Smoked food book shoot at Botelet Farm, Cornwall

I well remember my days as a young man when money was short, spending hours under the bonnet of whichever banger I was trying to keep on the road at the time. A constant companion was my trusty Haynes Manual, the car tinkerers’ bible and a must have for any DIY mechanic in the days before mass computerisation!

Until recently I assumed that Haynes only did car manuals. How wrong could I be? It appears that they now cover just about every subject under the sun from Caravanning & Camping to Cooking. So, I wasn’t too surprised to be approached to shoot a cookbook with Cornwall based chef James Strawbridge for his publisher.

The subject is Smoked Food: A Manual for Home Smoking and most of the images were made at the beautiful Botelet Farm, upstream from Fowey and Lostwithiel, home of the Tamblyn family for the last 150 years. Richard and Tia made James and I very welcome and were perfect hosts while we took over much of the ground floor and several outside areas.

Barbecues and smokers were set up in various locations and never-ending amounts of meat, fish, vegetable and game were cooked, smoked and cured, some even placed directly in a fire while I snapped my way through about 10,000 frames in seven days. All the time Richard kept the coffee coming and with Tia and a few other helpers made sure that all the food was tasted!

The book is now available from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smoked-Food-Manual-Smoking-Manuals/dp/1785212176/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1553256448&sr=8-4&keywords=smoked+food