Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

A choice of cookery books

Elfreda Pownall

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

Elfreda Pownall

The same goes for Claire Clark, a young English woman who is one of the world’s best pastry chefs. There are some complicated recipes in her first book Indulge: 100 Perfect Desserts (Absolute, £20) but such is the beauty of the photographs, and her skill in explaining the processes, they all seem possible. Diana Henry’s Cook Simple (Mitchell Beazley, £20) is subtitled ‘effortless cooking for every day’. In it she takes simple ingredients — a chop, a piece of fish, a handful of seasonal vegetables — which, with a few minutes’ preparation of a marinade, salsa or relish, can be slung into the oven to look after themselves, leaving the cook free to do something else. Henry gives alternative suggestions for every one of the delicious main recipes — there are 17 ideas for roast chicken, for example, and then ten stuffings too. The book’s simple layout and good photography make it easy to use and its recipes are very stylish, especially considering the time and effort taken.

No effort is spared in the kitchens of Gordon Ramsay. Chefs sometimes work 18-hour-days to achieve the perfection revealed in the elegant photographs of *** Chef (Quadrille, £40). But who will buy this book? Other chefs? Regular patrons? Certainly not amateur cooks, as the recipes are beyond mere mortals. Perhaps it is less a book than a signal that, despite his media high jinks, Gordon is to be taken seriously. Buy this for an aspiring young chef, but remind him or her that half Gordon’s new recruits don’t last a month in his kitchen.

It certainly wouldn’t be the place for the laid back Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who with Nick Fisher has written The River Cottage Fish Book (Bloomsbury, £30), a whale of a book at 600 pages. It is simply the best and most comprehensive work on the subject I have read, with guides to sourcing and very simple recipes for sustainable species (I recommend his delicious baked mackerel with potatoes and bay leaves). A well-illustrated compendium to British fish, it is a great reference book and a good read.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (1) | Apollo Art Books

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Felicity FitzGerald

January 16th, 2008 5:21pm

In the issue of The Spectator that has the above it says "The discount offers on books in this section remain open for 3 months from date of publication" but how does one go about ordering them to get the discount? They aren't in The Shop.

Deadlier than the male

Andrew Taylor

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.