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A choice of cookery books

Elfreda Pownall

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

Elfreda Pownall

A good reason to buy Lighten Up: A Healthy New Way to Cook by Jill Dupleix, (Quadrille, £16.99) is that her food-critic husband lost 35 kilos easily when she fed him on these vividly flavoured recipes — even though he was tucking in at fancy restaurants between times. It is not a diet book, but if, like St Augustine (almost), you say, ‘Lord make me slim — but not until after Christmas’ get the book now and open it in the New Year.

Slimming is far from the minds of the lively 20-30-year-olds for whom Joanna Weinberg has written How to Feed Your Friends with Relish (Bloomsbury, £20). Their lives are about fun, friends, work and love. My favourite 29-year-old, like Weinberg a very good cook, read it at one sitting, laughing in recognition the whole way through. Though Weinberg’s recipes are good, especially the beef stew with chilli, chocolate and giant garlic croutons, the book is more about arranging an occasion and its food, from a sofa supper to a picnic. Her ideas for dishes to take to a friend who has moved house, or had a baby or broken up with the love of her life, and dishes to avoid, like those that provide a make-up-melting steam facial when cooking for a man you fancy, are spot on. If this makes it sound like a schlocky, Sex and the City type of production, it’s not; it’s fun, charming and unusual.

A stocking present for a keen cook is Knife Skills Illustrated by Peter Hertzman (W. W. Norton, £14.50) in which elegant line drawings show the correct method (for right and left-handers) to julienne, dice, trim or slice. It’s a modest book which teaches skills that cost a fortune to learn at fancy cooking classes and should prove immediately useful on Christmas Day, as it shows exactly how to carve the turkey.

This Christmas I can’t live without Sarah Raven, Diana Henry and Moro East; I would have said Joanna Weinberg too, but I’m not 29 and my flirting days are over. Luckily my cooking days are not.

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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.

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