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Calm control are not the watchwords of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Every Day (Bloomsbury, £25), but there is a vivid sense of lively, muddly family life, with his ten-year-old son knocking up pancakes for breakfast from scratch, simple suppers made mostly from vegetables or cheap cuts of meat, and lunchbox meals conjured up from leftovers — all with an eye to the health of the planet. The photography strikes the only dull note in a useful book, but luckily the bland images are perked up with jolly, childlike graffiti.
The graffiti in Ad Hoc at Home by Thomas Keller (Norton, £40), the Californian chef of the French Laundry in the Napa Valley, who has collected a roomful of best chef and best restaurant awards, illuminate what Keller calls ‘light-bulb moments’: where he passes on techniques that raise the game of a keen home cook. His recipes are for simple soups and stews, roasts and puddings, but he brings them to new heights of flavour and texture not by elaborating them in a cheffy way, but by showing us how to cook them perfectly. His leek bread pudding — crunchy cubes of brioche and leek in a cheese custard — is an example of how he makes simple vegetables sublime.
Vegetable cookery books are big this year, though Simon Hopkinson’s choice of title, The Vegetarian Option, (Quadrille, £20) suggests that he may consider this a second-class way of eating, an alternative to the main event. And given the heroic amounts of butter and cream he uses in his recipes, it would appear too that, like some other chefs of the old school, he believes vegetables can only be made palatable by copious quantities of fat. Surprisingly few of his recipes suggest crispness, freshness or crunch, and many of the photographed dishes have an oily sheen.
Some old vegetables lurking at the bottom of Hopkinson’s fridge provided the genesis of his book. But Nigel Slater wouldn’t see the point of buying Hopkinson’s ‘packet of ready-sliced runner beans’ in the first place. Slater’s majestic 600-page Tender: A Cook and his Vegetable Patch (4th Estate, £30) shows how the subject should be approached. The sensual pleasure he gets from growing and cooking the produce from his small London vegetable patch is vividly conveyed in gentle, evocative prose. But it is concern for the planet that has made him change his diet, to put vegetables at its centre, with meat and fish (for which he gives recipes too) on the side. In this handsomely produced book he advises on growing and buying vegetables and, best of all, gives simple but superb recipes. I have just polished off a plate of utterly delicious spiced aubergine stew, and can’t wait to try the other 399 dishes.
A third veggie book, The Modern Vegetarian (Kyle Cathie, £16.99), by the inventive young chef Maria Elia, has some clever ideas using unusual combinations of flavours and textures. Her tomato, almond and date baklava might sound odd, but it tastes wonderful. This is a first-rate book by a future star.
Jamie Oliver is a shining star now (why hasn’t he been knighted?), but I don’t rate his new book Jamie’s America (Penguin, £25). The television series on which it is based was a great travelogue, showing parts of American life we rarely see, and people with good stories to tell but whose cooking was of minimal interest. In the book, space for the people has had to be curtailed to allow room for the recipes, which seem a bit of a disparate hotch-potch. Jamie has also had to suggest substitutes for such quintessentially American ingredients as collard greens, short ribs and alligator, so one is left wondering why he undertook this project at all, other than to make up his quota of a book a year.
He makes his ‘old-fashioned peach ice cream’ with tinned peaches — which would probably shock his former bosses, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray. Their River Café Classic Italian Cook Book (Penguin, £30) reflects a life’s work dedicated to the most authentic Italian regional cookery (they tried seven different versions of risotto nero in Venetian cafés before choosing the perfect one for the book). More than a million River Café books have been sold, and those who own a few of them probably feel they don’t need more of the same. This one differs from the others in its knowingly archaic 1970s- style photography, which is not a compelling reason to buy it. But there are always good recipes in a River Café book. I will bemaking thin potato and herb pizzas from their Tuscan dough recipe — a must for those who are not afraid of making bread.
But for the dough-phobic, Jim Lahey’s brilliant My Bread (Norton, £19.99) is the answer. The author, owner of the famous Sullivan Street bakery in New York, has invented a fail-safe no-knead method of making Italian-style bread, with a crackling crust and chewy, holey interior. The dough is mixed in a couple of minutes, allowed a 24-hour-long rise, then cooked in a cast-iron pot in a domestic oven. A ten-year-old (and not even one as skilled as the young Fearnley-Whittingstall) could do it, with a bit of help lifting the hot and heavy pot from the oven. There are step-by-step pictures, other breads to bake and even a cupcake recipe at the end of the book. ‘We’ve been in sort of a cupcake-crazy period in New York’, says Jim Lahey in explanation.
Same here, we might say from London, though we’ve taken our time to catch up: the Magnolia bakery in New York, which started the retro cupcake craze, was featured in an episode of Sex and the City in 2006. Two British cupcake bakeries have books out this year. The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook by Tarek Malouf and the Hummingbird Bakers (Ryland, Peters & Small, £16.99) gives the recipe for the most famous of these cakes, the Red Velvet. But for clever decoration (very important in a cupcake) they are beaten hands down by Cupcakes From the Primrose Bakery by Martha Swift and Lisa Thomas (Kyle Cathie, £14.99). Jude Law, Kate Moss and Elton John are said to be Primrose Bakery fans, though the mystifying craze for these re-named fairy cakes with their thick, sweet buttercream icing will no doubt soon fade. However, for this Christmas, one of these books would make a good present for a teenaged girl who wants to cook something pretty.
Nothing could be further from the cupcake celebrity circus than the serious intent of Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, whose classic Mastering the Art of French Cookery, first published in 1961, has been re-issued in paperback (Penguin, £12.99) to cash in on the film Julie and Julia. If you want to make a terrine, or a navarin printanier or an apple tart that tastes just as it would in France, this is your book. Don’t forget, too, the other half of the film, which was based on Julia Child’s rollicking memoir, My Life in France.
Because you read about cooking
Also by Elfreda Pownall
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