Only in Britain could there be a recipe book for people who can't cook

Ha ha ha. How hilarious. You know this cooking business, it's an awful bore, isn't it? But what with it being so fashionable these days, you can't ignore it altogether. How's this, then, for a brilliant wheeze? Let's publish a cook book for people who can't actually be bothered to cook!

Only in Britain, you suspect, is this line of reasoning possible. In plenty of time for Christmas, a book has been published called Rita's Culinary Trickery: how to get dinner on the table even if you can't cook (Ebury Press, £17.50). The author is Rita Konig, a woman apparently well known enough to dispense with the authorial convention of stating who you are on the dust jacket. It was with the help of Google that I learned that Konig is a "style doyenne" who, among other things, writes a "home advice" column for Vogue entitled "Rita Says".

What a cursory reading of Rita's Culinary Trickery makes clear is that Konig has nothing to say, even though she loves the sound of her own voice. Her book is a compendium of statements of the obvious ("It's annoying when people are really late"; "beef and horseradish is particularly yummy") combined with her opinions on various aspects of home entertaining. Konig has strong views on quite a lot of things - for instance, she approves of formal dinner invitations, but thinks serving baked potatoes with stew is a bad idea. The one thing that never occurs to her, though, is to ask why anyone should be remotely interested in what an overprivileged woman of evidently limited talent has to say about cooking, home entertaining or, for that matter, anything else.

The most annoying thing about the book is that it doesn't even deliver on its title's promise. Since the art of cookery is largely about mastering various tricks, a work devoted to divulging some of them wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea. But none of Konig's "tricks" are remotely useful. Presumably, telling us stuff that's genuinely handy would soon resemble actual cooking, thus defeating the point of the book. So the author makes do instead with "advice" that isn't remotely clever or helpful: for example, she advises women cooking dinner for their in-laws to pick up a Thai green curry from their local takeaway, decant it into a large pan, and pass it off as their own.

Naturally, being someone who can cook, and a man to boot, I am not the target for this book. Rita's Culinary Trickery is explicitly aimed at women: its (pink) cover is decorated with a retrograde fantasy of a long-lashed housewife waving a pan in the air. Konig writes: "I know that I'm not always seen as the modern voice for women." So it's all a joke. We're not meant to take it seriously. Except that it's not a remotely funny joke and it's depressing to think some people would find it so.

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