Paper Palate

It might sound a touch imperialistic to limit this to just British books, however, rest assured that I could write hundreds more lists, Top 10 American Cookbooks, 13 Most Cookable French Books, 7 Highly Desired Books on Preparing Tripe and so forth.

It’s a sad fact that many cooks these days simply use the most commonly available books in the supermarket or recommended by Amazon. To us Brits, this usually means Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay or Delia Smith. It also seems to me that most people don’t choose to read the bibliography so carefully listed at the end of many cookbooks, and discover the well of inspiration whence forth the book in their hands sprung from.

It could be that most people aren’t as slavishly driven by the need to discover the heritage behind certain foods as I am. This is no bad thing. We are literally tripping over cookbooks and magazines in our house, piles of them stacked in every room, and squeezed into any book-shaped nook and cranny.  I admit it, I am an obsessive cookbook collector and reader. Much to my husband’s chagrin (for he is the one who builds and consequently reinforces the bookshelves), I have recently started collecting both Time Life food series: Good Cooks and Foods of the World. Let me make this clear: I feel bad for the people that actually paid out good money to buy these new, on a monthly basis, and, after realising they’d spent well over £1000.00 on completing the collection, shamefacedly stashed them away in the attic until the next garage sale came along.

For me, some 3 decades later, these books are a rediscovered gem.

The recipes are sound and informative (due in no small part to such great contributors/editors as Richard Olney for the Good Cook series and MFK Fisher for Food of Provincial France for Foods of the World) and I regret to say that they can be picked up really cheaply online.
I am also particularly fond of the American Regrettable Food era, which is to say anything produced by the Culinary Arts in the 50s or Betty Crocker’s small series of spiral bound books. I love the joyful artwork and the frugal experimental attitude of the era. England, on the other hand, was a far more stoic place in the 50s. I could compare, England’s cuisine to America’s as Watercolours and Oil Paints – one being subdued and classical, the other bold, bright and brash.
Therefore, when Elizabeth David published her first book, Mediterranean Cookery in 1950, it was with a very gloomy reception that her book was received. How on earth could the British Housewife find such exotic produce as Avocados and Sardines (except in a tin)?

However, curiosity began to grow about ‘foreign’ cookery and in her beautifully respectful prose, David published the seminal French Country Cooking the following year. This book, coupled with Italian Food, cemented her reputation as the British forerunner for writers who took food to a literary level. Her books could be taken to bed and read, almost as novels.

I have heard Elizabeth David compared to Julia Childs (both published world famous books on French cookery) but I consider her to be more like MFK Fisher. They both had a lust for life and adventure that was enhanced through good food.
Bringing us up-to-date (I don’t like to write chronologically) we have another highly intelligent food writer whose current reputation as a bit of a sexpot has over-shadowed her culinary skill: Nigella Lawson. Many remember her early food columns in Vogue magazine, then a weekly slot on Nigel Slater’s excellent TV show, Real Food Show. Fame rapidly shot her into the stratosphere as she fronted her own cookery show that illuminated a million bored housewives kitchens: Nigella Bites. The book of the same name is a veritable goldmine of helpful tips and quick recipes for the harrassed wife and mother. It is, however, her book on baking that makes it onto my list. How To Be A Domestic Goddess is essential for anyone wishing to dip their toes into that science of baking. Her straightforward, big-sisterly prose make the most complicated recipes (and really, they don’t get much more complicated than a Christmas Cake) seem simple. 

Her latest book, Feast – Food That Celebrates Life, is a monster cookbook devoted to recipes for all occasions, from the first date to Rosh Hashanah. It is joyful in its execution and prosaic descriptions of those events that give us history and meaning.

If Nigella Lawson is your sexy big sister, then Tamasin Day-Lewis is your strict but good-natured schoolmarm. Tamasin Day-Lewis is, without doubt, the Queen of Tarts. She has published two amazing books, The Art of the Tart and Tarts with Tops on, in addition to several other highly recommended cookbooks. I consider her to be today’s Elizabeth David. Her food is sophisticated without being fussy and is grounded in an alluring combination of the French, British and Middle Eastern traditional cuisine. She is adamant and unrepentant about her crusade for people to use organic produce, to the extent that it isn’t always possible to entirely replicate to the note. However, with that in mind, she (wittingly or unwittingly) allows the reader the ability to improvise on her dishes to suit their own purses/palates/store cupboards and this is what makes her recipes so appealing. She is a very underrated food writer in her home country and more the pity because her good sense and seemingly exotic but effortless recipes are real winners.

For the lazy but enthusiastic cook we have the inimitable Nigel Slater who has stripped cooking back down to its basics, right down from the previously complicated procedure of roasting a chicken to a simple but delicious chocolate cake. His seminal work, Appetite, is revelatory in its acceptance that not everyone can afford expensive kitchen utensils or that we might actually be cooking for just one tonight. His writing is sexy and alluring and makes you want to cook, right now!
Finally, no scant list of recommended British Food Writers could be complete without Mrs Isabella Beeton, the cook who inspired many pre-war housewives into making blancmanges and holding gargantuan picnics. Whilst it has been since claimed that much of her work was plagiarised (and let’s be honest, all recipes from the last 100 years have been stolen from someone else, improved or butchered, tweeked and twisted, if this wasn’t the case, what on earth would we be eating?), she was still, nonetheless, one of the first women to produce her own cookbook (Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management in 1861) and THE first celebrity female chef, a Victoriana Nigella Lawson. When you take into consideration that she died at the age of 28, her achievements were amazing.
This is a brief list, merely skating over the ever-increasing glut of excellent British food writers. I have not made mention of Delia Smith, many of whom think revolutionised cooking in the 1970s and 1980s, just as Elizabeth David did in the 1950s, nor have I made note of Hannah Glasse who was published more than a century before Mrs Beeton or Elizabeth David’s favourite author, Eliza Acton, famed for writing one of the first domestic cookbooks, Modern Cookery for Private Families.

These are all books that our cooking heritage is based on. How many of us have inherited cookbooks from our parents or grandparents - we might not cook from them ourselves but we know that our traditional Christmas Pud recipe comes from one of those moth-eared pages and we wouldn’t want it prepared any other way than the one that evokes our special childhood memories.