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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall also looks his subject firmly in the eye, not flinching even at the abattoir. In his new book The River Cottage Meat Book (Hodder, £25) there is a series of photographs of his own beasts being slaughtered. Nor does he shy from the ethics of being a carnivore: its first 200 pages (of 523 — it is quite a tome) deal with sourcing good meat, poultry and game, but it is not a harrowing book and there are good recipes too for meaty meals from Sunday lunch to an outdoor pig roast.
If only all the men who put on an apron once a year to take charge of a barbecue had Hugh’s knowledge and charm. Most barbecue food leaves one wondering uneasily about salmonella, as one bites into the bloody interior of a chicken thigh, simultaneously picking its charred skin from one’s teeth. But the know-how and recipes in Blistering Barbecues (Absolute, £14.95), by a company that specialises in barbecue catering, inspire confidence and might almost induce one to have another try.
There is no hesitation at all in trying the recipes in Casa Moro (Ebury, £25), the second book by Sam and Sam Clark, husband and wife chefs at Moro restaurant in Clerkenwell. In the book they continue their exploration of Spanish and north African food with many good salad and vegetable dishes (Turkish sweet and sour leeks are particularly successful), and some unusual, quickly made meat dishes that make one long to get cooking, though it is reading the recipes rather than the somewhat downbeat photographs that provides that impetus. The opposite is the case in A Taste of Morocco (Hachette, £20), a hybrid travel/cookery book, whose good, authentic recipes by Maria Seguin-Tsouli, culinary consultant to the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (which serves the best food to be found in any museum restaurant) are complemented by evocative food and location photography. This would make a good present for an adventurous cook or a traveller who, ‘like Webster’s dictionary [is] Morocco-bound’.
Another essential book for travellers is the new Concise Gastronomy of Italy by Anna del Conte (Pavilion, £14.99), which contains all the information from her previous definitive doorstopper book of the same name (without its garish full-page photographs) on regional food specialities and wines of Italy, with her masterly recipes, in a paperback format handy for trips to market or trattoria.
Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook (Bloomsbury, £20), based on recipes from his restaurant, a French bistro in Manhattan, is written in his raunchy, tough-guy style, but the book is of limited use to a British reader; our cuts of meat are different and some ingredients are unobtainable here. I have found it very hard to find the pig’s caul he demands in his p
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