Many people are unfamiliar with the rough and ready approach of a true Cumbrian country man. If that is the case W.M.W. Fowlers Countryman’s Cooking would better be described as tales from a no nonsense kitchen, or better still food without fuss. If your kitchen is more accustomed to mess than shipshape military precision then this book will read like a welcome homecoming. However, if you are the type who meticulously works away at creating painstaking culinary masterpieces then this is also the book for you. It may just feel like a breath of fresh country air to find good food is just as successfully achieved with Tin Snips and the hinge of a door than a Moulin and a Kitchen Torch.

From roast pheasant to ‘tatie’ pot each recipe, as rich in anecdotal detail as they are in flavor, arrive just as welcome to the country dwellers taste for the rustic as it does the world-weary appetite of any a time served urbanite. Fowlers red blooded rural technique meant that his kitchen was not the place for those afraid of hands on dirty cook work, plucking pheasants and skinning mutton are not jobs for the feint of heart. He himself states in his introduction that.


Although I’d hasten to add it is also a book for women with a touch of the country about them. It is also a book written by a man with a real passion for country life, a man who appears to like nothing better than shooting, fishing, cooking and womanizing, and although not all of these are the pursuits of modern men they do in this instance seem to be the corner stone to good hearty cuisine.

His awfully politically incorrect world view and earthy matter of fact descriptions are so unfashionably contrary to the taste of the times even just reading the book, with out trying the recipes, feels like taking a long weekend break in the country. He obviously has clear, yet perhaps unfair, views of the mental agility of the fairer sex; however his macho dealings of issues such as making a rabbit pie do require a feminine touch,


He explains how he would cajole a local lady to prepare his pie case for him. As he got to grips with the frying of the rabbit, simmering afterward in beer or cider, his “glamorous pastry-maker” would get on with the girly stuff, or perhaps the more delicate aspects of rabbit pie craft.

Fowlers frequent asides which punctuate his to-the-point instruction come as friendly warnings against mistakes he himself perhaps had made,


You can picture Fowler returning the bird to an oven which has gone cold and assume that Bill’s kitchen was not only one of colorful flavors and aromas but also of colorful language. The book is flowing with not only the pungent odor of bona fide country cooking but also a genuine whiff of the life and times of a country man. It is a unique look into the life of a somewhat unconventional, yet wholly unassuming fellow with a flair for uncomplicated cookery, all of which (garnishes and trimmings aside) leave the reader salivating and indeed eager to try out roast pheasant or beef and dumplings.

This posthumous best seller, not nationally realised until a good forty years after Fowlers death in 1977, was the only book written by the man, and after its apparent failure at the time of its first publication in 1965 it has now been flying off book store shelves all over the country encouraging anyone tired of slaving over soufflé to try a little hare with lemon juice. On the other hand if the idea of true country cooking still doesn’t leave you running for the nearest local butcher in search of mutton and oxtail there are also recipes for lobster and salmon stakes for those whose palette is still not ready for the delights of stuffed heart baked in dripping and served "very hot".