Some of the books I’ve had longest and treasure most are cookbooks (cookery books? cookbooks is shorter)so it is time I wrote about some of them.
My sister gave me a present of 500 Recipes: Bedsitter Cookery by Marguerite Patten, in the late ’70s.Katherine Whitehorn brought out a much more celebrated book on bedsitter cookery, which I bought for curiosity value (Cooking in a Bedsitter, London: Penguin 1961), and it is good too, but it has a kind of amused (‘isn’t this a hoot’) tone that isn’t in Patten at all. Patten knew that lots of single women and men lived in bedsitters all their lives, on these islands, and she was writing for them as well as for students and young workers. (Someone close to me, a white-collar worker, lived quite happily in a bedsitter until she was 65 – in the 1990s – and became eligible for social housing.) And because Patten was actually a career cook, who broadcasted and toured Britain during the Second World War, she knew exactly how to ‘make do’ with limited ingredients in small spaces. Practical and no-nonsense, 500 Recipes tells you how to heat tinned salmon, how to make fruit salad and how to get the best out of canned or packaged ‘savoury rice’. There are serviceable recipes for quick moussaka and quick goulash, evaporated milk white sauce (quite good) and a bolognese sauce. There are no illustrations, but there is lots of very practical, basic information I still have recourse to, and the simplest kedgeree recipe I ever saw, one of its ingredients being ‘cream from the top of the milk’.
Next up was a book nearly all my generation acquired in the 1980s, Your Favourite Recipes from Theodora Fitzgibbon. (My copy has long since fallen apart and I parted with my replacement, alas). It had all the exciting, innovative meals we made for each other when we visited each others’ flats/houses in our 20s and 30s – chili con carne, goulash, moussaka, bolognese and so on. Fitzgibbon was a literary figure, but the cookbook our mothers all had, Full and Plenty (1960) was also written by a literary figure, Maura Laverty, and contained short stories, so we weren’t surprised by this. (I’ve written about Laverty’s cookbooks before).
My mother-in-law gave me a present of Darina Allen’s A Simply Delicious Christmas in 1988 ( a loaded gift? I didn’t mind) and I used that green and red paperback until it literally fell apart. After some years I found a second-hand replacement copy in the Oxfam bookshop on Parliament Street in Dublin (a great shop, by the way). Darina is really good on the cake, mince-pies, pudding and the cookies (pinwheel cookies!), and smoked salmon-scrambled egg kind of things, but she advises cooking the turkey without foil, and she only allows an hour and a half for the goose! (But every newspaper and magazine has turkey and goose recipes coming up to Christmas.) Still, she has very good stuffing and sauce recipes, and a manageable and adaptable St Stephen’s Day pie for the leftovers, and a Yule log my sister swears by. There are atmospheric photographs of some of the dishes. I’ve dallied with a number of Christmas cookbooks since then – including the beautifully-styled but annoyingly aspirational-under-the-guise-of-being-traditional ICA(Irish Countrywomen’s Association) one that came out in 2015 – but none have proven as useful as Darina Allen’s.
Her Traditional Irish Cooking, which I bought when it came out in 1995, is also excellent on all the different kinds of griddle and bastable bread, treacle bread, bocáire and yellow buck, and on vegetables, and potatoes (champ and boxty and the like). It has dreamy photographs of old delph in old kitchens, an open fire, corn fields, breads, coloured meringues and a slightly-lopsided orange sponge cake which, because of this tiny flaw, looks far more appetising than the picture-perfect ones in other cookbooks.
