The National Trust Cookbook

By National Trust

The National Trust has nearly 200 cafes, and in 2014 they served 3.2 million cups of tea, 2.68 million home-made cakes and more than 600,000 soups. In this cookbook, the National Trust share their hugely popular, tried-and-tested dishes so you can cook your favourites at home.

There are over 100 recipes for British seasonal dishes, ranging from classics like Steak and Ale Pie to to newer favourites like Pumpkin Pearl Barley Risotto and Vegetable Tagine. Desserts range from scones (of which the NT sell millions and particularly pride themselves) to Ginger and Satsuma cake and Orange and Poppyseed cake. Many of the recipes use ingredients sourced from the NT's kitchen gardens and farms – and so make the most of the fresh summer peas or autumnal squashes. The book also features recipes that are linked to NT places, such as the hearty beef stew enjoyed by Churchill at Chartwell, Agatha Christie's favourite Lobster Bisque which she ate at Greenway, or the Plum Cake recipe handed down to Beatrix Potter from her mother.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Apr 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781911358015

National Trust

Founded to preserve and provide access to places of natural beauty or historical significance, the National Trust is one of the world’s leading conservation organisations dedicated to preserving Britain’s landscape. From ancient forests to historic houses and gardens, the Trust looks after more than a quarter of a million hectares of land, including over 770 miles of coastline and thousands of archaeological monuments across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Book preview

Introduction

If you’re anything like me, no visit to a National Trust property would be complete without stopping by the café or tea-room to rest the feet and recharge the batteries.

Every year, our visitors tuck into over one hundred thousand plates of sausage and mash, almost seven hundred thousand bowls of homemade soup and well over a million scones, all washed down with almost seven million cups of tea and coffee.

You’ll find some of these dishes in our cafés all-year-round – after all, when is it not the right time to bite into a slice of flapjack? But one of my favourite things about our places is how each season brings something unique to the gardens, estates and houses. This is reflected in our cafés’ changing dishes. After a stroll through a frosty winter garden, I like to warm up with a bowl of our warming rich and creamy roast onion and garlic soup. For fresh spring days, a delicate goat’s cheese tartlet with pickled cucumber. In summer, a slice of green vegetable and mozzarella quiche with a crunchy salad enjoyed from a sunny terrace. Or a satisfying Sissinghurst honey, walnut and cobnut tart to fuel a long ramble through a kaleidoscope of autumn leaves.

These dishes were all developed by us and tried and tested by all our National Trust kitchen teams. They are also simple enough to whip up in your own home – no industrial kitchen equipment or hard-to-find ingredients required. For the first time, we’re bringing together favourite seasonal recipes, including many vegetarian and gluten-free options, in this cookbook, along with some of the best local recipes from our chefs across the country. So now you can whip up a taste of the National Trust in your own home.

I have visited National Trust properties since childhood. We didn’t travel much when I was a kid (my mum and step-dad didn’t drive), but we’d often go on family days out to Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire; it was so close to an industrial area, yet walking through its gates felt like stepping into another world. My grandfather took me on trips to National Trust places further afield and I have cherished memories of long sunny days picnicking by the lake or riding my bike through the woods.

My grandparents also fuelled my interest in food and its provenance. My grandmother never bought anything pre-packaged: everything was made from scratch, whether bread, pastry or ice cream for treats. My grandfather was a keen gardener; he worked with his simple patch to grow vegetables and soft fruit. In spring, I’d pick sticks of rhubarbs to dip into a bag of sugar, my lips soon coated with the sticky granules. In winter, I gathered greens with my grandmother, who insisted that sprouts always taste better after a frost.

So I have a fascination with food and how it works: how the sun completely changes the flavour of a tomato; what does pepper taste like on a strawberry? At school, I was always adapting the recipes we were told to cook. I cooked at home for friends and family and when I left school I went on to catering college. It’s this passion for food and its origins from that led me to work at Clumber Park in 2007. I still lived locally and felt that the Trust’s ethos around food was fantastic: in the busy world we live in, here was an organisation still using raw ingredients and cooking from scratch in their kitchens.

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I loved how we didn’t just receive a delivery of ingredients that could be from anywhere; if possible food was sourced locally or even from Clumber itself. The property has a huge walled garden growing a vast range of fruit and vegetables, and you could pick food from it in the morning and be serving it by the afternoon – just like my grandparents used to do.

