Yotam Ottolenghi: the Saatchi brothers of vegetable PR

It would be a mistake to treat Plenty More, the new cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, merely as a collection of recipes. It is a collection of recipes, as it happens, and very good ones, but it’s more the epitome of a world view, a way of life, a vision of contemporary Britain. This is a collection of the great man’s latest vegetarian recipes from the Guardian magazine — I see some of my readers slipping from me as I write — and the mag accompanied the book’s serialisation with a picture of Yotam in the guise of a Renaissance artist, or prince.

But really, the recipes are secondary to the man, who is pretty well the incarnation of the character of contemporary Britain. In Ottolenghiland, za’atar and sumac long ago replaced Lea & Perrins as the condiment of choice, and pomegranate molasses is the new mustard. Quite how you feel about this depends on how you look at the transformation of contemporary Britain by the arrival of lots of people from other parts of the world; this would not, perhaps, be Nigel Farage’s cookbook of choice. Oh all right, that’s a caricature — there are any number of exotic elements in traditional British/ Irish cooking — but as I say, this is a world in which you know not just how to pronounce quinoa but how to make porridge out of it.

Ottolenghi’s godlike status extends way beyond his capacity to make the Waitrose classes buy stuff they’ve never heard of, and to liberate vegetables from their former, second-fiddle status to full-on sex symbols. He’s the Saatchi brothers of vegetable PR. He’s been named as the 19th most influential Jewish person in the Jewish Chronicle power list and, believe me, they slipped up in putting him below Ed Miliband.