The Rosewood Cottage Cookbook

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a country kitchen in the early morning, before the world has properly remembered itself — the range ticking with warmth, the windows filmed with steam, a pot of something unhurried making its gentle promises on the hob. I have lived inside that quiet for the better part of sixty years, and it is from that quiet that every recipe in this book was born. Nothing here arrived from a glossy magazine or a fashionable restaurant; these dishes came from neighbours who pressed handwritten notes into my palm at the garden gate, from my mother's flour-dusted index cards held together with a rubber band gone brittle with age, from failures that taught me more than any success ever could, and from the slow, patient wisdom of simply paying attention to what a thing needs. I have written this book not because I believe my way of cooking is the only way, but because I am frightened, in the honest and ordinary fashion of old women everywhere, that certain things will be forgotten — the smell of a proper beef broth on a February afternoon, the particular satisfaction of a suet pudding turned out onto a cold plate, the knowledge that a tart made with windfalls is always more interesting than one made with perfect fruit. These seventy-two recipes are not grand. They are simply true. I hope you find in them what I have always found in the cooking itself — something that steadies you, something that says, without any fuss at all, that you are home.

I began copying these recipes onto scraps of paper when I was nineteen, standing at my mother's elbow. Most were never measured — a handful of this, a knob of that, until it looked right. For years I feared they would be lost when I was gone. So I sat, season by season, and wrote every one down properly: the soups that carried us through hard winters, the puddings that made ordinary Sundays feel like feast days, the preserves that line my pantry still. This is not a clever book. It is an honest one. Cook from it slowly, and let your kitchen fill with the smell of a house that is loved.

— Agnes