Clumber isn’t our only property with a kitchen garden or orchard that supplies food for the café. Others include Attingham Park, in Shropshire, where many of their intriguing crops, such as the long, prickly cucumber, established in the eighteenth century, are used in the Carriage House Café. At Beningborough Hall, in Yorkshire, their home-grown beetroot is made into a moist beetroot cake. Wimpole Estate, Cambridgeshire has a two-hectare (four-and-a-half acre) walled kitchen garden, which grows around fifty types of tomatoes and provides over 450kg of fruit and vegetables for the café each year.

In some cases, our kitchen teams also work with the estate’s tenant farmer, who supplies the café with – often award-winning – produce from the surrounding farmland. For anything beyond their capacity to deliver, we work with local and regional farmers and suppliers who not only provide great-quality ingredients but also share our values around sustainability, animal welfare, looking after the land, and nature. There are inevitably commodities and ingredients which aren’t grown in this country that we have to bring in from further afield, but we make sure these too are sourced and delivered responsibly.

We couldn’t have a National Trust cookbook without including the recipe for our celebrated fruit scone, best served warm from the oven with lashings of strawberry jam and a generous dollop of fresh, clotted cream. Or (to avoid upsetting any Devonians) a thick spread of Devon clotted cream topped with a dollop of strawberry jam! There are also some dishes you might not have come across before. The brioche sausage Wellington, developed by Josh Hopkins at Calke Abbey, is well worth trying and much more interesting than the traditional sausage roll. And you might not expect to see a ‘spiced star anise pork stew’ on the menu at a National Trust café but it’s a delicious, aromatic and warming one-pot combining free-range pork with spices from the far east.

With such a wealth of ingredients and recipes at our fingertips, we wanted our cookbook to celebrate some of the very best recipes from our 200 restaurants and cafés and to tell some of the stories behind them, such as Churchill’s stew from Chartwell, which was always cooked there for Sir Winston on Tuesdays. Or why not try the plum cake made by Beatrix Potter at her Cumbrian home, Hill Top; the recipe is the one she inherited from her maternal grandmother. And on here you’ll find a variation of Agatha Christie’s favourite, crab and lobster bisque, which she enjoyed as a birthday treat at her holiday home, Greenway. We hope that they will inspire you to share a taste of the Trust at home with your friends and family.

PS. I love cooking all the recipes in this book, but if I had to recommend just one for you to try, it’s got to be the Victoria sponge. The quintessential English cake, it’s the perfect balance of everything and yet so simple to make – perhaps that’s why it’s the bestselling cake across the Trust!

Clive Goudercourt

Development Chef,

National Trust

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Spring

Spring is a time of new green shoots, lengthening days and those first few bulbs full of vibrant colour to cheer the soul. Embrace the changing season with lighter meals such as pearl barley, chickpea and goat’s cheese salad or super easy chicken Caesar salad. On the days when the weather is a little unpredictable, enjoy a bowl of vibrant green pea, lettuce and mint soup or try macaroni with tomato ragù all cooked together in just one pot. Welcome in the first of the forced pink rhubarb stems and add to a light posset or to a delicious and comforting traybake with custard.

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Pearl barley, chickpea and goat’s cheese salad

Primrose salad

Goat’s cheese and spinach quiche

Chicken Caesar salad

Curried carrot and tarragon soup

Lentil, chickpea and fresh coriander soup

Pea, lettuce and mint soup

Goat’s cheese tarlets with pickled cucumber

Pearl barley risotto with garden greens

Spiced bean patties

Brioche sausage Wellington

Chicken buknade

Macaroni with tomato ragù

Chicken and leek pie

Honeyed pork casserole

Chicken and spring vegetables one-pot

Steak and kidney one-pot

Steamed rhubarb and ginger sponge puddings

Fruit scones

Rhubarb and custard traybake

Bramley apple and rhubarb crumble

Toffee fudge gateaux

Orange and rhubarb posset

Chocolate brownies

Pearl barley, chickpea and goat’s cheese salad

Packed with healthy grains and pulses, this delicious salad will leave you feeling fuller for longer as the body releases the energy more slowly. The creamy goat’s cheese, mellow balsamic vinegar and crunchy pumpkin seeds create a taste sensation.

