Cook books

[Levin]

What are your favourite cookery books or books about food?

I nearly picked up Roast Chicken & Other Stories but I'm not sure. I do miss book sized food books though.

[imp]

I've got most of Nigel Slater's - I'm a fan of his approach to flavour, meat quality, vague measurements and improvisation of ingredients. I raved about the first couple (I think 'The 30-Minute Cook Book' was the first one I bought), and then my family just kept buying them for me as an easy option Xmas present. Which is good, because his chatty style makes them the kind of books that are a casual but rewarding browse during the festive season.

[imp]

More on Nigel - at one point we shared the same literary agent. But I never got to meet him at the agency Xmas party or anything, because that agent dumped me. They say you never get over being dumped by your first agent, but I did. I just never got over not getting to meet Nige. Though I did spot him in his favourite butcher's shop in Highbury once. I was outside looking in, and he was looking pensively at some lamb chops. I left him to it and wondered on down the street.

[diggedy derek]

I am not a religious man. However.


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[diggedy derek]

I like Nigel Slater a lot for sure, not so much on TV, but in his books. Lots of his ideas have stayed with me a lot, like making a meal from just spaghetti parsley and garlic or something. Or his argument that mushrooms in a bap makes for a great meal.

[Levin]

That was going to be a follow up question actually. Which Nigel Slater? There were a lot of them in Waterstones

[diggedy derek]

Appetite is great.

[San Bernardhinault]

I'm not sure I have a favourite cook book. My favourite books about food are Alan Davidson's wonderful Oxford Companion to Food; and Jeffrey Steingarten's columns collected in The Man Who Ate Everything - that said, I read that a while back and I fear that my (reading) tastes have changed and he might annoy me now; I loved it when I read it.

When I was younger and wanted recipes I always went back to Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery and Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food.

These days, I guess the Ottolenghi books are all great for inspiration and recipes, and for just the basics, the American The Joy Of Cooking basically tells you how to do any of the things you didn't know (or remember) how to do.

[caja-dglh]

I have rather a lot of cookbooks.

[ursus arctos]

I do as well, and find the original question essentially impossible to answer without some idea of what Gregario is looking for/likes to eat/etc

[San Bernardhinault]

The number of cook books I've owned is pretty huge. I/We have purged them on a number of occasions to remove ones we'd not looked at in a couple of years. Two christmases ago we did a 12-days-of-cookmas where we cooked a recipe from a different book for each day, and going along the shelves found a lot more books that didn't have anything that interested us, or was either WAY too complicated and took days to make, or was way too simple and not worth bothering with. They got purged, too. So we're now down to only a couple of shelves full.

[imp]

One of my non-Nige favourites I bought in the US - Cooking Slow by Andrew Schloss. In winter especially I'm fond of shoving a pot or tray of stuff in the oven and letting it cook all day at a very low temperature (usually 80-90 degrees) as the smells start to waft through the flat. Heightens the appetite and anticipation, while the taste always makes everyone think you're a culinary genius when all you did was follow some simple instructions to whack a load of ingredients into a pot and push it into the heat.

[Sporting]

My partner is scared of leaving any electric etc. appliance on while nobody is at home. She's scared of flooding, fire...

[Levin]

I'm not looking for anything in particular. I'm just interested in what books other people rate. Either for the food or for the writing.

As a category they are my most populous non-fiction type.

There are so many, and they have so many different purposes. McGee is fun to dip in and out of to read. Rhodes British Classics is fantastic for good versions of classic things. I love all my Blanc books but maybe because he's the first chef I discovered myself rather than getting from my dad. Child has a number of essential childhood recipes although looking through it it does seem rather dated. I probably use the Ottolenghi books more than any others but I don't read them. And that's barely the tip of it.

[ad hoc]

I used to buy quite a lot of cookbooks, and really enjoyed them (and have a lot of favourite recipes that come from those books). But for a couple of key reasons, I haven;t bought one for years and years - firstly because I don't have access to English language bookshops for the most part, and cookbooks are usually heavy (meaning either buying while overseas and carrying back, or ordering online, can be prohibitively expensive or difficult), and secondly because my cooking these days is more based around available ingredients - I go to the market, see what veg looks really good and in season, buy it, and stock my cupboards with non perishable essentials. Then i find it easier to search for recipes online that use the ingredients I have (search engines are much better than recipe book indexes for this purpose). Partly I regret this, as like I say, a good cookbook is more than just a thing with some recipes in, but at the same time it does seem a bit more sustainable in a couple of ways

[diggedy derek]

Isn't the McGee book a favourite of Heston Blumenthal? I read a bit of it at my brother's house. I thought it was absolutely fascinating the way it broke down what exactly happens to a piece of fish or meat as it responds to heat. It was just amazing. I have no idea how I'd incorporate it into my cooking, but it was like (say) a writer absorbing some slice of the deep history of linguistics.

