Cookery Books

Before I got hot and cold running Internet plumbed in at home, my days off would often consist of wandering round Waterstones, flicking through whatever caught my eye and generally using it as a library. It has comfy chairs dotted around, and even an in store coffee shop, so this behaviour is encouraged. Obviously, a fair chunk of my time consisted of perusing the cookery section, which had clearly been arranged to fit into what book store's curatorial mindset envisaged to be the 'lifstyle and hobby' section of the first floor. There is always plenty of new product to be shifted in the food section, and this is in Sheffield where the availability is miserly compared with say, Nottingham's branch. New cook books tend to fall into one of two categories.

The first is the telly spin off. Every time a presenter or named chef has a new series on one of the major terrestrial channels, their publishing arm throws together an accompanying volume, containing usually next to no information you couldn't have gleaned watching the program in the first place. These books are photo-heavy, a trait which we will see has infected nearly all cookery writing. They also contain recipes. Telly cooking nowardays is almost completely bereft of recipes. An unspoken agreement between producer and viewer exists whereby neither is really fooled that they are being given any sort of culinary instruction. Instead it is all location shots and shaky cameras, intent concentration faces and, here we go again, 'passion'. With a few rare exceptions, no one cooks the stuff they see on telly. When it is finally reproduced in recipe form, with plenty of close up photographs of food stylists' trickery and screenshots from the series, next to no one cooks it then either. More often than not, they are bought as birthday and Christmas presents, for that person you know who is a bit into food. They thank you profusely, pore over the pictures, and then the tome is consigned to the shelf or coffee table to moulder in useless perpetuity. 

'Coffee Table Book' is a phrase rarely heard these days, but the idea persists. It is not the sole preserve of cooking, in fact it is a form better suited to visual media. Art, fashion and architecture are all ripe for coffe table bookishness because they are suited to lavish illustrative glossy reproduction. Unfortunately, the very same thing has happened to food. The second form that many new publications take, is the chef/restaurant book. Just as the telly spin off is designed to sell a programme's own advertising, so is the chef's/restaurant's book an excellent money spinner, whilst at the same time promoting that individual and the business they represent. Again, the same formula holds true, big glossy photos on heavy gauge pages designed to within an inch of their lives, accompanied here and there with recipes that no one is going to cook. 

If you accept that both types are of little practical use, then at least the second type is far more interesting, dense, and maybe, has a few practical tips and ideas if nothing else. I can think of three stand out examples of this form that deserve a place on the bookshelf of anyone who takes food seriously. The first is Thomas Keller's 'French Laundry Cookbook', now over a decade old, but still an absolute classic from a chef and restaurant that I don't feel silly to call legendary. Heston Blumenthal's 'The Fat Duck Cookbook' is an engrossing mix of narrative, science, unfathomaby complex recipes, mouthwatering food porn close ups, and the waywardly eccentric illustrations of Dave McKean. 'A Day at El Bulli' takes obsession with detail to a strange and dizzying place, an insight into the remarkable brain and working methods of the great Ferran Adria. It is the apogee of 'you're never going to cook this at home, but look at the pictures absorb the mythology and enjoy'. It is in this arena that cookery books that aren't going to teach you to cook really come into their own. This was also the point of Elizabeth David. Any inexperienced cook who picks up something like 'French Country Cooking' and expects an instruction manual is going to come unstuck. Her stuff, fantastic as it is, is closer to travelogue, and to journalism than it is to recipe- mongering. 

The sad thing is that there exist a good many books from which it is possible to derive an auto-didactic education, but they are seldom the most hyped, and rarely top the best seller list. The most important cookery book published in the English language is Lousette Bertholle, Simone Beck and Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. I don't like the title either. It's not an art, and this book won't make you a master of it, but it is a fantastic, rigorous, concise, basic and yet thorough explanation of so many essential principles that I would go so far as to say the following: it is not the only book you need, but until you have read it from cover to cover, don't waste your time even thinking about buying anything else.