I loved Nigella Lawson’s food articles in British Vogue in the 1990s, so when she brought out her first cookbook How To Eat in 1998 I bought it. Weirdly and a little pretentiously, all the photographs in How To Eat are of utensils, not food, and there is no photograph of the gorgeous author herself. The writing, however, is frank and friendly, and miraculously unsnobby for somebody from an upper-middle-class background (British political royalty) although a lot of the recipes she thought were ‘retro’ seemed very modern to me and when she wrote that she’d scream if she saw another ciabatta, I had to ask, what’s a ciabatta? She has some good recipes, including a children’s birthday chocolate cake that never fails, and she’s my go–to for things like risotto and ratatouille. She also has some good Christmas recipes, oddly, given that she is Jewish. There is very little Jewish cuisine in the book, though latkes make a cameo appearance; she doesn’t keep kosher. Her Cook, Eat, Repeat, which I was gifted a few years ago, is a great read with some good recipes (rhubarb flapjacks, peanut-butter and chocolate cake, chicken with orzo), and the lasagne she cooks for special occasions with her adult children. A few bits of forgivable pretension aside, both books reveal her to be the kind of person you’d enjoy talking to. Absurdly, I feel as if I know her – maybe because she is just two days older than me. I can’t be the only woman to have a girl-crush on Nigella.
Judging by the few photos of himself in his book, but more so because of his cooking, I could also fall head over heels for Tom Norrington-Davies, whose excellent Just Like Mother Used To Make, came out in 2003. Not only the dust-jacket, but the front cover, has long fallen off my copy, exposing its pretty red-gingham end-papers, and the pages are full of my scribbled amendments and suggestions. It was this book that taught me how to make one of my all-time favourite dishes, Lancashire hot-pot, but it has almost an entire chapter on scones and other breads, including a really good recipe for eggless scones. It is almost impossible to find recipes for those 70s-80s staples stroganoff and moussaka and even lasagne in modern cookbooks (Nigella aside), but this one has them, and a good vegetarian lasagne too, and a really good ratatouille, which, he explains, is simply a vegetable stew. He also demystifies French toast by calling it eggy bread.The photographs show reassuringly ordinary food in warm yellows and reds in homely settings.
The Irish Countrywomen’s Association brought out a series of cookbooks in the second decade of this century and the best of these, to my mind, is their Book of Bread and Baking (2019). Although it contains some atrocities (like a ‘mystery cake’ that contains tomato soup), it has the best soda-bread, spotted dick, crumble, queen cake, carrot cake and scone recipes I’ve ever seen. The photographs and linking texts are really good and all the recipes are attributed to individuals. (Rather worryingly though, it reproduces Maura Laverty’s ‘Ballad of an Irish Wheat-Field’ as a ‘traditional ballad’. Her cookery book Full and Plenty is acknowledged as the source but it is implied that Laverty quoted, rather than wrote, the poem.)
My favourite new cookbook is Neven Maguire’s The Nation’s Favourite Food (2013), which I only discovered in the past year. It actually has (among other things) a recipe for French Onion Soup (impossible to find in most cookbooks), a really good Indian Lamb Bhuna, and Roasted Root Vegetables in Buttermilk. This book also taught me to let the ingredients catch the bottom of the pan when making a stew or casserole or bolognese, so as to enhance the flavour, and then deglaze all with vinegar or wine. This is a really good tip and I don’t know how I’ve cooked so long without it.
I want to finish with a book that holds a special place in my heart; the Ritz London Book of Afternoon Tea by Helen Simpson(2006). Simpson is a novelist and short-story writer, so her evocation of the history of afternoon tea and tea-drinking and all that goes with it is well-written as well as authoritative. There is a lot about the different kinds of teas, a tantalising description of preparations for afternoon tea at the Ritz (they use specially-baked long loaves for their sandwiches) and delicate little illustrations (unattributed), all of nineteenth and early twentieth century people drinking tea or making crumpets. There are quotations from literary works too. Eccles cakes, scones, the simplest Victoria sponge ever, and lots of appetising sandwich fillings and toast spreads such as ‘devilled ham’ and cinnamon, feature in this lovely little book. But particularly welcome is her chapter on High Tea, a meal that used to happen around 6 in the evening :
What you will find at High Tea: a large table spread with a white cloth; a heavy brown Firestone teapot pouring tea strong enough, as they say, to trot a mouse on; a side of smoked ham, perhaps, or an egg-and-bacon pie; a generous wedge of cheese; a dish of tomatoes and a bunch of watercress; some savoury dish like potted shrimps or even jugged kippers; scrambled eggs; bread-and-butter with pots of jam and honey; a plate of sandwiches; hot toasted tea-cakes; and appetite-cutting cakes, often baked from recipes unique to the region, full of dried fruit and oatmeal and ginger.
