The Rosewood Cottage Cookbook

This little book began not as a book at all, but as a collection of flour-dusted index cards stuffed into a blue tin that once held violet creams, a tin I have carried with me through four house moves, two decades of village fêtes, and more Sunday lunches than memory can honestly count. It is a book about cooking the way my mother cooked, and her mother before her — without theatre, without fuss, with a great deal of butter and an even greater deal of patience. If you come to these pages looking for novelty, I am afraid I shall disappoint you. But if you come hungry for something you cannot quite name, something that tastes of an autumn evening or a wet Tuesday made bearable by a pot on the stove, then pull up a chair and we shall get along very well indeed. ---

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