The women share their recipes for chutneys, pickles, sauces, relishes, jams, jellies, marmalades, cordials, pestos, salads, soups, cakes, slices, loaves and tarts, as well as tips about how to tell if jam is set and how to grow vegetables and fruit.
It's a book that will be enormously useful if you have a garden, a fruit tree, or access to fruit and vegetables and don't already have an old favourite book on preserving.
Rather than family favourites as in the New Zealand book, this includes some less usual recipes such as green tomato jam, pomelo, lemon grass and kaffir lime marmalade, pomegranate molasses, green papaya relish, and mango chutney, made from things that don't grow so well here, along with old favourites such as branston pickle, chowchow, and fruit mince.
It, too, offers many tips.
The former cafe owner and chef gives a mouthwatering array of recipes. She divides them in to chocolate, syrup-drenched, spicy, cheesecakes, gluten-free, slab cakes cut in squares for everyday, rolls, little cakes (with more flavour than cupcakes, she says) and cakes for celebrations, and also gives lots of tips and suggestions, including how to vary recipes.
Some that I found particularly enticing were a traditional Easter simnel cake, a fruitcake with home-made marzipan filling, topping and decorations, a yoghurt cake drenched in a passionfruit syrup, a nutmeg cake topped with coconut, an Arabian date cake, and double ginger gingerbread. I can feel a cake or two coming on.
