Summer's Lease- How to Cook Without Heat- Thom Eagle

Like his previous book, First Catch, this one is about food but is not a recipe book. He won the Fortnum and Mason debut food book award in 2019 for the previous title. In this one he considers summer cooking . . . and how to cook without heat.

This isn’t an excuse for 1001 recipes for a green salad but rather Eagle considers all the methods of food preparation which don’t involve flame, oven or hob. He breaks the book down into methods; the first deals with ‘breaking’ and concentrates on how breaking down the original structure of the key ingredient can constitute a means of cooking: a smashed cucumber recipe and raw steak dish. Further chapters include those on salting and souring before a final chapter on ageing food in order to ‘cook’ it.