HE best cookery books are usually more than just recipes, and Bee Wilson’s The Secret of Cooking is a shining example. It is a sturdy volume of 140 recipes, made appealing by her little essays on things such as gadgets and equipment or techniques that experienced cooks will like and that will give novices confidence. She writes with candour about her own kitchen trials and family responses to them.
A good number of vegan recipes are welcome and attractive (such as Burmese chickpea tofu), and her reading around of other cooks brings many voices to the table. The dishes are varied, interesting, and global, and beautifully depicted through Matt Russell’s photography. There is plenty to cheer up a jaded palate or tired repertoire.
Alex Jackson’s novel and clever Frontières looks at the borderlands of French cuisine. The south-west, the Riviera, the Alps, and Alsace are joined by North Africa. He, too, writes intelligent chapters and notes: how a handful of ingredients can morph any dish into a neighbouring culture. The legacy of Elizabeth David lives in both these pages and Charlotte Bland’s arty photos. Recipes, including chicken stuffed with rice, fresh figs, and prosciutto, or courgette gratin with parmesan and cream, or carbonade, the red wine and beef stew, are enough to make anyone reach for their apron and get cooking.
The restaurateur and recovering chef Russell Norman opened Brutto two years ago, and it has been fully booked ever since. The winning idea is a trattoria serving delicious staples, and now we have the book of the restaurant in Brutto: A (simple) Florentine cookbook. “Rigorously simple, few ingredients, exceptionally good,” is the tagline; and so it is. Tuscan bread and tomato salad, rigatoni with wild boar and chianti, penne with vodka and tomato sauce, apple fritters, almond and blood-orange tart, stocks, dressings, and sauces — all are delicious, with photos by Jenny Zarins telling their story, along with images of the restaurant and Florence, too. There is even a section with a map at the end, recommending where to eat in Florence. An enthusiastically infectious book.
Jonathan LovekinNigel Slater’s pear and ginger cake, from These Delicious Things
One celebrity-chef title this year, among a crop, is Rick Stein’s Simple Suppers. Here we have 120 recipes: fast, slow, fish, for friends, one or two, veggie. It is breezy and straightforward: you can’t go wrong.
Aiming to produce a cookbook “written by the shining lights of our incredible British food scene and, with the profits, the very real possibility of helping others”, Jane Hodson has compiled These Delicious Things. A crowd of chefs and cooks have pitched in, offering favourite recipes and cherished memories, for a handsome volume in aid of the charity Magic Breakfast, which provides vulnerable schoolchildren and young people with breakfasts each day (Feature, 15 April 2015). It is a salutary reminder of food’s nutritional importance. With photography by Tara Fisher and Patricia Niven, it is a unique and delightful book.
The Revd Simon Walsh is a cookery writer, journalist, and priest.
The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an easier life in the kitchen
Bee Wilson
Fourth Estate £28
(978-0-00-844645-1)
Church Times Bookshop £25.20
Frontières: A chef’s celebration of French cooking
Alex Jackson
Pavilion Books £30
(978-1-911663-78-2)
Church Times Bookshop £27
Brutto: A (simple) Florentine cookbook
Russell Norman
Ebury Press £32
(978-1-52919-714-3)
Church Times Bookshop £28.80
Rick Stein’s Simple Suppers
Rick Stein
BBC Books £28
(978-1-78594-814-5)
Church Times Bookshop £25.20
These Delicious Things
Jane Hodson, Lucas Hollweg, Clerkenwell Boy and others
Pavilion Books £25
(978-0-00-860360-1)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
