Marguerite Patten's Best British Dishes Updated Edition

One of the most important cookbooks of the year comes from a food writer aged 93, who is still flying the flag for simple British home cooking. –Bristol Evening Post

This is a thoroughly practical new cookbook from one of the great stalwarts of British food, and emphasises the importance of good home cooking and economy. –BBC Good Food Magazine

From traditional breakfasts to high teas, Marguerite Patten has put together more than 400 delicious recipes showcasing the great variety of British cooking and produce.

The recipes are straightforward and easy to follow and each section has an introduction explaning things such as which cuts of meat are best for particular dishes and tips on how to get the best out of your baking … you’ll find plenty of mouth-watering dishes. –NFU Countryside

Patten’s recipes are happily uncluttered; she has, after all, had a lifetime in which to refine her thinking about and approach to food preparation and her writing about the processes is in simple and easy to follow prose.

In Marguerite Patten’s Best British Dishes, one of the grand dames of British cookery writing looks back over a career’s worth of recipes from these isles. With few photos, it packs in more than 400 recipes, mostly for tasty old-school fare such as mock turtle soup, bacon-and-egg pie, trout in cider, and cauliflower cheese. Patten’s wise words illuminate proceedings throughout. –Jamie Magazine

Marguerite Patten is the undoubted doyenne of writers about British food and cooking and, in her own quiet way, has been as influential as more sophisticated food writers such as Elizabeth David or Jane Grigson.

In some respects Patten’s Best British Dishes is a distillation of a lifetime’s thinking and writing about the range and variety of British food and, as such, it is an invaluable companion for both the kitchen tyro and old hand.

Patten’s recipes are happily uncluttered; she has, after all, had a lifetime in which to refine her thinking about and approach to food preparation and her writing about the processes is in simple and easy to follow prose.

There are no real surprises here, rather this is a book of tried-and-tested recipes for meals which should satisfy even the most pernickety of eaters and which should tempt into the kitchen even those idiots who proudly boast that they cannot so much as boil an egg. –Peter Burton, 3Sixty Magazine

If you stay long enough on the planet and are as distinguished in your field as Marguerite Patten, you become a national treasure. Ms Patten, author of around 170 cookbooks, presenter of her own cookery show from the late 1940s through the 1950s, winner of the 2007 Woman of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award, has just celebrated her 93rd birthday with the pubpublication of a handsome collection of more than 400 of her favourite recipes. All the classics are here … As you’d expect of a woman who rallied the nation’s cooks in wartime, the recipes are delivered in clear workman-like English with appropriate tasting notes, tips and historical background, and all without recourse to the f-word. Such a relief. Buy it as a Christmas present for all your friends, old and young. –Elisabeth Luard, The Oldie

…some of the dishes that helped put the ‘Great’ before Britain –Cambridge Style

Marguerite Patten is a great British institution and her new collection of best British recipes is set ot become one of her classics … reignite your pleasure in good British cooking. –Townswoman