buying books

If you're going to cook, you've really got to start with a cook book.
The dread phrase that dooms any chef at an interview is " I like to do the classics - but with my own twist". Sure as hell this guy is going to be writing his name in raspberry coulis on his signature dish while the sauce is disappearing into a pool of tar. The classics already have their own twist, and unless you're a genius (like Peter Gordon) buy books so that you can learn how to do them rather than invent your own.

The act of dotting casually a few cookbooks somewhere visible in your living room, is the first step on the road to culinary brilliance. But just as the secret of cooking is the avoidance of error, so you should be careful when buying a book.

(1) Resist, whatever the cost, books written by professional chefs, in particular, anyone who‘s had a TV show. Too long as a Head Chef and/or being on the telly corrupts absolutely.

For example, Raymond Blanc once brought out a book with the text printed in such a colour that you needed a special kind of mercury lamp in order to read it. Furthermore, the recipes were graded by a code of little chef’s hats which indicated the level of difficulty. The one hat recipes, it seemed, were laughably easy and required merely two or three days of stock making, egg white aided sauce clarification, advanced butchery and other preparatory work. The three hatters, however, were at such a level of complexity that it’s likely a typewriting monkey would come up with an explanation for Shrodinger’s Cat Paradox before you managed to produce anything edible.

The exceptions are anything written by one of “The Three Degrees” the trio of university educated chefs who changed the face of London restaurants in the 80’s; Simon Hopkinson, Alistair Little and Rowley Leigh. You can buy Alistair Little’s “Keep It Simple” just to read the preface.

(2) Don’t buy books without colour pictures. When you go on holiday it’s nice to have seen a photo of your destination. You can also tell when you‘ve arrived.

(3) Avoid books written by French people. Instead buy books about French cooking written by foreigners. In particular, any book by Patricia Wells - though you won’t find any pictures, so be careful you don’t end up in Switzerland.

(4) Don’t buy books with an open ended category. So that rules out anything along the lines of
“ My favourite Whatever” or “At Home With Whoever” or “ The Romance Of The Something-or Other”.
What you want is writing of real authority and understanding of a particular type of cooking. And then you want a long list of recipes of that particular type.
So zoom down to a particular region and get something like “Cucina Siciliana” by Clarisa Hyman. Or hard boil your focus into a very narrow category like Pork or Biscuits or Soups Etc (Time Life series edited by Richard Olney), Fish (Jane Grigson, Rick Stein).
Or go to the intersection of two or more cookery sets - like Bourgeois Indian (Madhur Jaffrey, J. Inder Singh Kalra) or Asian Street Food (Tom Kime).

(5) Anything bought on holiday is always great

(6) Everyone says Elizabeth David - they're right, what a woman. Best read when nowhere near a kitchen, glass in hand.

(7) A photo of a fat author is usually a good sign.