Arabella Boxer

Arabella Boxer's Garden Cookbook

Arabella Boxer is a legend in the food world, having written 12 cookbooks, spent 19 years as the food columnist at Vogue, and served as both a founding member and previous vice-president of the Guild of Food Writers. Born in Scotland to the 18th Earl of Moray, Boxer first became interested in food after a trip to Maine with her American mother piqued her interest through corn chowder and strawberry ice cream.In 2025, she was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Guild of Food Writers Awards. She has also won the Glenfiddich Special Award, the Andre Simon Award, and the Glenfiddich Cookery Writer of the Year Award twice. Her first cookbook, First Slice your Cookbook, was revolutionary, with colour-coded pages that were literally sliced in thirds, allowing the reader to flip through and create their ideal menu of a starter, main, and pudding.Arabella Boxer's Garden Cookbook, first published in 1974, focuses on vegetables, with chapters including everything from soups and souffles to stuffed vegetables, mousses, and sauces. She writes in her introduction: '[Vegetables] make such beautiful material with which to work, whether gathered from one's own garden, or selected with care from the shops...There is also the pleasure of choosing vegetables, seeing each week what has newly come into season.' With handy reference materials including vegetable and herb encyclopaedias, a page of metric equivalents, and suggested menus, Arabella Boxer's Garden Cookbook gives the home cook everything they need to get started making excellent vegetable-based dishes.