Although I haven’t yet cooked my way through the entirety of the St Michael All Colour Cookery Book, close reading suggests that the prize for worst recipe must go to “brussels sprouts in a mould”, a dish in which everyone’s least favourite brassica, having first been pureed, is mixed with mashed potato, cream, butter, an egg and some nutmeg, and baked in the oven in a bain-marie for 45 minutes. “In wintertime, it makes a welcome change from the usual vegetable dishes,” reads the preamble. A photograph, however, suggests otherwise. On the menu tonight: a Polo-shaped lump of cold porridge, from the centre of which watercress unaccountably sprouts like fungus from a damp wall.
Regular readers of this column will recall that, not so long ago, I vowed to kick my addiction to cookbooks. Fearing that I would be found, like Leonard Bast in Howards End, crushed beneath a vast pile of old Jane Grigsons, I decided that I would buy no new cookbooks in the near future; and those I hardly ever opened, I duly delivered to Oxfam. But some things are so hard to give up. The other day, there I was quietly minding my own business when I happened on an interview with Niki Segnit, the cook whose singular book, The Flavour Thesaurus, has sold 250,000 copies and is esteemed by everyone from Heston Blumenthal to Yotam Ottolenghi. In the course of this encounter, Segnit, who is very funny and larky, but also highly practical, admitted that her most beloved cookbooks are Moro by Sam and Sam Clark, from 2001, and – wait for it – The St Michael All Colour Cookery Book by Jeni Wright, first published for purchase by customers of Marks & Spencer in 1976.
Phew, I thought. Moro is one of the titles that survived my cull (I don’t live in north London for nothing). But my mind was already racing. What about this other book, with its cover featuring a bottle of beaujolais in a wicker pouring basket? You know what happened next. Overtaken by a paper-lust I was utterly powerless to fight, I was soon stalking the internet – and a few moments after that, the book was mine. Did I balk at the outlandish price, which was close to £40? (By rights, it should have been about £4.) No, I did not. I took this as a sign of its essential greatness and, perhaps, of the sheer power of Segnit. Picturing the oranges in caramel she’d picked out for particular praise, I waited for my heart to stop racing and felt briefly triumphant.
No doubt you’re expecting me now to admit – see our sprout mould, above – that like all fools, I’m easily parted from my money, and thank God the 70s are over. But, no: I wasn’t disappointed, not even a little bit. OK, so it looks a bit garish. Perched next to Ottolenghi’s minimalist Simple – someone gave it to me, I promise – on the shelf, it has the aspect of a tipsy dowager who is wearing too much Max Factor. You’ve never seen prawn cocktail as rudely pink as this, nor garnishes that so closely resemble the crown jewels. All the same, I know why Segnit loves this book. I think I love it for the same reasons.
These have relatively little to do with camp nostalgia, though if you’re in the market for a recipe for duck à l’orange or lemon meringue pie, they’re here. Rather, it’s to do with a certain kind of simplicity. Wright’s book belongs to a time when most cooks only had one or two such manuals on their shelves; when ingredients were more restricted than now, and palates less sophisticated (or, at any rate, less obsessed with novelty).
It has, then, to do so much work: to instruct and encourage, like any cookbook, but also to be both as comprehensive as possible, and to make the most of ordinary, inexpensive things like greasy breast of lamb or boring old button mushrooms. Brisk and no nonsense, it comes with none of the lyrical guff that pad out so many cookbooks these days. It tells you only what you really need to know – which is that breast of lamb is good stuffed with anchovies and breadcrumbs, and that even button mushrooms can be extraordinarily delicious, devilled and on toast.
