Pure and mostly simple

A long and messy business is how the chef Rowley Leigh explains his preferred way of eating. Picking at a crab, for example, or eating raw young broad beans straight from the pod. He applies the same phrase to cooking. That too is messy, but not all the recipes in his new book take ages to make. Long, I thought as I gratefully lapped up Leigh’s wisdom, applies more to the time needed to become not just a fount of knowledge but also a man of very good tastes. You could include grumpy in the title of A Long and Messy Business (Unbound, £25); but I trust the advice and judgment of grumpy (not angry, mind) cooks.

It is a great cookbook, as much for what irritates Rowley as what doesn’t. He loves too many ingredients to list, but it is what he does with them, and the experience he offers, that puts this book in the if-you-buy-one-make-it-this-one category. Many recipes are those you need to know to produce pure and simple suppers, such as risi e lughaneghe, an insulating dish of risotto rice, lean sausage, parsley and parmesan. There are soups, exercises ‘in minimalism’, he says; ham hock with lentils, crab spaghetti with chilli and mint, poulet Antiboise, fruit fools and unmatchable advice on cooking fish.

Leigh is aggravated, however, by spring lamb, frozen peas, fusion food and clearly also by the book’s photographer, the superb Andy Sewell. This scratchy relationship, which pops up in places throughout, is mostly about Leigh being made to stand for too long holding something, Sewell’s scattered, dirty coffee cups or the age a soufflé crepe spent at the mercy of his camera lens. This brought back memories, because I have worked a lot with Sewell. He does take extraordinary pictures, rather slowly, and I have whipped more than a few collapsing gougères and congealing stews away from his camera.