The Rosewood Cottage Cookbook

A Word Before We Begin

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.

— Agnes