Food
Gastronomic miscellany - Having had his fill of celebrity chefs, William Skidelsky samples a more varied menu of books for foodies
Published 15 December 2003
River Cafe Cookbook Easy
Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, Ebury Press, £20
ISBN 0091884640
The past year has not been a vintage one for cookery books. Unlike 2002, in which new works from Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith were published, there have been relatively few stellar offerings. In the absence of big-hitters, other books stand a greater chance of being noticed. And in 2003 has come the publication of some interesting food books that aren't specifically concerned with cooking.
In the spring, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, responding to criticism that the recipes in their first four River Cafe books were too complicated for the average domestic chef, brought out the River Cafe Cookbook Easy (Ebury Press, £20). The title certainly isn't misleading: this must be one of the least challenging cookbooks ever published. Gray and Rogers have pared their already stripped-down style to the bone; one recipe, for lemon roast chicken, consists simply of telling you to place a lemon in the cavity of the bird before roasting. I never understood why people objected to the earlier River Cafe cookbooks; all the recipes I've attempted have seemed straightforward, with the exception of the notoriously troublesome Chocolate Nemesis. But this book will come as a relief to anyone who can't cope with dishes that require more than five ingredients.
John Burton Race, the former two-Michelin-starred chef at L'Ortolan in Berkshire (and later the Landmark in Marylebone, London), published French Leave (Ebury, £20) to tie in with his Channel 4 television series. I watched only a couple of episodes, but the premise of the series (unassuming Brit decamps to a quiet village in France with his wife and kids and impresses the locals with his grasp of French cuisine) seemed appealing enough. However, what makes for good escapist TV does not necessarily translate on to the page. Burton Race may be an excellent chef, but his descriptions of his sojourn are rambling, and his recipes suffer from the reverse of the problem posed by the Gray and Rogers book: they are far too complicated. Just maybe, if you were holed up in a French village for several months, you would be tempted to try the fiendishly complicated recipe for cassoulet, which requires 36 ingredients and seems likely to take even longer than the two days that Burton Race estimates.
Far more practical is the excellent Classic Conran: plain, simple and satisfying food (Conran Octopus, £25) by Terence and Vicki Conran. This is a book that does exactly what it says on the cover. It is essentially a collection of all those dishes that everyone, even the unadventurous, loves. All the classics are here: gazpacho, fish pie, steak and kidney pudding, daube de boeuf, sausages and mash. The recipes are pitched at just the right level of difficulty, and the authors' commentary makes you warm to them. There is even a recipe for cassoulet which, I was relieved to see, features a mere 14 ingredients. It seems likely that dining chez Conran is a more enjoyable experience than eating at one of his overpriced restaurants.
Two other cookbooks that deserve mention are Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's The River Cottage Year (Hodder & Stoughton, £17.99) and Sybil Kapoor's Taste: a new way to cook (Mitchell Beazley, £20). I had never been attracted to Fearnley-Whittingstall's back-to-nature approach, but he writes well and this book is full of intriguing recipes, including one for roast cod's head, gigot style. Where Fearnley-Whittingstall is happiest roaming the countryside, Kapoor prefers the kitchen or, better still, a laboratory. In her book, she reveals that there are not four major categories of taste, but five, the fifth being called umami ("typified by the intense taste of soy sauce or chicken stock"). Kapoor's scientific rigour is impressive; but isn't it enough to know that peas and bacon are likely to go well together in a risotto without having to be told that this is because "sweetness, umami and salt can produce a satisfying dish"?
Perhaps the most eagerly awaited food book of the year was Ben Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany (Bloomsbury, £9.99), his follow-up to last year's bestselling Original Miscellany. Schott tells us some things we already know, and much that we don't know, about matters as diverse as the 1912 Scoville Scale for assessing the heat of chillis and the origins of the term "upper crust". I am pleased to have learnt that the correct terms for carving hen and deer are "spoil" and "break" (as in, "Would you mind spoiling that hen, please?"). Next time someone asks me to carve a haunch of venison, I'll be sure to put them right. However, there is something irritating about the way Schott includes references to contemporary events alongside more arcane trivia. Do we really need to be reminded that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are supposed to have struck a deal at Granita?
More substantial is the American author Francine Prose's Gluttony (£9.99), published as part of Oxford University Press's seductive series on the Seven Deadly Sins. In this extended essay, Prose points out that gluttony has not gone away. As a society, we are as obsessed as ever with overeating: it is just that we no longer see it as a religious offence that will lead to eternal damnation. On the contrary, Prose points out, we are more likely to see overeating (or self-starvation) as a response to unhappiness in this life. In a sense, she implies, previous eras had it right. Even if gluttony was unjustly frowned upon, at least people were clear as to its true cause - it is enjoyable.
Ample evidence that this was the case is provided by Ian Kelly's Cooking for Kings (Short Books, £16.99), an account of the life of the "world's first celebrity chef", Antonin Careme, who cooked for many of the most illustrious figures of his day, including Napoleon and Josephine, George IV, the Rothschilds and the Romanovs.
The book offers a memorable insight into the astonishing opulence of upper-class life during the Regency period; one banquet, served to Archduke Nicholas of Russia at the Brighton Pavilion in January 1817, featured eight soups, 23 fish dishes and more than 50 meat dishes. Cooking for Kings follows last year's Escoffier: the king of chefs by Kenneth James. Our appetite for contemporary celebrity chefs having finally been sated, we are turning our attention to their predecessors.
But probably the most interesting and unusual food book of the year was Pierre Boisard's Camembert: a national myth (translated by Richard Miller; University of California Press, £19.95), which is a fascinating account of some of the misconceptions surrounding France's best-known cheese. The story Boisard tells is a depressing one; the cheese that has become a symbol of French unity is in fact a mass-produced travesty of the original. As the book demonstrates, for all that the French have a reputation for protecting their culinary traditions, they are just as susceptible as any other country to the damaging effects of globalisation. What would a gourmet such as Careme have made of the food we eat today?
William Skidelsky is deputy books and arts editor of the NS
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