Campari and Cirl Buntings – 3 October 2025

Do you want a book that discusses Campari, Joni Mitchell, Talk Talk, lebkuchen, sweet cicely and quinces and offers recipes for oregano flower focaccia, potato and celeriac boulangère, gooseberry Eton Mess, not to mention herb sugar, harira soup and fig crumble? And all this while walking across the West Country with an enthusiastic dog, picking gorse flowers, listening to the blackbirds and even hearing a cirl bunting? Yes, I thought so.

The things Mark Diacono can do with a broad bean flower are wildly hunger-inducing. And what that man suggests for rhubarb. Well…

How he manages to work Robert Duvall into his musings on the scent of Elaeagnus ebbingei or Camus into a caraway and cranberry flapjack is beyond me but I am absolutely here for it. Turn up his favourite album, Spirit of Eden, as instructed, and settle in for a cornucopia of fantastic essays, recipes, foraging and gardening tips and fizzing cocktails in Abundance.

Abundance is marvellous. Not to be confused with a book of the same name by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson although both in their way are about how we might build a better future, one through making Alexanders ice cream and one through changes to healthcare, housing and energy production.*

Apparently unsated by this profusion of delicious things – how have I not yet mentioned the hazelnut butter? So easy to make. So hard to make it last – I have also been reading Diana Henry’s Around the Table, a collection of essays spanning her career from when she arrived in London to discover a Turkish grocery selling ingredients with which she had never cooked before – orange blossom, barberries, orchid root – through almost three decades of relishing travel, hospitality and really, really good food.

Discussion of late-night salt cravings and her almost religious ecstasy in pasta have convinced me that she and I could be great friends. I’m thinking of inviting her and Sophia Loren round for spaghetti and negronis. The essays are short, fun bursts, much like the addictive pomegranates she writes about rather sensuously.

With thanks to a wise customer for this recommendation, I am hoping to find space on the tasting menu for The Restaurant by William Sitwell, a history of eating out from the Romans to the French Revolution to contemporary gastronomy, and for Matt Buttrick’s Moreish which examines the many factors which determine what and how we eat.

The Restaurant is an extremely beautiful book (no Eton Mess near this one, please), served with a healthy dollop of sharp wit while Moreish manages to explain all the reasons for craving chips when hungover whilst inducing that exact desire.

I first met Matt in the shop when I was eating some dark chocolate buttons. He stole one. Or I offered. Either way, I have learnt from his book the import of sharing food and that I will find a sad film less so if I eat a mugful of buttons first. (Serving suggestion my own.)

Matt has worked in food advertising, including in the delightfully named area of ‘yellow fats.’ Which leads seamlessly to the important discovery of a novel called Cheese by Willem Elsschot. You may know it already, it being published in 1933, but I am afraid that Harry and I only found out about it this week when researching Belgian authors.

A novel about a useless but ambitious clerk whose job is to import Edam despite hating all cheeses and having no idea what to do with the ten thousand red monstrosities once they arrive? Yes, please. I look forward to reporting back.

If you have an aversion to cheese, wait until you sample a dish at The Cave Downwind of the Café. In Mikey Please’s sequel to The Café at the Edge of the Woods, Glumfoot dreams of a better breakfast than the bogey broth his father makes. Then the scent of fresh pastry reaches him from the new log café in the wood. Unfortunately it also reaches an ogre who might consider the chef herself a tasty meal, thus ruining breakfast for young Glumfoot. He must save the day (and chef Rene). I hope you like pickled bat.

In The Wanderdays by Clare Povey, Flo and Joseph treat breakfast with the utmost importance. But the news that their mother, an oceanographer and filmmaker, has gone missing at sea ruins Flo’s usually expert pancake flipping. A reasonable reaction but one is going to need a full stomach to embark on a rescue mission so I do recommend a hearty breakfast for anyone following the siblings and their friends as they untangle a twisting and wild mystery.

I loved the adventure but also the siblings’ relationship and the way Povey shows Joseph’s nerves and fears so sensitively. So, I am delighted that there is a second Wanderdays adventure about sweet treats… The Midnight Sweet Factory. A new sweet shop has opened, the flowing chocolate fountain surrounded by jars full of every lurid confection stacked to a ceiling decorated with candyfloss clouds. When Joseph unravels the wrapper of a tennis ball-sized Gobstopper, he finds a message inside. Somebody needs their help. Sugar cravings notwithstanding, they are off on another adventure.

With such a copious harvest, bowls and shelves overflowing, I seem to have found myself reading Hard Times to balance things out. You don’t need me to tell you how very good it is. Possibly I will anyway. I would enjoy seeing how Bounderby and Gradgrind get on in The Midnight Sweet Factory.

May your weekend overflow with abundant figs and books and Campari and more(ish) books,
Lizzie

*Let’s not get sidetracked by Annie Dillard’s The Abundance. Though actually, with her thoughts on birds taking flight and the fragility of our world… Everything connects.