Summer Cooking
By LESLIE ADRIAN
A HARBINGER of summer fell through my letterbox early last month—the new edition of Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking.
For the last seven years this irresistible book has been a familiar of our kitchen—a reminder that, irrespective of the weather forecast, summer for the gourmet starts with the arrival of the earliest Jersey potatoes and the first hard green gooseberries, and carries on until the black- berries disappear from the shops and the aubergines start to wrinkle. Summer Cooking is a perpetual encouragement to come in out of the sun (bearing if possible a bunch of fresh herbs, a trugful of young vegetables and a basket of new-laid eggs), and get down to the agreeable task of creating a summery meal.
Not that Elizabeth David suggests (as the glossy magazines perennially do) that all summer days are hot and all summer food should be cold. She works on the principle that the fruits of each season, hot or cold, should be exploited and enjoyed to the full—that money lavished on early strawberries, salmon trout and fresh asparagus is money well spent. whereas the soggy strawberries, leather scampi and other icebound summer luxuries that are pulled out of the freezer in February are mere extravagances that earn no rewards.
The arrival of a fine new edition of Summer Cooking (Museum Press, 12s. 6d.), and the tatty state of my old copy, jolted me into sorting through my cumbersome collection of cookery books, dividing the grimy few that are in con- stant use from the immaculate multitude that are hardly ever touched.
The few in this instance amounted to six slim volumes, three hard-covers and three Penguins' Fifty bob almost covers the lot; which is 20s* less than it costs to buy the stodgy volume (Put together by fifty-eight experts) which takes Mrs. Beeton's name in vain, or that bewildering Constance Spry compendium for hostesses rather than cooks. The most basic book of the six is Bee Nilson's Penguin Cookery Book (6s.). It does for cookery what Professor Gombrich does for the visual arts in his Story of Art. It is simple, complete and precise, and steers successfully between the Scylla and the Charybdis that have sabotaged so many cookbooks for beginners: textbook flat- ness and Children's Hour condescension. The Pocket Guide to Good Cooking (15s.), by Robin McDouall, though more selective and idiosyncratic, is no more pretentious. The gentle wittiness of the writing never degenerates into the irritating archness so often adopted by male Cookery writers who are not professional cooks. The recipes make no optimistic assumptions about the reader's expertise.
It was Mr. McDouall's knack of making suc- cess with a recipe seem inevitable (almost!) even for the griffin, that attracted me to his book when it was first published eight years ago. It is his amusing mixture of economy and extravagance, of improvisation and studied care that has kept it in constant use in our kitchen ever since.
,My only complaint about Good Cooking is that its publishers, Collins, have allowed it to go out of print.
• fw o books which give the lie to a cherished tenet of the housewives' creed-that the frying Pan, the can-opener and the deep-freezer are the quickest way out of the bothersome business of Preparing meals-are Edouard de Pomain's Cooking in Ten Minutes (Cassirer, 12s. 6d.) and Plats du Jour, by Patience Grey and Primrose Boyd (Penguin, 3s. 6d.).
Cooking in Ten Minutes is a crisp essay on the art of the possible. It is a gathering of hon- est recipes any one of which, allowing a modest margin for the Gallic exaggerations of its skilful author, can be prepared in a few minutes; not a manual of mock-ups and short cuts, a collec- tion of instant bisques or lightning gdteaux.
M. de Pomaine's lucid little recipes almost seem to jump out of the page and demand to be composed. The print is large, and the instruc- tions short and transparently clear. (The book includes the only completely foolproof recipe for Hollandaise sauce that I have ever come across.) And if a meal cannot always be pre- pared with quite the sure-fire panache that he predicts, his book stimulates you into having a jolly good try.
Patience Gray tackles the time problem from the opposite end. She works on the sane prin- ciple that life would be so much simpler for the part-time cook if everyday meals consisted of a plat du jour (usually from a casserole), salad, fruit and cheese-meals that make far less work and washing-up than the conventional soup, meat-and-two-veg and pudding. It is a way of eating that has enabled our household to dine well every night, though the cook seldom gets home before 8 p.m.
The meat of Miss Gray's book is a tempting selection of plats, most of which can be made hours, or days, in advance. The 'starters' are several useful sections on stores, equipment, herbs and the basic methods of applying heat; the 'afters' two informative chapters on cheeses and fungi.
Quite the most battered book in our kitchen is Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking (now a 5s. Penguin). But as I am confident that it is silting, similarly time-stained and dishevelled, in the kitchens of nearly everybodywho reads the back pages of this journal, it would be super- fluous for me to spend any space on it here.
Summer Cooking completes the half-dozen.
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