If you can’t stand the heat…

Put down the pans and discover how to serve up dinner by salting and souring instead

XANTHE CLAY

ummer cooking is a conundrum. Simmering pans turn the kitchen into a sauna, and switching on the oven feels like asking for the Seventh Circle of Hell to be re-enacted at home – especially galling if you are the only one sweating over the stove while everyone else lounges in the sun.

A new book by Thom Eagle, former head chef at Little Duck Picklery in east London, tackles the paradox by exploring the idea of cooking without heat.

Yes, that can mean salad, but as Eagle points out, there are plenty of other ways to transform ingredients without reaching for a pan.

Summer’s Lease (Quadrille, £16.99) isn’t a recipe book, and there are no photographs. It is more a collection of musings on ingredients, flavours and techniques, peppered with classical allusions and snippets of food history. It is closer in spirit to a volume by Elizabeth David or Patience Gray than a Jamie Oliver kitchen manual, and perhaps better read in a hammock with a glass of rosé in hand than at the kitchen table.

Nonetheless, the recipes, when you stumble across them, are worth dashing back into the kitchen to make.

I had a meal this week of torn greengages and apricots with herbs and mozzarella, soaked in their own juices and glowing with green olive oil. Alongside were slivers of quick cured lamb and broad bean pesto, as well as vivid yellow yogurt-pickled nectarines with translucent slices of delicately salted cod, and a feisty, chilli-speckled smashed cucumber salad.

It was a riot of colour and flavour, a summer supper par excellence, and the sort of food that made me think of holiday dinners after trips to sunsoaked Italian markets.

The recipes are not entirely heat-free – that clutch of nectarines is skinned after immersion in a pan of bubbling water, and in another recipe, cabbage is pickled in boiling spiced vinegar. But nothing is cooked in the conventional sense, with a searing pan, a slow simmer or a hot oven.

All of these would soften the texture of raw foods, develop and meld flavours, and improve digestibility, so Eagle turns to a quartet of techniques to do the job instead: breaking, salting, souring and ageing.

In this way, he writes, ingredients “have not been transformed by heat – but that is not to say they are untransformed”.