Photo by Mark Diacono
I’ve been looking forward to this book for ages, with increasing impatience. If, like me, you have a sour tooth, then this is gloriously the book for you. And actually, even if you like your sharps muted, the recipes in Sour (subtitled wisely ‘the magic element that will transform your cooking) will deliciously show you the importance of this flavour-enhancing taste. Sourness can be used to balance and highlight other ingredients; it can also — in the realm of dessert especially — throw things into beautifully weighted relief. The Blackcurrant Yogurt Cake and Sweet and Sour Apricot Upside Down Cake in this book are luscious examples of this, as is, most magnificently, the Sussex Pond Pudding, with the melting fattiness of the wonderful suet crust, and the rich sweetness of sugary butter, perfectly offset by the intense lemoniness.
I love too the uncompromising tang of so many other recipes in these pages, from sourdough, through pickles, salsas and dressings. I crave, in particular, the exquisitely pretty Rhubarb and Radish Salad, Chicory with Red Grapefruit and Avocado, and the Squid with Hot and Sour Dipping Sauce, but it is this Passion Fruit, Grapefruit and Pomegranate Ceviche that is calling my name most melodiously. And I am most definitively not a person given to adding grapefruit to fish in the normal run of things. This book about sourness, sharpness and the pleasures of the tangy has certainly given me zing!
