Tom Parker Bowles

I really enjoyed this book. I learnt so much about tea leaves and the regions that grow tea. It was fascinating. The only thing I would caution is that this isn’t a book about tea in general, it’s specifically about tea in Fortnum & Mason. So many of the tea blends Parker-Bowles talks about are only available in Fortnums. So you really do need to have access to Fortnum tea to fully appreciate this book. Also the recipes included are a little aspirational for the novice cook but there are some easy recipes included as well.… (mehr)

Parker Bowles writes an interesting account of food around England. I was rather taken aback to open the book, however, and see reference to the 'Kingham Plough in Gloucestershire'. Where the first words you read are wrong - this pub in my childhood village is firmly within in Oxfordshire - you expect a certain laziness elsewhere, and I wasn't disappointed in that. Poorly structured, the absence of an index makes relocating information hard. Still, the book was pleasant enough, a heavily anecdotal but pleasing. The recipes are good enough, though I fail to see why you'd want to make a rhubarb and apple crumble except to save on rhubarb. Battered tripe? Mmeh. Perhaps I'll give it a go. Perhaps, though, it's significant that the publisher classifies it as a travel rather than cookery book.… (mehr)

I read the first chapter of Tom Parker Bowles The Year of Eating Dangerously, thenI gave it up. I hardly ever give up books but I do wonder if TPB hadn't been the son of Camilla Parker Bowles who is now married to the future King of England he would he even have got it published. The first chapter was all about fishing for elvers on the Severn Bore - a river with a huge tidal wave - and in 40 pages never came to a climax but introduced large numbers of people by name he met in the pub, on the river, around a campfire, in some other place or perhaps another one or maybe on a motorbike... and it just ended. No climax at all. Just ok, there you are. Next chapter. Yawn.
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