In our house growing up, ‘tea’ (we never called it high tea but that was what it was)was the ‘smaller’ meal we had in the evening, but it was also the meal my mother served to visitors, because dinners in those days were utilitarian, crude meals designed to satisfy basic hunger rather than please palates, served at midday in steamy kitchens, not in more elegant dining-rooms in the evening. My mother’s legendary ‘tea’ was either a plated salad, where all the ingredients except for the eggs and tinned fish or cold meat, were from our suburban garden, accompanied by tea and bread-and-butter, (her peerless home-made brown soda bread and good white loaf bread freshly cut in the kitchen), or the combination of egg, sausages, rashers, puddings and tomatoes often called a ‘fry’ but which, apart from the egg, were all cooked under the grill in our house. There was apple or rhubarb tart to follow, and sometimes a Victoria sponge, too, and inevitably a fruit cake of some kind. Nobody has high tea any more, which is very sad, because it is my favourite meal, and Simpson is one of the few cookery writers I’ve come across who celebrates it.
Marguerite Patten, 500 Recipes: Bedsitter Cookery. (London: Hamlyn 1970). Another of her books, which has mostly historical value, is We’ll Eat Again: a collection of recipes from the war years (London: Hamlyn 1985 in association with the Imperial War Museum) which I bought in one of those Times Past shops (now gone, sadly). There are lots of good recipes in this too – I made the parsley honey once, and the borscht has become a staple.
Theodora Fitzgibbon, Your Favourite Recipes From Theodora Fitzgibbon (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1981, reprinted several times.) She used to write a food column for the Irish Times, hence the ‘favourite’, no doubt people wrote in and asked her for them. She also wrote Irish Traditional Food (London: Pan 1984) which I also had until it fell apart. It was very scholarly but a bit boring.
Darina Allen, A Simply Delicious Christmas (Dublin: RTE/Gill & Macmillan 1989). She brought out a new glossy revised edition of this with Gill in 2014 which I bought and gave away. It lacks the simplicity of the original, contains a lot of unnecessary recipes (nobody wants innovation at Christmas), and, interestingly, instead of describing Christmas at Cullohill (where she grew up), describes Christmas at Ballymaloe, which sounds crowded and chaotic.
Darina Allen, Irish Traditional Cooking (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1995).
Nigella Lawson, How to Eat: the pleasures and principles of good food (London: Chatto & Windus 1998.
Tom Norrington-Davies, Just Like Mother Used To Make (London: Cassell 2003).
Neven Maguire, The Nation’s Favourite Food (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 2013). Neven is living proof that chefs do not have to be horrible or even difficult people, and his engaging personality comes across in his writing.
Helen Simpson, The Ritz London Book of Afternoon Tea: the art and pleasures of taking tea. (London: Ebury 2006). This book often turns up on remainder piles and in second-hand bookshops. Pounce on it!
Nigella Lawson, Cook, Eat, Repeat: ingredients, recipes, stories. (London: Chatto & Windus 2020).
NOTE: I haven’t mentioned all the cookbooks I valued over the years, here. Desperation Dinners by Beverly Mills & Alicia Ross (I can’t remember the date of publication or the place, but it was American and 1990s) was a great boon for a while during the ultra- busy years; it eventually fell apart. I’ve parted with two copies of the vegetarian The New Laurel’s Kitchen (1986 I think, also American) with its brown cover and very engaging introductory comments on life and appetite and general slowness and appreciation of the good things in American life – I will buy it if I ever find it again anywhere, and this time I’ll keep it, but more for the philosophy than the recipes, which are a bit austere.
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