freezer is brilliant as it remains as good as when you first made it and it’s very handy to have some as a back up for when you need a tart in a hurry.

There is something both very satisfying and gratifying about making your own pastry, in fact, I think that a good cook is defined by the quality of their homemade pastry – perhaps a bold statement but nevertheless one to think about. My keys to success for a flaky and very puffy rough puff is that all the ingredients must be very cold, you must work quickly, do not knead the pastry and follow the rolling process meticulously, and success should be guaranteed every time.

These tarts are rustic, not pretentious, and they are very gutsy in taste indeed. If you are going to do it properly, do it with meaning, I say! I have chosen a Norfolk-made blue cheese, called Binham Blue, made by Mrs. Temple, and it’s a punchy blue cheese with perfect acidity and creamy ratios. I like it to such an extent that I class this as one of my all time favourite blues. It’s from our region and simply feels right, but do find your own favourite local blue cheese for this recipe, if you like.

With the really chilly weather, hearty and punchy flavours are needed to keep the cold at bay. The combination of blue cheese, walnuts and pears is a classic, but I do not mind classics as they taste good together and work very well for me.

Holding the final product in my hands, I feel both honoured and humbled to have been given such a wonderful opportunity and I hope you grow to love it as much as I do.

After all this time, I still can’t quite believe that we have finally produced a cookbook and I can still remember my first conversation with Jon Croft, Publisher and Managing Director of Absolute Press (an Imprint of Bloomsbury), as if it were yesterday.

It was 4:30pm on a bright clear May afternoon. I had just finished my staff lunch, when the phone rang. It was Jon. He asked whether I would consider writing a cookbook. When I responded that I had recently declined such an offer because I had felt that the other publisher was not quite right for me, Jon turned on the charm… and the sales pitch.

Well, as they say, the rest is history.  Here we are with the book completed and launched in all its 448-page glory. I am very aware that I could not have done this on my own and I am grateful that I was supported by such an amazing group of people on my journey.

Looking back, I realise how incredibly lucky I am to have had Jon and Absolute Press, as my publisher. I couldn’t have chosen a more understanding or perceptive company when it came to interpreting my passion for food and cooking and I’m so proud and fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with them.

As the art director, Matt Inwood had the difficult job of taking my words and images and making them fit together. Not an easy task and we had many awkward and tricky conversions. One of my main weaknesses was that I found it extremely difficult cutting down my recipes. As a chef, I can only compare it to the feeling of what it must be like to have to choose between ones children. In the end, I managed the process of limitation by justifying to myself why each recipe featured in this book, deserved its space on the page. In addition, my photography was by no means professional and it was purely due to Matt’s patience and tenacity that the book has ended up coming together so well.

In fact, that reminds me that the images themselves represented a drama of their own, which I’ll share with you. In September 2011, we had an unexpected power surge and my Mac and external hard drive, failed.  When I thought that I had lost all 24,000 images, I cried like a baby. At the time, I truly felt that my life was not worth living. It was and probably still is, the most stressful experience I had ever had. I was very close to having a nervous breakdown. We had just signed the contact with Jon and I didn’t know what to do – even the experts at Apple couldn’t retrieve the data. Luckily for me, Tim and Andy from Bruizer, a local film production company and good friends of ours, helped out; they pulled a few strings and talked to the right people. The hard drive made a U-turn at the University of Manchester and after 3 months of agony, Tim was finally the bearer of good news… and all 24,000 images!

We can now all have a laugh about it, but I think the experience certainly aged me. In fact every time I see the image of ‘the Rabbit’, I recall how I felt at the time. It was the one image that was burnt onto my mind; I knew that if we found that image, we would have found them all.

Two other troopers, who played a major role in the writing of this book, are Anne Sheasby and Imogen Fortes.  These two ladies had the task of editing every single word I wrote. And I mean EVERY word. I can’t count the number of e-mails we exchanged nor the amount of hours we spent in front of the computer, but when I consider what we have produced and when I read what I have written, I know every second was worth it. I have no regrets! Looking at this book through the eyes of both an author and a chef, I’m happy to say that I would not change a single thing.

And last but not least…the cover, which was designed by Claire Siggery, a very talented graphic designer from Bristol. In fact, it was the one episode in the whole process that I found truly bizarre.  I had had no input with the design of the cover and was waiting in anticipation for what it would look like. I think in hindsight, that I was hoping to find some fault with it.  But, when it finally arrived, I was gob smacked.  I could not fault it at all. That Matt had commissioned a cover such as this, finally demonstrated to me how well Matt had come to understand me as a person and how well he had grasped me as a chef and author. I felt truly grateful and can only thank whoever it was, whether Matt Inwood or Jon Croft, who had the great vision in bringing something as beautiful as this cookbook, to life.

But… this book is not a coffee table book.

No.

It’s a cookbook that has the desire to be used; used as a reference book every day of the week and every week of the month…I hope that in reading my book, you are inspired to buy local, cook seasonal and enjoy eating the fruits of your labour.

Lots of Love

Maddy xx

A signed copy available from our shop at £30 +£5 for postage UK only (For outside UK please contact me via info@britishlarder.co.uk)