About this kitchen

This is a kitchen for old recipes — the ones written down before anyone was in a hurry, when a cake took three weeks and an oven had no dial on it.

Most old recipes are close to unusable as they’re written. They assume you know what a moderate oven means, that you can judge butter by the size of an egg, and that you have a cold pantry rather than a fridge. So they get skipped, and the cooking that went with them gets lost — which is a shame, because a great deal of it was very good.

The work here is putting them back into a form you can actually cook from, without flattening what made them interesting in the first place.

How every recipe is written

Four parts, every time. A headnote about where it came from and what it was for. The recipe itself. The historical context — which is usually the bit that explains why it’s made that way at all. And a modern kitchen note, so it works in a present-day oven with present-day ingredients and nothing is left to guesswork.

The history isn’t decoration. Fruit went into a cake weeks early because it had to keep. Puddings were steamed because ovens were unreliable and fuel was expensive. Once you know that, the recipe stops looking eccentric and starts making sense.

The books

The Green Gables Kitchen Companion is out now, in its second edition. Forty-seven recipes drawn from the world of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and the working Prince Edward Island farmhouses it was written about — arranged across spring, summer, autumn and winter, because that’s how the cooking actually happened.

Christmas at Green Gables is in progress. A whole book for a single day: the black fruitcake started in November, the tins filled for the Christmas concert, the taffy pull that got out of hand, and the preserves wrapped as gifts by a household with nothing to spend.

After those, more of the same sort — seasonal, illustrated, and rooted in a particular place and time rather than in general nostalgia. Anything new is announced to the mailing list first.

Who’s behind it

The Cottage Kitchen Table is the recipe side of Guava Tree Press, a small independent publisher. Small in the literal sense — there’s no test kitchen and no team, just a lot of reading of old cookbooks and a fair amount of time spent working out what “a quick oven” meant to someone who never owned a thermometer.

I’d rather the recipes spoke for themselves than write you a biography, so that’s the whole of it. If something here doesn’t work, or you know more about it than I do, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

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Write to [email protected]. I read everything, though I don’t always answer quickly.