Wonders of the world’s fare

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’.