For the past two years I have been locked in a basement kitchen with a knife-wielding psychopath, the treasurer of the Tory party and a dog-eared copy of the late Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World. Happily the psychopath, the Tory grandee and the claustrophobic kitchen are entirely fictional, characters in a novel I have been writing. It's about a siege in a restaurant kitchen which begins on the night of the 1983 general election. The cook book, of course, is real - although to my shame, until I started writing The Oyster House Siege, I had never looked at it. Boy, I am glad I did. I set out to write a tight, intense thriller. Whether I succeeded or not will be for the readers to decide. But one thing is certain. Along the way I was reminded of a kind of cooking which, in the pursuit of the new, I had all but forgotten. And I fell in love with it all over again.

There were lots of reasons to set the book in 1983. I knew, for example, that at least one of my hostage-takers would be a drug dealer. If the story was set now, he would be flogging smack and crack, and it would be almost impossible to feel any sympathy for him. Set it in 1983 and he becomes a soft-palmed peddler of hash and grass and easier to understand. Politically, that election was when Thatcherism really began and the politics of then tells us an awful lot about now.

But mostly it was for the food. Inspired by the events of the Spaghetti House Siege in Knightsbridge in 1975, when robbers holed up in the basement of an Italian restaurant for six days, I wanted to examine what would happen if a crowd of people were locked in a kitchen with access to prime ingredients. Would they start cooking? What would they make? And what would they learn from the experience? I hate novels that use food as a metaphor for sensuality; that soften the heavy-browed thug by allowing him to be a wonder with pastry, or that make the frigid female characters swoon by the mere application of a little dark chocolate.

For professional cooks food is rarely about sensuality. It's about control. Chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White had chaotic childhoods and found, in kitchen life, an order they couldn't get elsewhere. A siege is, by necessity, chaotic. Food, it struck me, could bring order. But it needed to be a specific kind of food. I wanted dishes that were instantly recognisable, the recipes to which were specific. Within a few months of the novel's setting, the first signs of Britain's gastronomic revolution would appear. A young chef called Alastair Little would start cooking in Soho, with a bold mixture of light Mediterranean flavours, and Sally Clarke would open her Californian-inspired, ingredients-led business in Kensington.

But in early 1983 most of Britain's restaurant food would have been the sort of thing recognisable from the ITV sitcom Robin's Nest. Think chicken chasseur and steak Diane, goulash and stroganoff and blanquette de veau. The forgotten greats.

And so to Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World, a magnificent book first published in 1963, and updated thereafter, which is a reminder that there was a world before Gordon and Marco. Here are glorious recipes for duck with oranges and trout with almonds and boeuf en daube a la Provençal; dishes full of big bold flavours. No, they might not always look pretty but, gosh, do they eat well.

Restaurant critics are, by nature, neophiliacs. Sated by experience before we have even sat down to eat, we pursue novelty for its own sake. Give us unheard of spices that have to pass through the digestive tract of a rare marsupial, before being roasted. Give us throat-burning Szechuan dishes and culinary experiments involving Marmite ice creams. Too often we'll be happy.

So for me to be reminded of the classics was a very good thing indeed. Sure, some of Carrier's dishes use too much cornflower for my liking (which is to say, any at all). And I will never attempt the nightmare that is prawns in whisky. But, for the most part, it is a total delight. In my novel, a foodie police sergeant is thrust into the role of chief hostage negotiator, because he spots things are missing from lists of ingredients that the gunmen have apparently asked to be sent in. There are sequences in The Oyster House Siege involving coq au vin and bouillabaisse, quiche Lorraine and rum babas. Almost all of what I needed was in Carrier's book. It became my bible, my road map, my culinary compass. And at the end of a long stint at the computer, I could pick up my primary source material - or even, if you like, my sauce material - take it downstairs to the kitchen, and taste those very flavours I had been writing about all day. Weirdly, as I tasted his coq au vin, I came to envy my own characters. With catering that good, I concluded, it would almost be worth being held hostage.

· The Oyster House Siege by Jay Rayner is published by Atlantic Books, price £10.99. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885