Three star cooks
Elfreda Pownall
JAMIE’S ITALY by Jamie Oliver Penguin, £20, pp. 336, ISBN 0718147707 V £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 ARABESQUE by Claudia Roden Penguin/Michael Joseph, £25, pp. 352, ISBN 071814581X V £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 THE KITCHEN DIARIES by Nigel Slater Fourth Estate, £25, pp. 400, ISBN 0007199481 V £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Going to Italy for his latest book, Jamie’s Italy, Jamie Oliver is, in a sense, coming home. Though he learnt to cook in his parents’ pub in Essex, all his early professional experience was in restaurants serving good, authentic Italian food. He worked for Gennaro Contaldi, Antonio Carluccio and, of course, at the River Café, where he was discovered and made a television star. Jamie’s recent television series have had a serious purpose, improving the abysmal standards of school dinners and helping disadvantaged young people find a trade and self-respect through cooking. Though he presents this latest book as a busman’s holiday, irrepressible high spirits to the fore, one senses he is really pondering why Italy has the strong food culture that we lack in Britain. He is not blinkered about modern Italy (acknowledging that these days a salad there can mean a scrap of Iceberg lettuce) and occasionally finds the partisan attitude that will countenance no recipe save that from one’s own village stifling; yet he celebrates the spirit of the people he meets along his journey and their close relationship to their produce and cooking. His recipes are terrific, sophisticated in conception, yet, as always with Jamie, easy to make. The method for cooking dried beans, keeping the skins soft by adding a potato and two tomatoes to the cooking water, is very clever and both his caponata and mushrooms cooked in paper bags are delicious. The book is full of dishes one wants to cook, with photographs to make one feel hungry — just as well, as the helpings are huge.
When Claudia Roden’s first classic cookery book, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, was published in 1968, it was a revelation. She wrote in an evocative way about the dishes (and the way of life) she had lost in coming to Europe. It was difficult then to find many of her ingredients and the names of the dishes were strange to our ears. Now, thanks largely to her pioneering work, we can buy pomegranate molasses in Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer sells ready-meal tagines. In Arabesque, Roden revisits the cooking of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, telling the culinary history of each of the countries and bringing their cultures vividly to life; one can almost smell the cumin-laden smoke of the night-time food stalls at the Djemma-elFna in Marrakech and the scent of rosewater that is poured over visitors’ hands in hospitable houses. Roden presents classic recipes with a new slant, inspired by a new generation in those countries which no longer use Primus stoves or send dishes to be cooked in the baker’s oven as they did when she wrote her first book. Her mezze are delicious (aubergine slices with pomegranate, yoghurt and tahini), as are her tagines (a particularly good one is made from lamb with dates and almonds) and there are simple, scented desserts. I wish there were fewer photographs of the tagines (one stew looks much like another), and a picture of such things as m’hencha, the almond snake, might have made preparing it easier. But that is a small cavil about a good book.
In their books Jamie and Claudia are coming home, but Nigel Slater has never left. The Kitchen Diaries follows a year of cooking and eating in his home and garden. It is a true diary; all the entries are dated and the food is photographed on the day it is made. On 23 February, a day of slush and treacherous ice, he buys some oxtail from the butcher for a rich braise, then makes a treacle tart to go with it — it is the perfect food for that time of year and that weather. On 25 February, feeling he has been eating too much meat recently, he makes piquant warm soused mackerel with sauté potatoes. We look with him at the remains of his fridge’s vegetable compartment to see what he can make from them (a delicious soup). We hear about snacks and a few failures too, a boring cabbage and apple salad (‘I’d rather have had fish fingers and chips’) and something else gets burnt. We watch as he spreads tomatoes from the garden on the kitchen table — their vines had been blown down by the wind — and we can almost taste, so evocative is his writing, the salad that he makes from them. We hear the ‘blip and putter’ of a Bolognese sauce as it slowly cooks.
Slater has never set foot in Tesco; he shops only at specialist suppliers and farmers’ markets, choosing what is in season. He lives the life most keen cooks would love to live, showing how it could and should be. But the purpose of the book is not to make us into culinary stalkers; it is to point out good ingredients at their perfect moment and show us how to shop and eat seasonally and well. This attention to one man’s kitchen life would seem obsessive or irrelevant only to someone who does not know and love Nigel Slater through his cookery books. And I don’t know one keen cook who is not an avid Nigel fan, nor one who would not find this book invaluable. With The Kitchen Diaries Slater has become the foodie Pepys.
Elfreda Pownall is Food and Interiors Editor of Stella, the Sunday Telegraph magazine.
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