[imp]

Frau imp asked me this morning if I'd be making dinner. Nah, I said, can't be arsed. Which has largely been my attitude since the girls moved out. Then I read this thread again, texted her to say I'd be cooking after all, went to the Kleinmarkthalle (indoor market hall - which is a great place at all times, but even better in the earlier part of the morning when there's hardly anyone there, full of the aromas of spices, fruit and veg, cheeses, hams, freshly baked bread...), and now there's chicken cacciatore slow-cooking in the oven at 95 degrees. I can't really explain why, but I was partly inspired by the thread about VT's passing - maybe all the tributes to him living his life to the full, and I thought, "I don't do that every day of my life, like The Exploding Vole said we should after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I need to stop wasting too many of my remaining days getting depressed about the fucking news."

There's enough for about six people if anyone fancies popping by later.

[San Bernardhinault]

McGee is great to dip in and out of. When I went through a phase of having all my mayos and aiolis fail to emulsify I read McGee’s section on it and there was something in his explanation of how the science works that triggered something in my brain, I changed what I was doing, and suddenly they all worked again.

[ursus arctos]

The Kleinmarkthalle is the single thing I miss the most about FFM

[Greenlander]

Count me as another in the Nige camp. It might be around thirty years old and some of the recipes can be very much of their time but I just love my dog-eared, no fancy photos, closely typed Penguin copy of his Real Fast Food. My recipe notebook is stuffed with cuttings from his Observer column too. Not only is his style easy to read and it's probably because I'm a fan that I find if I do use one of his ideas last minute I've got most of the stuff required in the cupboard. In fact I think I might do his sausage, onion and pasta recipe tonight.

And if you're into vegetarian food his Greenfeast book is pretty decent too.

For some reason we've got far too many Jamie Oliver cookbooks, but I just can't get along with his style. This isn't anything to do with his blokey, indie plodding early years or his more recent anti turkey twizzler crusading but because whatever I choose inevitably requires a trip to the shops. He's rightly pared this back recently but the damage has been done.

[Sean of the Shed]

My partner is scared of leaving any electric etc. appliance on while nobody is at home. She's scared of flooding, fire...

To be honest, Sporting, I wasn't sure you actually had electricity until you posted that.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Marcella Hazan
Some of the Moro books
Roden Middle East as mentioned above
Carluccio on Italian veg
and I remain fascinated by an Eastern European penguin cookbook I bought in the 80s, now falling apart

[Levin]

My go to pasta book is by Giuliano Hazan (The Classic Pasta Cookbook) and Locatelli (Made in Italy) for more general Italian. I use the Locatelli method for every ragu I do.

For reference I do use DKs The Cook's Book. It is very thin, just a handful of recipes on a massive number of topics, but each topic is written by a master of that area.

I was browsing at Foyles yesterday and there is still a race on to produce the least practical cookbook. To sell something that is unusable in the kitchen. The cookbooks I got from my parents are mostly paperbacks with a couple of larger format hardback reference works. I guess people won't buy books like that any more, you need to have a full A4 page photo of every dish to just keep up with everyone else. Some of the restaurant books on sale are ridiculous though, who has the shelving for a book that's 50 x 30 x 10?

[Levin]

Has anyone else used he Silver Spoon book? I gave it away in the end. It looked pretty but none of the recipes turned out anything interesting or good.

[Tony C]

More on Nigel - at one point we shared the same literary agent. But I never got to meet him at the agency Xmas party or anything, because that agent dumped me. They say you never get over being dumped by your first agent, but I did. I just never got over not getting to meet Nige. Though I did spot him in his favourite butcher's shop in Highbury once. I was outside looking in, and he was looking pensively at some lamb chops. I left him to it and wondered on down the street.

An extract from ‘Toast’ was used in an AQA English Language GCSE paper a few years ago.