The River Cottage Fish Book

This is a huge book and tells you all you will ever need to know about choosing, preparing and cooking fish and shellfish. There is everything from killing and dressing crabs and lobsters to killing and filleting line caught fish. There is a section on different types of fish and their various merits and of course there are lots and lots of excellent recipes. I bought this 2nd hand and it was a snip.

Oh, Mr H. F-W - please come and live with me. This book is so wonderful. Lots of recipes, but so much more than recipes. A book that gave me a healthy appreciation of fish and how to enjoy catching a cooking them. Thank you!

Excellent and all embracing: from how to catch (or purchase), kill and cook your fish!

This book will open your mind to the wonders of fish.The book starts with a detailed section on how to prepare all the seafood that is in the book, from gutting and filleting a fish to dressing a crab.The passion that Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall and Nick Fisher have for fish is then shown through the wonderful recipes that are offered for every type of fish and shell fish. Each recipe is straight-forward and the number of ingredients never becomes unmanageable.Of course, with his River Cottage hat on nothing is left to waste so there is even a section on how to cook the off-cuts and left-overs from your main meals.After the extensive recipies section there is a wealth of knowledge on each fish and mention of a sustainability rating, e.g. whether you should really be buying the fish in question or not. It really does make you aware of what can be considered ethical and sustainable when eating fish.A truly wonderful guide to fish that will make you aware of what and when to buy.

I looked around before I bought this book - I wanted something that had a lot more to it than the fish sections of general cook books, and I really wanted the sections on choosing fish and basic tchniques.As you can see from the other reviews, it fits the bill very wellHowever, I mark it down one star because using it as a cook book is actually quite difficult because of the lack of a proper cross-referenced index showing fish types and recipes. What they do is give you a load of recipes, which are listed under the name of a single fish, but may recommend up to about half a dozen other fish that will work.Suppose you have a beautiful grey mullet. You look it up in the index and find pretty much zilch. So you turn to grey mullet in the fish directory and hidden in the grey box in the margin are some page numbers which contain recipes suitable for using with grey mullet - but no clue whatsoever as to what any of those recipes might be. So you have to turn to each one in turn to discover what they are. By the time you have done this you've spent half an hour finding out that the recipe you fancy needs an ingredient you don't have and the corner shop closed 10 minutes ago.Wouldn't have been easier just to list in the index all the recipes under the fish to which they can apply ? And entries for fish steaks and fish fillets while you were at it guys - not all of us cook for 6 all the time, and those of us in small households tend to buy our fish dismantled (PS if you read this guys, look at Rose Elliot's Bean Book for an example of an almost perfect ingredient-led index).