In the kitchen, a small crisis. Something Must Be Done about the cookery books, which are threatening to take over, and may soon leave one of us in the same boat as poor old Leonard Bast (killed, in EM Forster’s Howards End, by a bookcase). The question is: what? At first, it all seems so easy. Online, I find an OK-looking set of shelves, and stick them straight on my credit card. But new accommodation or not, my tape measure tells me there is going to have to be a cull nevertheless. I need to lose, I reckon, at least three dozen books. This is going to be hard.
When I say “hard”, what I mean is: protracted, and agonising. The selection process takes hours, and at the end of it my chuck-out pile consists of a meagre 15 titles. Why? Well, for a start, the classics – Marcella Hazan, Margaret Costa, Claudia Roden et al – all get an instant waiver. They’ll be here when I’m living, as Elizabeth David was said to have done in her last years, on nothing but Roka cheese crispies. So, too, do the newer keepers: Moro: The Cookbook by Sam & Sam Clark, and English Seafood Cookery, Rick Stein’s first and best outing as a writer (I note this last title ungrudgingly, even happily, in spite of the fact that, having taken exception to a piece I’d written about him, Stein once informed the then editor of this magazine that I was “banned” from Padstow). Naturally, Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course also gets leave to remain. Yes, the cooking times for lamb are pretty funny (“Roast the joint until it’s the colour of Harold Wilson’s mackintosh,” as she doesn’t say anywhere). But I’ve owned it since I was 21.
After this, in theory, everything else should be a possible, if not a probable, for the Oxfam bookshop. Except this isn’t how it works. I pick up Eat Like A Lord, a bizarre and completely unnecessary volume from 1973 about the dietary habits of British peers, bought in some godforsaken seaside town because the photograph of the Marquess of Bath “whipping up” crepes suzette made me laugh out loud. Am I likely ever to have need of a recipe for curried egg mousse (Baron Monteagle of Brandon) or a dish called banana ambrosia (the Earl of Pembroke)? No, I am not. But nor am I willing to let go of this … unusual book.
The same goes, at the more scholarly end of the scale, for Scottish Cookery by Catherine Brown. The thought of bawd bree, a stew made from well-hung hare, makes me gag. But – I’ll just flip it over and read the jacket quotes – this seminal book is the ne plus ultra when it comes to cock-a-leekie.
I can’t dispatch The Full English Cassoulet by Richard Mabey, for all that I’ve never been moved to make his (rather damp) chestnut flour flan: I have a sentimental attachment to him that dates back to my weird mycological childhood (Mabey is best known, you’ll recall, as the author of the foraging classic Food For Free, of which, incidentally, I own two copies: one pocket sized, and one so big and luxuriantly illustrated you have to wonder when the herbivores got into coffee tables).
Nor can I bear to part with the cookbook Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote with Fay Maschler because she (EJH) once made a “scratch” lunch for me at her home in Suffolk, and I will never forget the sight of her peering wonderingly into the darkest recesses of her fridge. (The lettuce was ancient, but the dressing was unimpeachable.) Thus far, I’ve only ever rolled my eyes at the flowerpot cheesecake in Rose Prince’s The New English Table (first, line your terracotta tub with muslin). But now I’m really thinking about it, I’m wondering … that geranium looks really tatty. I should put it out of its misery.
You see the problem. Where does it come from, this obsession of mine? One thing I do know is that it has very little to do with cooking. These days, if I want to find a recipe quickly, I’ll search for it on my laptop, or go straight to my failsafe, the comprehensively useful New Penguin Cookbook by Jill Norman (try her espresso-frosted brownies and you’ll understand that, sometimes, the lily really does need gilding).
I guess I just like cookbooks. They’re comforting and may be read, in desultory fashion, when you’re too weary for anything else; they’re fascinating, immaculate time capsules, the lot of them; and sometimes they’re very pretty, too.
Still, I know when I’m beat. Who wants to be flattened beneath the great weight of Constance Spry and her colleagues? Not me. The 15 must become 30, and soon.
