Cookery-books
Browsing in bed
Brenda Houghton
Iused to supervise the food photography for a colour magazine, so recently I went to an exhibition of foodie photos to catch up with old friends in the business.
To my surprise, I discovered that the snappers and home economists are all working flat out — no recession here — as publishers knock each other over in the rush to bring out more and more cookery-books packed with perfect pictures.
What is going on? In the real world, one chunk of the population can hardly afford to buy food, never mind cookery-books, a few million more live on packets of ready- cooked meals and jars of cook-in sauces, and at any given moment one in three peo- ple say they are on a diet.
So who is buying all these books? Not cooks, or not often. Illustrated books are not intended for the kitchen shelf: they are for the bedside table, for dreaming, for wish-fulfilment. And people buy whole shelves of them.
The cookery-book junkie can always jus- tify buying another fix. It's one of the few self-indulgences women can allow them- selves without feeling guilty. Suggest they spend a tenner on a jar of face-cream and they will flinch from the sinful waste. But buying a cookery-book isn't sinful: it's for the good of the family, isn't it? The martyr under the skin is very easily appeased.
And reading a recipe gives women a pleasant glow of illusory power because they can pretend for a moment that they've actually mastered it. Propped up on the pil- low, they can visualise themselves knocking out a little fish mousse, see the perfect trimming on the plate and bask in the audi- ence's satisfaction — all without the risk of it going wrong, as happens so wearily often in the kitchen. And simply reading the recipe can make you appreciate another's toil: it would take a heart of stone not to think Raymond Blanc deserves every penny he charges in his restaurant after ploughing to the end of his exhausting instructions.
Chef's books, especially, are not meant to be cooked from. They are bought to show you know who's who, even if you never eat in their restaurants. And they offer a dou- ble bonus: a guilt-free way of eating rich food. The women who bought the Roux brothers' Patisserie could mentally devour the pretty cream tarts without absorbing a calorie, and visit France without it costing a penn y.
This urge to travel without the horrible trauma of arriving is what makes foreign cuisines so peculiarly addictive to the Brits. Why else would anyone buy Texas Home Cooking or Latin American Vegetarian Cookery, except that it is pleasanter to visit these places in the mind than in the flesh.
And what a delightful form of one- upmanship if you can say to the traveller who has iust struggled back wan and worn from the jungle, 'Oh, you didn't try the frit- tered, flambded caterpillars? What a pity. It's their best thing.' You can tell whether a book is meant for people who might get up out of the chair and go into the kitchen by the number of illustrations. Serious cooks don't need pho- tographs: they know what food looks like. But the bedside browser wants colour, and this affects what is offered between hard covers.
Nobody photographs succulent roast meat and gravy, or a steak and kidney pie, because this is brown food and brown fond looks dull. So these recipes slowly disap- pear from our repertoire. I once had to drop a delicious meat loaf recipe because it couldn't help looking like dog food.
For one dreadful period, everything Was wrapped in a layer of spinach, not because it had some amazing ingredient, lake monosodium glutamate, to give a lift to every dish, but just because it was green and looked good in colour. Salmon is pho- tographed more often than cod for the same reason, though cod has far more won- derful recipes to its name. And so the glossy cookery-book goes to the coffee-table, not the kitchen. Why else ? would anyone buy 'Hello' Good Cooking. But if you really want to score, buy The Indigenous Fermented Food of the Sudan and leave it casually where it can be seen, worth every penny of its £55 as it places you firmly among the cognoscenti and flattens the critic at your table.
Texas Home Cooking, Harvard Common Press, £19.99; Latin American Vegetarian Cookery, Rider Books, £6.99; 'Hello' Good Cooking, Headline, £14.99; The Indigenous Fermented Food of the Sudan, CAB Inter- national, £55.
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