Around the world in 18 cookery books
Elfreda Pownall
Long before she became a fingerlickin' television star Nigella Lawson's ability to conjure tastes in vivid prose and her celebration of the pleasures of eating were known to readers of The Spectator as she was this magazine's first restaurant reviewer. And it was the writing in her first book, How to Eat, with its confidential tone of voice, her larky attitude to cooking and eating, as well as brilliant, original recipes that brought her legions of fans. To them she became what Elizabeth David had been to their grandmothers. Nigella's latest book, Feast (Chan°, £25), which arrives without benefit of a television boost, is another big, comprehensive book, its subject nothing less than 'food that celebrates life'. It includes food for the great religious feasts (many faiths are included) when even the non-cook must wield the pans, to private pleasures — a midnight feast for the first time your lover stays the night — and simple pasta teas for children. There is also a poignant chapter on cooking for funerals. The recipes are terrific, I haven't found a duff one yet; even the notorious chocolate orange cake works like a dream if you make it in a food processor, as she suggests. Her curry banquet to celebrate Lid (which marks the end of Ramadan) was easy to make and magnificent to eat, as were banana pancakes, and the 'super juicy turkey' should see off the sawdust-dry festive bird for ever. My only cavil is that while she exhorts one to plan for the huge occasion that induces 'panic, weight of expectation and family tension', she is short on logistics.
Equally wide-ranging and personal in tone is Falling Cloutibenies (Murdoch, £25) by Tessa Kiros, whose family of keen cooks is a permanent presence in her book. With a Finnish mother and a Greek-Cypriot father, Kiros grew up in South Africa, then settled in Tuscany. She gives the classic recipes from these cultures, from Finnish salmon soup to
South African milk tart, with additions and twists unique to her family, in a pretty-looking book. Childhood memories also marked Anissa Heton, whose elegantly designed book on offal and off-cuts of meat, The Fifth Quarter (Absolute, £20), is uncompromising in its approach. The author was brought up in Lebanon where her favourite childhood treat was raw liver, still warm from the slaughterhouse, eaten for breakfast on pitta bread with a slice of tail fat. Some of her recipes (for spleen, or poached brain and eyes with 'Fleur de sel) are not for the squeamish, but there are more approachable ones too. Her sweetbread boreks are wonderful.
Hugh Feamley-Whittingstall also looks his subject firmly in the eye, not flinching even at the abattoir. In his new hook The River Cottage Meat Book (Hodder, £25) there is a series of photographs of his own beasts being slaughtered. Nor does he shy from the ethics of being a carnivore: its first 200 pages (of 523 — it is quite a tome) deal with sourcing good meat, poultry and game, but it is not a harrowing book and there are good recipes too for meaty meals from Sunday lunch to an outdoor pig roast.
If only all the men who put on an apron once a year to take charge of a barbecue had Hugh's knowledge and charm. Most barbecue food leaves one wondering uneasily about salmonella, as one bites into the bloody interior of a chicken thigh, simultaneously picking its charred skin from one's teeth. But the know-how and recipes in Blistering Barbecues (Absolute, £14.95), by a company that specialises in barbecue catering, inspire confidence and might almost induce one to have another try.
There is no hesitation at all in trying the recipes in Casa Mom (Ebury, £25), the second book by Sam and Sam Clark, husband and wife chefs at Moro restaurant in Clerkenwell. In the book they continue their exploration of Spanish and north African food with many good salad and vegetable dishes (Turkish sweet and sour leeks are particularly successful), and some unusual, quickly made meat dishes that make one long to get cooking, though it is reading the recipes rather than the somewhat downbeat photographs that provides that impetus. The opposite is the case in A Taste of Morocco (Hachette, £20), a hybrid travel/cookery book, whose good, authentic recipes by Maria Seguin-Tsouli, culinary consultant to the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (which serves the best food to be found in any museum restaurant) are complemented by evocative food and location photography. This would make a good present for an adventurous cook or a traveller who, 'like Webster's dictionary [is] Morocco-hound'.
