Foodist: Cookbook Reviews

Cultivating the Cook's Garden, From Seed Packet to Sauté Pan

By Theodore James, Jr.

First published in 1983, Theodore James's Cultivating the Cook's Garden has been updated to take into account a few of the changes that have occurred at the American dinner table in the last 15 years. Asparagus beans, for example. These are the yard-long beans favored by cooks of Chinese cuisine. Their nutty, pea-like taste is the give-away that these beans are members of the cow pea family and not true beans at all. But the main point here is that more and more cooks know the product, buy it when available in local markets, but can just as easily grow their own. James tells you how.

Cultivating the Cook's Garden assumes the reader already has some gardening experience. This isn't a book about how to establish a garden, how to create compost, how to weed and water, how to fertilize. None of that. This is as cut-to-the-chase as a gardening book can get. And yet, it has delightful literary merit. What James does have to say about each of the plants in his book is a pleasure to read.

Divided into sections on vegetables, herbs, and berries, the gardener will find detailed planting, cultivation, and cooking information on 48 vegetables from artichokes to tomatoes, 27 herbs and a list of edible flowers from anise seed to thyme, and eight berries including blackberries, currants, gooseberries, and Fraises des Bois.

This is a slim volume, but don't be fooled. It is packed with the pertinent information a kitchen gardener needs to be successful. Cultivating the Cook's Garden is of a size that it will fit neatly into a jacket pocket as you head for the garden. Read it and eat.
Schuyler Ingle ...