The Kitchen Bookshelf reviews

Five Quarters - Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome by Rachel Roddy

A constant on my kitchen bookshelf - nestled between Nigellas - is Rachel Roddy’s Five Quarters - Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome. Its pages are so riddled with pencil markings that we keep a pencil actually tucked inside. And it is right up there as the most-cooked-from cookbook in my collection.

The RR backstory in brief goes a little like this: Rachel is from Lancashire in the north of England and tried her hand as an actress, living for London for 7 years. In 2005, fed up with London life (or perhaps London and life), Rachel took a trip to Italy that was to change everything. She arrived as a curious tourist and what she found there was love, a home, and (perhaps most importantly for our cookbook purposes) a kitchen to call home. She also found her voice.