Book review: Turnips’ Edible Almanac

We usually turn down cookbooks written by suppliers but have made an exception for fruit and vegetable specialist Turnips because its effort is a genuinely useful tool for chefs (it’s not vanity publishing either, the book is published by DK). Turnips’ Edible Almanac is a comprehensive guide to seasonality intermixed with recipes and anecdotes sourced from some of the best in the business.

The author of the book is Fred Foster, a fourth-generation costermonger and co-director of Turnips, which operates a stall in Borough Market and supplies some of London’s best restaurants (it also runs its own restaurant, which is also in Borough Market). 

The book is divided into 52 chapters for each week of the year. There’s also a handy at-a-glance section at the beginning and end of the book that simply lists which ingredients typically arrive in which month, from Landes kiwis to Puglian violet baby artichokes. Each chapter is focused on a single ingredient and comprises an impressively detailed mini essay and a recipe or two.

The bulk of the recipes have been penned by Turnips Restaurant chef patron Tomas Lidakevicius, who Foster describes as Lithuania’s answer to Eminem (presumably on account of them having a similar haircut, but who knows). Other contributors include Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, the Galvin Brothers and the late Jennifer Paterson of The Two Fat Ladies fame.

While ambitious chefs might not be too interested in Oliver’s recipe for banoffee pie, they will be interested in Foster’s insights into the fruit and vegetable business. This is a man that knows his stuff, having supplied top-end produce to restaurants for over 30 years.

He's particularly good at appreciating and articulating the difference between produce that's simply 'fine' and the really good stuff: "If you've never eaten a lychee from grown in Réunion (an island in the Indian Ocean) prepare to be blown away, especially if you think you don't like them". Foster’s accounts of supplying some of the UK’s most exacting chefs are also worth a read - there’s a particularly good one about what went into Nico Ladenis’ famed peach Melba.