From Starnash with Love
From Starnash with Love is a collection of letters which tell an engaging story of resilience and inventiveness as one family moves from urban chic to country life and aims for self sufficiency. Radtke’s original voice, recipes and photographs illustrate her lessons in survival and good humour in a modern handbook for 21st century life, while echoing Peter Mayle’s observations of change of culture and lifestyle.
When Brighton restaurateur, Vicky Radtke first spotted Starnash, a farmhouse ‘with potential’ set in three acres of Sussex countryside, she dreamed of restoring it, growing produce for their three restaurants and teaching her family to live off the land. With husband Dave’s background in market gardening, and both of them trained architects, embarking on a new way of life couldn’t be that hard, could it?
Two years on, through the depths of the recession, her letters to an anonymous friend chronicle the highs and lows of turning a dream into reality. This is the story of country life, but not quite as we know it. Whilst weeding the floor, vacuuming the walls, catching escaped pigs and foraging for very free range eggs - often found in the toe of a shoe - the Radtkes also begin the reinvention of their restaurants as an urban showcase for their rural dream, with seasonal, home grown, local and artisan food transforming the menu and the Tin Drum philosophy. In the process they learn how to butcher, cure, forage and preserve using traditional methods, creating unique seasonal menus and recipes for the family and the restaurants too.
But while the narrative drives us towards the evolution of the restaurants, Radtke also explores the ripple effect of making choices: she touches upon philosophy and practicality; persuading the children that it’s okay to pluck a pigeon when it’s still warm and cook it for tea; teaching them to make sausages out of the pigs they hand-reared, and then eating them. What is idyllic freedom for an eight-year-old boy can mean incarceration for a fifteen-year-old girl. How far do you really move from one way of life to another?
Radtke‘s original and elegant voice recalls the Bloomsbury spirit of resilience and self sufficiency mixed with an arty dedication to life’s pleasures. It reminds the reader of a gentler, more uplifting time, while her modern entrepreneurial spirit and clear determination is at the root of this inspiring real life make-over making it a comforting and practical package for a new age of austerity.
Book Author
Vicky Radtke was born in 1963 and is married with four children.
During the 1980’s she trained as an architect in Oxford (now Oxford Brookes University) and met husband Dave also an architect, whilst studying for her diploma in Architecture in Brighton.
In 1998 the Radtkes opened the first Tin Drum Café Bar and Restaurant in Brighton. It hit the zeitgeist of the moment being a continental style cafe bar. They went on to open three more successful Tin Drums in popular neighbourhoods of Brighton and Hove. The business has always remained a family enterprise.
The Radtkes now gr...
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