Jonathan Ray on our modern obsession with food
Most cookery books published these days are by so-called celebrity chefs and by those "on the telly". Just as provincial theatres tempt the busloads of blue-rinse matrons in from Haywards Heath by giving their cast members the endorsement "Star of TV's 'Allo, 'Allo", so books such as Jamie's Kitchen by Jamie Oliver (Michael Joseph, £25) boast proudly on their covers: "As seen on Channel 4".
It is hard not to be cynical about TV tie-in cookbooks. They often come across as hurried efforts, rushed out to appear at the same time as the associated programme, and they can be impersonal, often having been put together by the team behind the programme. This results in the nominal author's no doubt passionate philosophy becoming diffused. Too many cooks spoiling the broth and all that.
The overriding suspicion, with such books, is that they are just another marketing tool. After all, cookery books these days are not cheap: they cost between £20 and £25, and with Delia, Jamie and Nigella seldom out of the bestseller lists, selling tens of thousands of copies, there is serious money to be made.
But who are these books for? The fashionistas tell us that the dinner party is dead and social commentators tell us that the family Sunday lunch is similarly defunct. Nobody seems to have the time or the passion to cook good food at home. We would far rather eat in restaurants, or survive on takeaways and the ever-improving supermarket ready-meals. A quick straw poll among friends revealed that although almost all of them had one or two books by celebrity chefs, only one could remember ever having used them. One particular friend, Sarah, once had a dinner party at which she served a soggy mass of spaghetti - untouched by salt, pepper, butter, oil or indeed sauce of any kind - topped with a cold smoked mackerel fillet per person. As a result of this and of her once being spotted scrubbing some Brussels sprouts in a bowl of washing-up liquid, Sarah was bombarded with cookery books for birthdays and Christmas.
Which brings me to my next point. How practical are today's cookery books and how appropriate are they for daily eating? When Sarah set about following one of the sainted Delia's recipes, she soon lost heart and returned to supermarket hot-ups. The truth is that both the books and the TV programmes on which they are based are really about restaurant cooking - a fantasy world where you never have to bother about peeling spuds, where you pay for your meal to arrive looking wonderful, and where you pay for someone to wash up afterwards. But at home, you aren't going to bother with drizzling pesto and scattering herbs delicately around the rim of the plate as instructed; if you did, you'd only whine that your attempt didn't look how it should in the picture.
Just because you have these books on your shelves and just because you look at them occasionally doesn't make you a cook. Just ask Sarah's husband. In truth, these books are about lifestyle, and in buying - or being given - one of them, you are buying into the image. They are books designed to be drooled over - gastro-pornography - their unwieldy size, knee-crushing weight and glossiness betraying the reality that they are designed for the coffee table rather than the worktop.
And yet, there are some fine cookery books around. Rick Stein is one of the more unassuming TV chefs, and Rick Stein's Food Heroes (BBC Books, £20) is meant to be used rather than just ogled; unlike many of its rivals, it has an invaluable directory of producers at the back. Heston Blumenthal is being touted as one of the most innovative chefs around. Family Food: a new approach to cooking (Michael Joseph, £20) is his first book, and with it he attempts to encourage children cooking in the kitchen. It is a wonderful idea and thoughtfully put together, but I question whether busy parents would have the time to work through its 350 pages, and whether it is really necessary, when attempting the perfect fried egg, to cook the white and the yolk separately.
I have always found Jamie Oliver smug and rather nauseating, but as I browsed through Jamie's Kitchen, I slowly warmed to him. True, the book is laddish, and there are almost as many photographs of Jamie as there are of his grub, but the recipes aren't complicated and there is a lot here that one would want to cook.
Delia Smith's position as Middle England's heroine may be impregnable, but I found Delia's Vegetarian Collection (BBC, £25) cumbersome in size and dated in appearance and, considering that Delia is one of the few cookery writers who has never been a restaurant chef, her recipes are surprisingly fiddly and complicated. In the past, cookery writers such as Jane Grigson and Elizabeth David became famous for their writing, rather than writing because they were famous, apparently the reverse of how it works these days. Occasionally, though, a publisher is bold enough to publish a book on merit alone, and so it is that we get such delightful books as Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons: enchanting recipes from the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa by Diana Henry (Mitchell Beazley, £20) and Eating England by Hattie Ellis (Mitchell Beazley, £14.99). The former is literary, with well-chosen quotations, impressive recipes and excellent pictures. The latter isn't a cookery book in the conventional sense, but more a captivating journey through England, rooting out small producers and merchants who do so much to keep our native cuisine alive.
The best of the bunch, however, is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's The River Cottage Cookbook (HarperCollins, £25). The author is one of my culinary heroes, and his programmes are among the very few that I bother to watch. The man is clearly barking mad - who, after all, could forget his cooking a human placenta on television? - but he is also passionate about his grub and everything here is suffused by his love of good food. Part recipe book, part smallholders' manual, the book ties in with the River Cottage programmes, but Fearnley-Whittingstall was writing cookery books before he was ever on television, and it shows.
Finally, a plea to the next celebrity chef planning a book. Please could the book have splash-resistant pages that stay open where the reader wants them to, and could the book be of a sensible enough size to fit on the average kitchen shelf?
Jonathan Ray is the author of Everything You Need to Know About Wine (Mitchell Beazley)
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