Cookbooks serve a variety of purposes in life. There are some that are a resource for the basics (think Joy of Cooking, Better Homes and Gardens and Fannie Farmer), some that are written to instruction a particular genre of food (Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Classic Italian Cookbook leap to mind) and still others that are designed mostly for showing off gorgeous pictures of nearly-unattainable food. My favorite category of cookbook is the one in which the book makes you want to crawl inside the binding and live the life described and pictured within the pages. In my opinion, The River Cottage Family Cookbook, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr, falls firmly into this last category.

It is a hefty tome, clocking in at more than 400 hardbound pages. It's organized differently than many of the cookbooks I've seen recently. They've grouped the recipes under the ingredient-specific headings Flour, Milk, Eggs, Fruit, Vegetables, Fish & Shellfish, Meat, The Cupboard, Sugar & Honey and Chocolate. I find it an appealing way to go, because it means that you find all the bread recipes near each other, all the butter/cheese/yogurt recipes right next to one another and then they lead neatly into the section on pancakes (which lives in the Egg section). It feels like a very organic way to arrange the book and while it took me a moment to orient to it, I now find it totally intuitive.

The other lovely thing about this book is that it's written to be appealing to kids and teens, but without any sense of pandering or talking down to. It works with the assumption that if you can get kids to fall in love with whole, real ingredients, you'll have far more success at turning them into happy eaters and cooks. Adults will also find it enchanting, so don't write it simply because the word family is in the title.

It's a gorgeous book, full of quirky, tasty photography and recipes that lend themselves to all levels of cooking ability. Even if you have no need for another cookbook in your collection, take a peek at this one next time you're in a bookstore. It's just that nice.