"Ask your butcher for the blood": a cookbook not for the faint-hearted

Fergus Henderson begins his cookbook Nose to Tail Eating (first published in 1999, now reissued by Bloomsbury with an introduction by Anthony Bourdain) with a page bearing the heading "Four Things I Should Mention".

The fourth starts: "Do not be afraid of cooking, as your ingredients

will know, and misbehave." As well as being wittily expressed, this is an extremely sensible piece of advice: being afraid is indeed one of the main reasons why people cook - and eat - badly. But it also has a special relevance to Nose to Tail Eating. Most people will need to overcome quite a lot of fear if they are to contemplate attempting the recipes Henderson recommends.

Henderson, who since 1995 has been chef-proprietor of the St John restaurant in Clerkenwell, east London (Bourdain's "favourite restaurant in the world"), is famous for liking parts of animals that most people would consider fit only for animal consumption. Even so, it is a shock to see his enthusiasms catalogued quite as brazenly as this. Nose to Tail Eating starts innocuously enough, with a chapter on the preparation of stocks; these, Henderson announces, are "fundamental". It soon becomes clear why. Henderson's liking for stocks stems from their usefulness as a medium for cooking cuts of meat that, in most kitchens, wouldn't even make it into the stockpot. His book is full of recipes for things such as "pea and pig's ear soup" and "giblet stew", as well as other, even less salubrious-sounding dishes.

Henderson is not only a fan of boiling and brazing. He also has a way with salads. Most of these feature capers and anchovies and parsley, a herb of which Henderson is extremely fond. ("Parsley acts as a great marrier of disparate parts in a salad, the dating agency of the salad world.") Other favoured techniques include rendering, brining and curing. A recipe for "dried salted pig's liver" starts by telling you to cure the liver in sugar and salt for two weeks. "When the time is up, remove the liver . . . it should be firm but not rock hard . . . Leave to hang in a cool, dry, airy place for at least three weeks."

The wonder of the book - and the reason, no doubt, why the first edition became such a treasured possession among a small but devoted band of admirers - lies in the gap between the actions Henderson advises and the perky, almost happy-go-lucky manner in which he describes them. A recipe for "ham in hay" suggests: "To obtain your hay, ask a friendly farmer if some is to hand." Another for "blood cake and fried eggs" begins: "You will need to ask your butcher for the blood" - the suggestion being that it is perfectly normal to do such things. Reading Nose to Tail Eating almost makes you wish that you lived in a world in which it was.

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