“A teaspoon of honey sweetens and deepens a tisane or stew and adds lustre to a sauce. Sweet tarts, cakes and roasts are burnished by its glow. Syrup-drenched baklava, glazed chicken wings and sticky ribs are made special with a touch on honey”. Spoonfuls of Honey by Hattie Ellis
Hattie Ellis’s introduction to her new book A Spoonful of Honey, is so evocative it will have you digging out that half empty jar of honey from the back of the cupboard and trying some of her recipes.
If you thought a single ingredient book might be a bit one dimensional, this book confounds that. Hattie Ellis knows her stuff, ten years ago she wrote a an award winning book, on the social history of the honey bee called ‘Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee’.
This new book is primarily a recipe book covering both sweet and savoury dishes.I personally love the sweet and savoury combinations like her chorizo with wine and honey and chicken wings with honey and thyme and love the sound of honey roasted roots and blue cheese and honeyed walnuts. There are plenty of puddings, cakes and drinks too.
Well produced and beautifully photographed, it’s more than a recipe book, it’s also a good read with background on producing, buying, storing honey and how to use it in the kitchen. She writes knowledgeably but with a light touch explaining the importance of bees in the natural world which is increasingly under threat and analyses the best honeys from New Zealand’s manuka to Yorkshire heather honey.
With acres of heather moorland on the North York Moors we have some of the best heather honey in the world, for which this book makes a fitting partner.