Amy Colter’s The Secret Garden Cookbook (1999)

Colter’s The Secret Garden Cookbook is mainly a collection of high calory, sugary and fatty foods. She starts with Burnet’s essential food path and never wanders far off. “You can trifle with your breakfast and seem to disdain your dinner,” Burnet writes, “if you are full to the brim with roasted eggs and potatoes and richly frothed new milk and oatcakes and buns and heather honey and clotted cream.”

Roasted Potatoes and Eggs

Improvising an oven wouldn’t have been a difficult thing for Dickon to do, as he was a handy child and may have watched his mother cook in an open hearth in their cottage. 

For the contemporary cook, an oven can be created in a fireplace or charcoal grill. The results are the same, and you will feel the sense of wonder, as Mary and Colin did, when you picnic on this delicious smoky-flavored food.

Ingredients 

4 eggs
4 medium new potatoes, scrubbed and cut into quarters
4 pats of butter
Salt and pepper to taste 

Procedure

  1. Make a charcoal fire in a grill or fireplace.
  2. While the fire is heating up, wrap each egg in foil. Then, on a piece of foil, place a quartered potato; top with a pat of butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Wrap the foil loosely around the potato, and seal tightly. Repeat with the remaining potatoes, butter, salt and pepper.
  3. When the coals are completely gray and have started to turn to ash a little, carefully nestle the potatoes among them, using long tongs. In 10 minutes add the eggs off to the side where it is a little cooler, but still touching the coals. In another 10 minutes use the tongs to carefully remove the eggs and one potato packet.
  4. Open the potato packet. You should be able to easily pierce the potato with a fork, but “hearth” cooking is more variable than oven cooking. If it is still slightly hard, return the packet to the coals for an additional 5-10 minutes. When the potatoes are done, carefully remove them all from the fire.
  5. As soon as you can handle them, open the egg and potato packets and enjoy.

 See Amy Colter. The Secret Garden Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnet’s The Secret Garden. Illustrations by Prudence See. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.