Another essential book for travellers is the new Concise Gastronomy of hal): by Anna del Conte (Pavilion, £14.99), which contains all the information from her previous definitive doorstopper book of the same name (without its garish full-page photographs) on regional food specialities and wines of Italy, with her masterly recipes, in a paperback format handy for trips to market or trattoria.
Anthony Bourclain's Les Hal/es Cookbook (Bloomsbury, £20), based on recipes from his restaurant, a French bistro in Manhattan, is written in his raunchy, tough-guy style, but the book is of limited use to a British reader; our cuts of meat are different and some ingredients are unobtainable here. I have found it very hard to find the pig's caul he demands in his pate de campagne recipe and perhaps he does too, as its accompanying photograph plainly shows him using a sheet of hack fat to line his terrine.
You would not find Shaun Hill making a mistake like that. He is the unflashy, gifted chef whose Merchant House restaurant put Ludlow on the map. His book How to Cook Better (Mitchell Beazley, £25) is calm, intelligent and full of good advice, a book for an interested cook or a committed beginner; you want to cook every recipe and the reasoning behind the techniques is clear and concise. Not quite so concise are the 818 pages on the history and chemistry of food and cooking, as well as techniques, in the revised edition of Harold McGee's 1986 encyclopaedic work, On Food and Cooking (Hodder & Stoughton, £30). It answers every culinary question from why fish goes off faster than meat, and how to store herbs, to the history of blue cheese. This is a definitive, heavyweight reference book for the keen cook.
There are cooks who are all-round good eggs, but few are as round or as good as Clarissa Dickson Wright, whose new book, The Game Cookbook (Kyle Cathie, £19,99), deals with every form of feathered, furry and fishy game, with recipes from pheasant with peanut butter to muntjac meatloaf. Lindsey Bareham does not have the tele-vision profile of Clarissa; she is the former cookery writer of London's Evening Standard, hut she does have a knack for writing books that one turns to time and again, and Just One Pot (Cassell, £20) with such recipes as 'After-work bouillabaisse' and 'Pork noodles with wilted spinach' (complete with preparation and cooking times) looks like another winner. Charles Campion, restaurant guide editor and man-about-food, provides his personal lifetime best in Fifty Recipes to Stake Your Lift! On (Timewell, £14.99) and every recipe, from Chinese Caramel Ice Cream to Smart Looking Salmon, comes with its own anecdote.
Anecdote is all in The Name Dropper's. Cookbook by Hugh Millais (Park Press, £25, tel: 01869 350951), an autobiography by the grandson of the pre-Raphaelite painter, a one-time interior decorator, oil man and hitpart film actor who has knocked about the world meeting such people as Hemingway and Adnan Khashoggi and collecting recipes, including a corker for walnut and raisin granary bread made in a bread-maker. He loves the sound of the word 'duke', so if you are one, look in this book to see what your friends have been eating.
Someone who could namedrop but chooses not to is the food writer Tom Parker Bowles in E is for Eating (Long Barn Books, 1.9.99); or rather the names he drops are of iconic ice-lollies of his youth — Mivvis, Zooms, Fab, Orange Maids and Tangle Twisters, whose neon-coloured, tongue-staining properties brought relief from the grisly school food that made him the whole-hearted cater he is today. He pursues his interest from Tokyo tuna auction to deep south barbecue with a stop at the local doner kebab stall, his knowledge lightly worn. This is a jolly stocking present with lively illustrations by Matthew Rice.
Another small but perfectly informed book is the re-issue of Peter Graham's Classic Cheese Cookery (Grub Street, £16.99) in which he provides 347 recipes, which beats even Nigella's total of 292, from rarebits and fondues to combinations with meat and fish, including a yummy galette of potatoes and cheese invented by the three-star Michelin chef Michel Bras. And to go with the cheese, what better than the unusual breads — a cassis and currant loaf, salt crackers or light rye flatbread discovered by Britain's star baker Dan Lepard on his travels round Europe and Russia? The Handmade Loaf (Mitchell Beazley, £20) is an inspiring read for those who make their own bread, an exercise which is pure pleasure.
Pleasure is the point of cooking and eating, and in this good year for cookery books nearly all of these mentioned have, as Gibbon said of the Roman emperor's concubines, been chosen for use rather than ostentation.
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