Most people have a touching and foolish belief that the people who put their names to cookbooks actually made up the recipes. Believe me, celebrity chefs rarely write their own books, let alone spend time in the kitchen inventing stuff that you can cook at home and share in a little bit of the glamorous fairy dust.
They have people to do that for them. There is a whole industry producing recipes for famous names to use. It’s an industry based on people who are often more talented than the famous chefs for whom they toil in anonymity, and more original too. They have to be.
The problem is that they are not famous; they have never had a television series; they have not even got on to the lower rungs of Masterchef. They just know how to cook and how to invent. I’m afraid there’s no market for that in this celebrity-obsessed culture of ours.
In any case, there are far too many cookbooks. It’s rarely that the world genuinely needs another one. You really have to ask yourself if it wouldn’t be better to keep the trees as trees rather than turning them into the latest culinary DIY manual.
There are three kinds of cookbook on the market these days. There are the ones with massive television backing and these are a mixed bag. Just because a book sells in huge numbers it doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just usually does. Many of Jamie Oliver’s books are pretty good, for example. And they sell in indecent numbers.
Then there are the chefs who decide that they must have a cookbook or they are letting themselves down. These are usually vanity projects and unless a particularly good copy editor and recipe tester has been employed the actual recipes will be all over the place (largely because reducing quantities from restaurant to domestic level is by no means a straightforward business). Some of these books are self-published and justified as a kind of marketing ploy. Few of them are any good and some of them are quite hilariously impractical.
Then there are the genuinely good, useful and personal cookbooks which somehow manage to bypass all the barriers to being published. They are rare and should be treasured.
I’d like to mention three examples and suggest that you treat yourself to all of them, or buy them as Christmas presents for people whom you genuinely like.
The first is Simon Hopkinson Cooks (£25,Ebury) in which the eponymous chef (late of Bibendum) demonstrates, yet again, that his skill with words equals his skill in the kitchen. He also manages to convey, as if by osmosis, the simple pleasure he takes in cooking, eating and entertaining. There is something infectious in his style.
This latest offering takes a format which was popular in the days way before the celebrity cookbook, viz. a series of menus suited to different kinds of events, different sorts of people. And each menu includes a cocktail.
I particularly like the menu he creates on the theme of the Sunday Roast. It starts with Champagne cocktail with cheese gougeres, followed by beetroot jelly with horseradish cream, then smoked cod’s roe on toast with devilled eggs, followed by roast duck stiffed with potato, spring onions and sage, finishing with baked almond and raspberry soufflé puddings (which are so ethereal they try to float off the plate). Anyway, I rest my case. Simon Hopkinson is (a) an inspiration and (b) a someone to whose cooking I can immediately relate.
One of the most interesting and useful cookbooks that I’ve come across in a very long time in The Irish Beef Book by Pat Whelan and Katy McGuinness (€24.99. Gill & Macmillan). This is a handsome volume that, essentially, does what it says on the cover. It tells you everything that you ever wanted to know about beef but were afraid to ask. Armed with this book, you will always know the difference between flank, skirt, bavette and clod. And everything else, too.
Pat Whelan is one of the country’s great craft butchers with outlets in Clonmel, Monkstown and Rathcoole and he is also clearly a cook with eclectic and adventurous tastes. He tells us precisely how to cook the perfect steak and goes on to share recipes for the likes of skirt steak fajitas, “multi-tasking rich beef cheek ragu”, stracotto, slow-cooked pulled chipotle brisket and all sorts of lovely things to accompany your meat.
Above all, Pat and Katy succeed here in persuading us of the true quality of Irish grass-fed beef and the value of seeking out the best. It’s a landmark.
Another landmark comes in the form of Darina Allen’s 30 Years At Ballymaloe, a celebration and a compendium of what has happened in the Ballymaloe Cookery School over the years since the Allens’ bank manager said to them “Sure nobody would ever want to go to a cookery school in the middle of nowhere.”
This is a large format book, lavishly illustrated and enlivened by that fact that Darina’s trademark spectacles appear in all their various forms as a kind of ocular timeline through the book. It’s full of fascinating memories, accounts of some of the world’s great food people who came to Ballymaloe to share their skill and knowledge (including Claudia Roden, the late Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Thomasina Miers and many more) and, needless to say, recipes. Some are complex (honey mousse with lavender jelly sounds celestial), most are simple but brilliant (prawn curry, sumac lamb chops with tomato and cucumber salad, Arun Kapil’s garam masala cookies).
All of these books, in their different ways, are as much about people as they are about how to cook stuff. That’s the difference. They are not formularies.
Finally, just arrived on my desk is Trish Deseine’s The Paris Gourmet (€25, Flammarion) which is an insiders guide to eating, drinking and shopping for food and wine in that great city. Trish is an Ulsterwoman who has been taken to French hearts as one of their leading food writers (she has sold, literally, millions of books there) and I can’t think of a better person to write a book such as this.
Read Tom Doorley every Saturday in the Irish Daily Mail.
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