Serves 4

Prep 15 minutes

Cook 30 minutes

200g/7oz pearl barley

4 tsp balsamic vinegar

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil or rapeseed oil

400g/14oz can chickpeas, drained, rinsed with cold water and drained again

4 tomatoes, cut into wedges

2 spring onions, thinly sliced

2 tbsp fresh chopped parsley

50g/1¾ oz rocket leaves

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

80g pack salad leaves

125g pack goat’s cheese, diced

40g/1½ oz pumpkin seeds

Add the pearl barley to a medium-sized saucepan of boiling lightly salted water, bring back to the boil then partly cover with a lid and simmer for 30 minutes until the barley is just soft. Drain into a sieve, rinse with cold water and drain again.

Mix the balsamic vinegar and oil in the base of a large bowl. Add the warm barley and drained chickpeas and stir together to mix well in the dressing.

Add the tomatoes, spring onion, parsley and rocket and gently toss the salad together. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Divide the remaining salad leaves between four serving bowls, spoon over the barley mix, sprinkle with the goat’s cheese and pumpkin seeds and serve.

COOK’S TIP You could replace the tomato wedges with oven-roasted cherry tomatoes for an extra kick of flavour.

Primrose salad

Hughenden in Buckinghamshire was Benjamin Disraeli’s home until his death in 1881. Mrs Hilda Leyel claimed in her 1930s book, Green Salads and Fruit Salads, that the primrose salad was Disraeli’s favourite as the pretty leaves were mixed with his favourite springtime flower.

Serves 4

Prep 10 minutes

For the salad

40g/1½ oz lamb’s lettuce leaves

2 little gem lettuces, leaves separated

2 small chicories, leaves separated

Inside leaves from a head of celery

A few primrose flowers and tiny leaves

For the dressing

A few strands of saffron or pinch of saffron powder

1 tsp hot water

2 tsp cider vinegar

4 tbsp light olive oil

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Little finely chopped chervil or chopped parsley

Rinse the lamb’s lettuce, lettuce, chicory and celery leaves with cold water to remove any dirt, drain well and pat dry with a clean teacloth. Arrange in a salad bowl and sprinkle with the primrose flowers and leaves.

To make the dressing, add the saffron to a small bowl, pour over the hot water and leave for a few minutes to soak. Add the vinegar and oil, season with salt and pepper then fork together until well mixed. Stir in the chopped chervil or parsley, drizzle over the salad leaves and serve immediately. Alternatively, put the dressing in a jug and allow your guests to serve themselves.

COOK’S TIP Pansies, tiny viola flowers or torn lavender petals also look pretty. Use lavender sparingly as it is very perfumed. Vibrant coloured nasturtium flowers with a few of their tiny peppery leaves can also be scattered over a salad, or you might like to add a few tiny chive flowers with a little chopped chive stems or delicate thyme flowers.

Goat’s cheese and spinach quiche

The filling of potato, apple and creamy goat’s cheese in this quiche means that it is packed with flavour.

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Cuts into 8

Prep 30 minutes, plus chilling

Cook 50–55 minutes

Pastry

225g/8oz plain flour

Pinch salt

½ tsp dried mixed herbs

115g/4oz butter, diced

50g/1¾ oz cheddar cheese, grated

1 egg, beaten

1–2 tbsp milk

Filling

200g/7oz potatoes, diced

1 tbsp vegetable oil

140g/5oz onions, thinly sliced

1 garlic clove, finely chopped

85g/3oz frozen spinach, defrosted

2 tbsp fresh chopped parsley

1 tbsp fresh chopped sage

1 tsp balsamic vinegar

½ Granny Smith or ½ small

Bramley apple, peeled, cored and diced

125g pack goat’s cheese, diced

125ml/4fl oz double cream

100ml/3½ fl oz milk

4 eggs

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

To make the pastry case, add the flour, salt, herbs and butter to a bowl or electric mixer and rub in until the mixture looks like fine crumbs. Stir in the cheese then mix in the egg and enough milk to make a smooth, soft dough.

Lightly knead the pastry then roll out on a lightly floured surface until a little larger than a 23cm/9in buttered loose-bottomed fluted tart tin. Lift the pastry over a rolling pin and press into the tin. Trim the top of the pastry a little above the top of the tin, to allow for shrinkage, prick the base with a fork then chill for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/gas mark 5. Line the tart case with a circle of non-stick baking paper and baking beans then bake for 10 minutes. Remove the paper and beans and cook for 5 more minutes until the base is