The Return of the Naked Chef
Jamie Oliver Michael Joseph, 288pp, £20
ISBN 0718144392
Appetite
Nigel Slater Fourth Estate, 448pp, £25
River Cafe Cook Book Green
Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers Ebury Press, 464pp, £30
How to be a Domestic Goddess: baking and the art of comfort cooking
Nigella Lawson Chatto & Windus, 374pp, £25
No Place Like Home
Rowley Leigh Fourth Estate, 287pp, £25
Is there a Nutmeg in the House?
Elizabeth David Michael Joseph, 336pp, £20
For anyone seeking a new book on home cooking, there is an embarras de richesse this Christmas. I mean this . . . er, literally. It is awkward to have so many good books and so few criteria to choose between them. Nigel, Nigella, Jamie, Rose & Ruth and Rowley all have new works out. They are all extremely glossy, filled with stunning artwork, and would squash your foot quite comprehensively if you dropped them. You could eat well out of any of them. But they cost between £20 and £30 each. You can't buy them all. How do you decide between them?
" 'Nigel is a genius' - Jamie Oliver" reads the cover of Nigel Slater's Appetite. All of these writers are dab hands at filling out one another's press releases. Nigella praises Ruth and Rose and vice versa. In his Telegraph column, Rowley recommends all the others except Jamie, and wonders, to boot, how Nigel manages to stay so "slim and dapper". Perhaps they should all just cut to the chase and recommend their own books. Behind the mutual admiration, moreover, is a real uniformity of approach to food. All of them use Maldon salt and free-range organic eggs; all cook a kind of Mediterraneanised British food; all (except Nigella) offer endless risotto recipes; all follow the seasons and abhor the kind of overblown creations they describe as "cheffy".
Subject matter at least marks out two of the books. If you want more recipes for greengrocery, you will surely opt, if you haven't already, for River Cafe Cook Book Green, as passionate as the other Gray & Rogers books about the produce of Italy and how to cook it simply, in accordance with the changing months. Having served walnuts and pomegranates over Christmas, you should be getting ready to cook fried polenta with cime de rapa in the New Year.
This book also contains an ingenious recipe for raspberry jam. You take some raspberries and the same amount, roughly, of caster sugar, put them in separate baking dishes in a hot oven and, when you mix the two together, you get instant, fragrant jam. Clever and very novel - or so I thought until I read the same formula in Nigella Lawson's book. You are doubtless already familiar with the golden pages of How to be a Domestic Goddess and its dream of dressing like Sophia Loren and "trailing nutmeggy fumes in our languorous wake". Her pistachio macaroons, marzipan fruit cake, steak and kidney pudding, Granny Boyd's chocolate biscuits and basic white bread are so good, however, that they do very nearly live up to the title.
This leaves us with Jamie, Nigel and Rowley. As a luxurious dinner-party crib sheet, you could hardly do better than Rowley Leigh's No Place Like Home, organised into meals for different occasions. "The club dinner for a rich uncle", for instance, comprises an oyster and onion tart, roast grouse with bread sauce and mirabelles and custard. Rowley pairs flavours you think won't work - pineapple and chilli, sauternes and olive oil cake - but they always turn out spot on. The recipes in The Return of the Naked Chef are also gorgeous - in particular, composed salads such as mozzarella and grilled chilli, or seared carpaccio of beef with beetroot, horseradish, watercress and parmesan. Nigel's recipes in Appetite are even more pared down: "a fishcake to console and another to excite" or "dark, sticky meat for a winter's day".
But if it weren't for the recipes, there'd be little reason to read any of these three books. What really unites them is their low-level, not to say banal, philosophising. Jamie comments that food is "all about" passing potatoes, "licking my fingers, getting well tipsy". Rowley observes, gnomically, "I like my cheese, and I like a bit of fruit" and "I want to cook rice". Nigel, who includes a panegyric to the McDonald's hamburger, also notes: "I usually eat peanuts and crisps while waiting for the bus. For some reason, Kit Kats always taste better when you are sitting down."
All six authors are also alike in their unstinting admiration for Elizabeth David. Curious, because they are actually so dissimilar to her. Is There a Nutmeg in the House?, a new posthumous collection of essays, reminds us not only what an intelligent writer she was - one of the finest ever composers of long sentences - but also how sharp, in every sense. This book is a taste of lemon after a diet of sugarplums. Bitchy and scholarly by turn, David is refreshingly unwilling to please or be pleased.
As for Christmas, she writes of the "grisly orgy of spending and cooking and anxiety". No Nigellan photospreads of cranberry-garnished cupcakes for her: "If I had my way - and I shan't - my Christmas day eating and drinking would consist of an omelette and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked-salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening."
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