If I were the kind of person who invited people to come and have a bite to eat that very evening — and you’ve got to watch it in London, where people are inclined to draw themselves up to their full height, even by email, to ask what sort of sad case you think they are to imagine they’re free right now as opposed to in six weeks’ time — well, I’d reach for the Morito cookbook (Ebury, £26, Spectator Bookshop, £20).
It is the book of the fashionable restaurant/café (and most cookbooks these days are) of that name, in London’s Exmouth Market, described by the authors, Sam and Sam Clark (husband and wife), as the ‘little sister of Moro’ (another even more fashionable restaurant) and ‘the noisier, more rebellious sibling, eager to experiment and explore’. Whatever, there are lots of good things here that you assemble as much as cook; grazing plates, tapas things to nibble.
This isn’t complicated cooking, but it does call for a range of Hispanic/North African ingredients that are easier to come by in Hoxton or online than in, say, Sunderland. And having wrestled to fill really sticky dough with walnuts and olives for their stuffed rolls, I can say with some bitterness that what’s simple on the page isn’t always simple in practice. And once you’ve bought the expensive sherry, high-quality vinegar and the rest, it dawns on you that relaxed cooking shouldn’t be equated with cheap.
Another cookbook of a fashionable hangout is the Ginger and White Cookbook (Mitchell Beazley, £18.99, Spectator Bookshop, £14.99) of the pseudo-nymous Hampstead café, which comes with an imprimatur from Helena Bonham Carter. You wonder why the Hampstead classes look so sleek, so content? It may be because they graze on banana and wheatgerm smoothies and chorizo, avocado and lime on toast before sallying off to run quangos and do acting. Actually there’s a lot that’s simple here: steak with Gentleman’s Relish, say, is served with tarragon and GR butter. My only quibble is that the mini chocolate cupcakes ended up concave, but they tasted fine.
Justin Gellatly, master baker, is the Nemesis of the low-carb diet, and I would happily eat every day at his stall at London’s Borough market where he and his wife Louise sell the best breads, grounded in the English baking tradition. Bread, Cake, Doughnut, Pudding (Penguin, £25, Spectator Booskhop, £20) is a succession of things I want to eat. The bread rolls as made for William and Kate’s wedding bacon rolls (swank, swank) are wonderful, but let me put in a word too for the ginger cake, which is what every ginger cake aspires to be. And if you’ve ever hankered after a nice Devonshire Split, go no further.
Konditor and Cook (Ebury, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £18) is the book of an Anglo-German cake shop, which, given the excellence of German cakes, is oddly rare on the scene here. Gerhard Jenne is notable for his quirky decorations and humorous take on fondant fancies and you get a fair share of jolly stuff here, but there are also things like plum streusel in the German fashion. It’s all delicious, but I should warn you that some of the cake bases are quite dense, the cooking times aren’t always geared to domestic ovens and there’s a variation on a Victoria sponge (extra egg yolk, added crème fraiche) which comes squarely into the category of gilded lilies.
The British love affair with Scandinavia has, curiously, not really translated into food. A reminder that it’s not all about herring (though you get them three ways) is Trine Hahnemann’s The Scandinavian Cookbook (Quadrille, £12.99, Spectator Bookshop, £11.69): the Scandinavian year in its dishes. It’s an excellent introduction. This is interesting cooking, essentially quite simple, with clean tastes (beef burgers are cut through with pickled beetroot and capers), a fondness for berries and a fine tradition of pastries and biscuits. Oh, and recipes for reindeer and moose. Rudolph with gratin.
William and Suzue Curley’s Patisserie (Jacqui Small, £40, Spectator Bookshop, £34) isn’t for the faint-hearted: these desserts are exquisite, complex and delicious. But having been to a class with them I can vouch that the patisserie is perfectly do-able; it just needs time and patience. And there are yeast things here that are pretty accessible but it’s still not something for ad hoc entertaining but for a ta-dah moment at your dinner party. A pared down version of a few of William Curley’s easy recipes — cake, biscuit, pudding — for those with people coming round this very evening would come in handy.
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