Book Review: Slow Cooker: Easy and delicious recipes for all seasons

Reviewed by Rebecca Hansen

“Slow cookers have been making a comeback in this era of busy working families and convenience foods of dubious nutritional value. Unpretentious to the extreme (though it is difficult to be pretentious with a slow cooker, they must do terrible things to foie gras), Sally Wise has complied a collection of her own recipes that were specifically developed for use in a slow cooker, using basic ingredients designed to produce easy and tasty results.

She begins the book with a section of general handy hints which includes discussing what size of slow cooker would be appropriate for different situations, details of temperature and how this effects cooking times, tricks to successfully converting standard recipes to slow cooker format and which ingredients are especially effective in enhancing the flavour of slow cooked dishes. Wise’s recipes cover the whole gamut of dishes from soups, dishes with red meat, white meat and seafood, vegetarian dishes and desserts. Some of the recipes feature an interesting anecdote that details their origin. She also includes a handful of recipes from her previous book (A Year in a Bottle), as she often uses these preserves in her slow cooker recipes (a rather startling amount of recipes include Quince Jelly, though she does frequently offer an alternative). The book concludes with a comprehensive index.

The recipes tend towards the comfort food variety, as you’d expect from this cooking medium, with the bulk of them being soups, stews, casseroles and steamed puddings. They would generally fall in the spectrum of being traditionally English cuisine, but  Wise does offer some recipes for curries, though these are of the curry powder, Worcestershire sauce and sultana variety that were a feature of many childhoods (luckily she doesn’t recommend that you serve them in the middle of a ring of rice). She also includes a handful of Italian and North African dishes.

In keeping with the unassuming nature of the recipes, the book itself is a rather stern looking unillustrated paperback, smaller than many recipe books and it therefore sets itself visually apart from most books that tend to prevail in the cookery section of bookstores (no large glossy photos featuring spray painted and varnished food of debatable plasticity here). To be fair there is only so many ways slow cooked fare can look attractive, and Wise doesn’t give the impression she’d be very keen on plastic spray painted food making its way into her work, but sometimes it can be nice to see what you’re making before you make it, if only for the reassurance you haven’t done anything terribly wrong. The book also doesn’t lend itself to flattening while you try to cook from it, I had to wedge it against a pineapple to keep it open when making her (delicious) recipe for Banana Self-Saucing Pudding. It is also printed on suspiciously absorbent looking paper (keep it physically away from the food preparation area, it doesn’t wipe well). There is generally room in the margins to make any notes of personal changes to the recipe, provided that you write small.

Wise caters for all levels of cooking skill, if you are happy to dice and measure, then total novices can easily produce very tasty meals, with the added bonus that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to overcook it, boil it dry or set it on fire. More advanced cooks will breeze through slightly more complicated recipes like the creamy soups or the steamed puddings. Beginner cooks may also appreciate that the recipes turn out fine even with a lack of exact measurements (I realised halfway through the recipe for Savoury Beef that one of my children had hidden all my teaspoons, but the finished product didn’t suffer through the resulting lack of precision). In terms of ease, the recipes also pass the Toddler Test (the ability to prepare food with a small child adhered to your leg). Other slow cooker books often recommend pre cooking some ingredients (onion in particular) or browning the meat before you add it to the cooker, but Wise doesn’t generally recommend this, as it just causes extra time, effort and cleaning, though there are some exceptions. Cooking times might catch out the unwary , I found the recommended 4 hours on High wasn’t enough for the Beef Stroganoff, for example, but usually slow cooking is generally an all day thing so it probably won’t matter.

Slow Cooker: Easy and delicious recipes for all seasons is an ideal book for families who want straight forward and easy to prepare dishes that can be hurled  into the slow cooker in the morning and easily dished up at tea time with a minimum of fuss.”