It was a slender hope, a moment of lunacy really, but I picked up Reinventing Food – Ferran Adrià: The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat by Colman Andrews (Phaidon, £19.95) thinking that the improbable claim in the subtitle might in future serve to stem, or anyway divert, the tide of cookery books published every year. So remorseless is it that we now expect — and get — Christmas ‘annuals’. (In 2010 the best by far of the adult cook’s version of Dandy or Oor Wullie is Nigel Slater’s Tender, Volume II: A Cook’s Guide to the Fruit Garden (HarperCollins, £30).
I was also encouraged by the author of Ferran Adrià being Colman Andrews, who in the 1980s published an innovative, thorough as only an American can be thorough book called Catalan Cuisine: Europe’s Last Great Culinary Secret (not any more, Colman). Unfortunately for Colman, Adrià greeted the publication of this book by announcing the closure in about a year’s time of his famous foam and spherification-driven restaurant, El Bulli, in Catalonia, so it will be impossible for readers to put the proposition to the test. Meanwhile a Spanish journalist has triumphantly announced, ‘Thanks to Ferran, everyone in Spain can make frozen foie gras dust’. In Chapter Eight, ‘Becoming Ferran’, it is revealed that only relatively recently did Signor Adrià espouse the Catalan version of his first name Fernando. Just think, the reverence that Ferran himself and many others accord El Bulli might not have been so great had the restaurant been called by the diminutive, Nando’s.
Elizabeth David would have had no truck with the tricks of molecular gastronomy, but worse for her to bear, I would imagine, as she quietly spins, is Jamie Oliver’s claim in the foreword tributes for At Elizabeth David’s Table (Penguin/ Michael Joseph, £25) that the book ‘cherry-picks her greatest hits’. Her first five books, published in the 1950s and 1960s, remain in print to this day. Getting the likes of Oliver to endorse her endeavours, plus adding the ‘glorious colour photography’ that she (and John Minton) would have loathed, traduces and buries her cultivated and acerbic spirit. The best parts of the book are her essays, including ones for The Spectator, the periodical for which she was most pleased to write. The book I am waiting for is Elizabeth David: The Recipes that Work.
Carrying on the tradition of well-born ladies who travel and write are Elizabeth Luard, whose new book is Recipes & Ramblings (Oldie Publications, £14.99), and Josceline Dimbleby, who contributes recipes, travels and memories in Orchards in the Oasis (Quadrille, £25). As any truly accomplished woman should, Luard illustrates her work with her own watercolours (reproduced above). The recipes are vigorous and eclectic — one spread features Melton Mowbray Pie on the left hand page, Georgian shchi on the right — and she is sensibly willing to include and credit other authors rather than, as often happens, making a minuscule change to the ingredients and passing a recipe off as her own. There is an excellent chapter entitled ‘Quick & Easy’ that prods non-cooks — her beady eye is on men — to cook. ‘Make it [mayonnaise] once and you’ll never look back’.
Maybe it is because Josceline Dimbleby announces in her introduction that she has diligently stuck all the photographs she has ever taken into albums and kept all the negatives in dated and named files that I find myself resistant to her somewhat leaden ‘What I did on my hols’ prose style. However, her undeniably interesting journeys and abiding fascination with food has resulted in a mix of recipes that would make this an ideal book to take on a self-catering holiday, even if only, you poor reader, to Southwold.
Rose Prince represents a generation of women for whom the duty of cooking is something that can be easily relegated to Marks & Spencer and the pizza delivery boy. In her latest book, Kitchenella (Fourth Estate, £25), the words ‘heroic’ and ‘nurturing’ make many an appearance. Seemingly a synthesis of Nigella — but a ‘pouting princess’ on TV is critically invoked — and Cinderella stuck sweeping crumbs in the kitchen, the saintly (actually slightly creepy) Kitchenella talks to the sisterhood:
Listen carefully for Kitchenella’s voice … She won’t show off, but nor will she bully you. She just wants to leave her mark: indelible, delicious influence.
At this time of year beautiful books are bought for presents. Two where the recipes are also authentic and excellent are Thai Street Food by David Thompson (Conran Octopus, £40), in a size ready to stand in as a coffee table; and the distillation of everything there is to love about Greece, Food from Many Greek Kitchens by Tessa Kiros (Murdoch Books, £25).
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