Nourish Me Home – Cortney Burns

This is quite possibly the most creative cookbook that I’ve ever seen…but also one that I really can’t see myself using very often.

Nourish Me Home is centered around the seasons and the elements (water, fire, air and earth). Sustainability and unique eats.

The book begins with casting a circle, a bit about the author’s journey into cooking and what supplies she uses for her recipes.

And from there we leap into a world of wild, weird and sometimes wacky recipes.

Chapter 1 is about filling the pot – so soups, chowders and the like. There’s a handful of recipes that I recognize like Baked Beans and Five Spice Chicken Soup.

And there’s a fair amount that have me tilting my head – like summer bean soup with tomato brown butter, spring chowder with peas and clams and fermented carrot borscht.

Chapter 2 is about weaving roots – so items like summer squash salad, buttermilk bagna cauda, horsradish gremolata, or beaver tail mushrooms with bone marrow.

Chapter 3 is Of Feathers, Scales and Fur (so lots of meat recipes) – with salt-baked fish, oil-poached fish and a few more unique items like grilled maple eggs or orange eggs with pumpkin, kale and saffron.

Chapter 4 is the Larder – so that will be fermenting and pickling. There’s a lot of differently fermented items like clam kimchi, preserved lemons, dilly green beans and so, so many more.

Chapter 5 is the sweet stuff (Weaving Maple into Silk) – with chocolate & fir tip cookies, black seasame date, silver dollar corn cakes and fruit leathers.

And the last chapter is about Imagination and Alchemy – so tinctures, elixirs and syrup.

Overall, I feel like this was a solidly interesting cookbook.

So one thing that I loved about the cookbook is the sheer uniqueness of the recipes.

At this point I’m pretty used to the culinary staples in various cookbooks but this one challenged all those expectations. It was a lot of fun to see what the author came up with and what combinations of food would appear next.

I also loved that the author created seasonal swaps – i.e. for the spring chowder with peas and clams, you can swap Brussel sprouts/turnips for winter or wild mushrooms in autumn.

I love the idea of having a cookbook with all kinds of readily-prepared swaps for the foods in season.

However, I feel like this cookbook isn’t very assessible. Nearly ever recipe required niche ingredients, long preparation times and would really not be something I could see myself making without having a full day prep available.