Digby Anderson
It's not her problem but that of food writing today. What to do now it's all been said, now there are enough recipes and dictionaries to last any cook a lifetime. One answer is to cover a narrow topic in detail which is what Elizabeth Romer does with pizzas (Italian Pizza and Savoury Breads, Michael O'Mara Books, £9.95). There is the history of the pizza, details about the dough and then sections on ingredients such as tomatoes and an in- teresting few pages on the hearthbreads, Schiacciate and Focacce. Game for All by Nichola Fletcher (Gollancz, £10.95) also has a narrow focus as it has 'a flavour of Scotland'. Its most successful pages are those which discuss matters such as hang- ing and ageing birds. The least successful are the recipes. Most quality books now do not try to solve the problem simply by recipes. Thus Miramar Torres (The Span- ish Table, Ebury Press, £10.95) introduces each recipe with discussion about the place or restaurant it comes from. She has less of a problem anyway since there is less of a surfeit of good Spanish recipes than French or Italian. That surfeit really does for Anna del Conte's Gastronomy of Italy (Bantam Press £19.95). It's a perfectly competent dictionary-style treatment and largely un- necessary. Some entries are better than those in existing books, but not many. That, of course, is one thoroughly desir- able solution to the problem: to do what others have done but better. Liz and Gerd Seeber (Simple Food, Doreen Kindersley, £10.95) combine three hackneyed formu- lae — whole menus for different seasons and busy people — and bring it off rather well. Most of the dishes are neither new nor very exciting but it is carefully done and they take considerable trouble to spell out how to select ingredients.
A classic solution is to mix with the recipes discursive material which is now about history, now about the ingredients, now about reminiscenses, and that is what Elisabeth Luard has done with her columns for The Field (The Princess and the Pheasant, Bantam Press, £12.95). It work- ed very well there. It doesn't work quite so well when they are collected in this book because there's a lack of linked themes. But it is good to be able to read her at her best, again and at leisure.
As one moves along the continuum, there are books in which recipes take up less than 50 per cent and the bulk of the book is given over to ingredients, history, geography, techniques and whatever. A Kitchen in Corfu by James Chatto and W. L. Martin (Weidenfeld, £10.95) is about the island, its people, their habits, how they fish, the influence of orthodox absti- nence and fasting rules, the effects of progress. This combination can read like a cookery-travel cross but in general it works, especially in the chapter on Corfu shops. Chatto and Martin show just how enjoyable and instructive non-recipe food writing can be.
At the end of the continuum are books with no recipes at all. Feasts (Constable, £12.95) is an anthology of over 100 'liter- ary' authors writing about food: Virginia Woolf, Saki, Galsworthy, Tolstoy, Pater, Tolkien, Dickens and Pliny — but most in the last century or so. One cannot say that even the French authors actually wrote very well about it but the editors, Christ- opher Bland and Linda Kelly, have made a very enjoyable collection. Eat Your Heart Out (Macmillan, £10.95) is a sustained and very persuasive argument against the food fanatics and particularly the anti-fat fana- tics. Dr James Le Fanu argues that food is not an important cause of illness in West- ern society, disputes the claimed links between heart disease and animal fats, is dismissive of the noisily trumpeted virtues of fibre and generally exposes the scientific failings and contradictions of the new politicised food puritans. Whatever the virtues of these last three books, it is surely the Le Fanu, Bland and Chatto books which point the way out of the current cul de sac in food writing.
Of course, there will always be a need for some recipe books and, even more certainly, a demand for them. More in- terestingly, there may well be books which look as if they are recipe books but which are not quite what they seem. My Gastro- nomy (Ebury Press, £16.95) is somewhat like this. It is by a restaurateur and, surrounded by autobiography and com- ments, there are recipes. One of the things that makes Nico Ladenis an unusually good restaurateur is his care to choose recipes which work in a restaurant. They are not necessarily the sort of recipes which work well in a domestic kitchen which functions rather differently. Indeed much of the ghastly Saturday night dinner-party food I complain about in The Spectator comes from cooks trying to reproduce at home dishes best left to restaurants. It's not that the Ladenis recipes cannot be used at home but that they are not the best things to cook at home. There is also a rather monotonous diet of 'the best things'; salmon, duck, fillet steak, lobster, bass. Not a stew in sight and next to no pork. It is not — as far as meat and fish ingredients go — a wide diet. But the recipes are imaginative and very skilfully put together, many including ideas which any cook will find interesting. That is the key. Despite the presence of recipes, this book is not really a recipe book but a book about Ladenis and his cooking. Treated like that it is informative and amusing.
There's much to disagree with — his advocacy of dried basil, or only one hot dish per meal at home, his preference for drinking car-battery water — the non- tasting mineral waters — and he is, as are many chefs, decidedly dodgy when allowed to talk about colours, art, flowers on tables etc. But Ladenis on food is fascinating and it would have been good to have more, and to have it neat, undiluted by pages and pages of photos of the author, his preferred white plates and his menus. But it is not the publishers' fault. They are simply catering for demand. There is clearly a demand for themes, instant answers, having the reader-cook's mediocre efforts and tastes flattered, and most of all for the idea that possessing at home another book with lots of photos of dishes like those served in fine restaurants is half way to producing them.
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