The Lost Orchard: A French chef rediscovers a great British food heritage. Foreword by The Former Prince of Wales

I love this book so much! I loaned it out twice and one of those people bought their own copy. Fair warning: you will have a strong desire to plant heirloom apples , , , , ,

As soon as I received this book and thumbed through it I knew it was something special. I got through it in a weekend and loved what I was reading. I found some trees that I planted in another house and was delighted to find a reference to the Peche De Vigne on page 239. This was a fruit I used to prepare when I was a patissier in London and have never seen or heard of it since and that was well over 30 years ago. The recipes are just what I like to eat and the in-depth note on each variety are very useful. I would have loved to have been one of the testers. This book is now full of little stickers of the bits I want to find quickly so I will use this book as a reference to work with. I loved the sections about Ramonds childhood, The Apple Store, Ancient and Modern and the Bee section. All in all I would very much recommend this book. Great job Raymond Blanc and thank you so much.Graham Dunton

A real waste of time & money. Three years ago a lot of money was spent planting an orchard at a hotel. The author was lightly involved & likes to tell us on most pages about how amazing his hotel is. He lists some of his favourite fruit trees & tells us some information about them, possibly from Wikipedia , then a few notes on cultivation, but as he doesn’t grow them himself & some of them haven’t yet been planted not sure how useful this is. There are some recipes at the back which might be good as the author is a chef. Unfortunately he’s not a gardener or a farmer so the rest is pretty dull, though it is interesting to know which varieties he thinks tastes best. However how relevant this is for a uk audience I don’t know as most of the varieties he imports from France & doesn’t yet know how well they will do.

Such a lovely book. So very interesting, it inspires you to want to go and plant your own orchard straight away. Thrilled to find reference to an old apple that my grandmother used to grow in her garden. So wish I had been in on the tasting panels! Can’t wait to try some of the recipes too.Highly recommended - read it in the weekend, I loved it so much.

Coming from Kent where I was born and brought up in the 60s and 70s I can never forget or forgive the EU for destroying the British Apple market. I remember the loss of orchards with our beloved English apple varieties torn up and disappearing and the flooding of our market with uniformed tasteless French varieties. I have never knowingly bought a French apple. However I do appreciate this French chef for his continued commitment to this country and his obvious respect for heritage fruits; and perhaps at last we may regain our culture, in all aspects, that was stolen by the United European project which is now happily failing.

Raymond likes to teach. This is typical of his books: well researched but there are only so many ways to describe an apple or its tree. Once you have read much the same thing about half a dozen trees, each spread over two or three pages, you will be asleep before you read about 40 more.I love Le Manoir, and Raymond is a great chef. But this book needed some serious editing.