Surprising literary ventures Gary Dexter
ACTION COOK BOOK
(1965)
by Len Deighton
The fact that the cover of this book by Len Deighton shows a chap cooking spaghetti while wearing a gun lends itself to many interpretations. Was spaghetti so expensive in 1965 that it needed an armed guard? Will someone be paying the ultimate price for overcooking it? Is she checking him for nits? Was Deighton’s sense of his own masculinity so fragile that he needed a shoulderholster and bird in a negligée to write about cooking? Is that an insufferably solemn question? But these are matters perhaps for the cultural historian. I will confine myself to saying that Action Cook Book was Deighton’s second cookbook, after Où est le garlic? He had already published The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water and Funeral in Berlin, and contributed a series of ‘cookstrips’ to the Observer in which cookery was presented by means of cartoon diagrams. Action Cook Book was essentially a reprinting of the cookstrips in book form, with a lengthy introduction featuring sections such as ‘The Secret Weapon in the Kitchen: The Blender’. Deighton writes good, solid cookery prose with plenty of imperatives, as if he is shouting instructions to a man on a roof. ‘Don’t let it boil!’ ‘Add plenty of mushrooms!’ ‘Don’t fillet it!’ In this idiom he tackles everything from Sauce Normande to Apple Pandowdy. My favourite piece of advice comes on page 197: ‘If you want tiny onions you can simply remove the outer layers from large ones.’
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