Roundabout
Books for Cooks
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN
MOST people would agree that the one section of English cooking which is probably going up is the top section: that whereas the masses may be eating more revolting things every year, the top cooks are taking an interest which would have been unthinkable before the war. And one of the things which dis- tinguishes them from their grandmothers is that they have probably got far more of it from books than from demonstration. This makes peculiarly interesting the exhibition now on at the National Book League (open to all), an exhibition of books on wine and food, some rare, in Latin or in leather, the rest actually in print.
The number of cookery books around is really startling. There are the straightforward national ones: Italian food, Greek food, Russian food, and so on. There are the vast compendiums which, I must admit, I am quite unable to cope with, however good they are: since I never know where to begin. Fanny Farmer is in double columns, Constance Spry weighs half a ton, Mrs. Beeton's inadequacies have been dealt with by abler pens than mine. And there are the books which it is hard to tell whether they were inspired by some lunatic quirk of fancy or by the simple desire to get out yet another cookery book—books like Cookery from No. ID, Cooking for Texture, Cooking with Yogurt and Food for Pleasure (what else it is for, for heaven's sake?).
But it is well to be wary about titles: some excellent books may lurk beneath excruciating names. The most sensible and amusing book for relative beginners I know is called The Right Way to his Heart (by Evelyn Board), and it is dedicated to 'My husband and son, without whose cast-iron digestions, etc. etc.,' Lucie Marion's first book is called Be Your Own Chef, a title that could have been specially Chosen to combine snobbery with an unjustified optimism, and yet it is an excellent and readable book. (This one, actually, looks more ,difficult than it is—it being one of the paradoxes of cookery writing that if everything is explained step by step the recipes look difficult; a vague outline is far harder to follow, but may look quite simple.) The titles of cookery books may not tell one much but the pictures, it seems to me, tell one a great deal. The best books seem to permit them- selves a few austere line drawings at most. Most step-by-step photographs are far harder to follow than any written instruction (though in fairness I would have to except Louise Davies's See How to Cook, which makes me feel that one day when I am feeling strong I actually might be able to skin a rabbit). The really suspect category of cooking illustrations, to my mind, are the big, lush, overblown photographs of finished dishes, always taken at an impossible angle and usually adorned with flowers. Books with pictures like that are all too apt to go in for the kind of food which looks good instead of tasting good; and anyone who has ever attended a photo- graphic session for cookery has no faith in such pictures at all: the heat of the lights wilts the lettuce, the sausages glaze, the aspic dissolves; indeed it is surprising that there is no book yet called Cooking for Photography. The glossy magazines, who know their onions on this kind of thing, have the sense to photograph a string of them raw, not a picture of the final onion pie.
One of the sad things about the exhibition was the realisation of how many good cookery books have gone out of print—Wilson Midgeley's splendid Cookery for Men Only, that was written the opposite way round to most books: instead of saying 'For a cheese soufflé you need cheese and flour' it said 'If you go to the larder and find cheese, this is what you could make . . And Marie Galatti's book was not in evidence —small, personal, without that suspicion of 'recipe collecting' that is apt to spoil larger books, at least of all those who do not bring to their books the informed discipline and dedica- tion to a particular cuisine that Elizabeth David brings to French cookery.
The two questions the exhibition sets one asking are, first, what one really needs a cookery book for (once you are past the very first stages); and second, what it is about one recipe that makes you want to cook it, while you simply turn the page on another. Granted that you may need a compendium as an encyclopaedia, that you rarely go back to a cookery primer for new recipes any more than to any other schoolbook, it must be that the main job of cookery books is inspirational; and only secondarily instruc- tional. This applies equally, I think, whichever of the two alternative ways of enlarging your repertoire you choose: whether you learn more and more different ways of cooking lamb, say, all the ways being French; or whether you stick to one basic method like the casserole, but use the entirely different flavourings of different countries—paprika or chilli or rosemary.
It may be the juxtaposition of materials that makes recipes about lemons and herbs, wine and lamb, apples and butter so much more com- pelling than something called Directions for soaking Fish in Lye; it may be the tang of child- hood or a forgotten holiday or a port or an orchard; the one essential quality is prose that stirs you as the smell of food stirs you; prosq that reads as the food tastes. In the end, it matters even more that the authors are writers than that they are cooks.
Previous page
