Nom nom nom de plume: authors on their favourite cookbooks

With Food Month in full swing in The Irish Times, we asked a clutch of writers to tell us about their favourite books about food. Often, the appeal of a text goes far beyond a tried-and-tested recipe or two and is rooted as much in the writer’s way with words as in how they combine ingredients. Like a good novel, a good cookbook should be full of character, create a real sense of place and come garnished with turns of phrases as memorable as a great meal.

Ranging from comforting to challenging, these books and the recipes they contain have a personal resonance for the authors. From high-end French cooking to more humble Irish fare, the pleasure comes from sharing delicious food with others.

Kathleen MacMahon on Roast Chicken and Other Stories, by Simon Hopkinson

This amazing little book is a paperback and has no pictures, only drawings of Hopkinson’s favourite ingredients, featured chapter by chapter. They are his characters, and with each one we get a potted history of his relationship with them. Hopkinson is old school, so there’s an emphasis on French cooking, with an unholy amount of cream and butter. There’s also a lot of offal – gratin of brains with sorrel, anyone? I’m a wimp as a cook so I steer clear of those. I also avoid his more terrifying suggestions, like eggs in gravy, sticking with the safer territory of vegetables and fish.

Olivia Laing: ‘People find it hard to grasp things like racism, or misogyny, because they genuinely can’t see they exist’

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I spent my maternity leave in a chemo chair. Then I got a letter telling me to go back to work

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Bryan Dobson: ‘Retirement could be a terrible shock to the system – or not, who knows!’

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Brianna Parkins: Here’s some of the best life advice I’ve ever received

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I love the way each recipe comes with a story, explaining where he first ate it and why he likes it. One of the delights of the book is the vicarious pleasure of visiting all the exotic restaurants he’s frequented. He shares what he’s learned from other chefs, citing everyone from Elizabeth David to Rowley Leigh. This is essentially the scrapbook of a really, really good cook, and it bears all the hallmarks of the good cook – skill, generosity and, most important of all, simplicity. I’m a long way off mining all its treasures but there are a few recipes I come back to again and again. Aubergines baked with Cream and Herbs is a winner, as is Smoked Haddock with Potatoes and – you guessed it – Cream; but my favourite for its simple alchemy is Braised Endives with Lemon and Butter. Just brown four halved endives with 4 oz of butter, then season and bake, covered, for two hours with the juice of one lemon. Sublime.

The Home Scar by Kathleen MacMahon is out in 2023

Louise Kennedy on The Mediterranean Diet, by Nancy Harmon Jenkins

Don’t be put off by the “d” word in the title, this is no faddish cookbook. Yes, Nancy Harmon Jenkins puts forward the scientific case for adapting the diet of the Mediterranean, and follows each recipe with nutritional information; but she gives so much more. Having spent over 25 years living, working and rearing a family in Lebanon, Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Greece, France and North Africa, her recipes are rich in provenance, lore and history. Above all, though, Harmon Jenkins is a cook. From “small dishes” as simple as wrinkly black olives marinated in orange rind, garlic and chilli to an elaborate couscous that takes all day, every single recipe is perfectly judged. I bought my copy in Beirut in 1996 and turning a page stained long ago with green olive oil from the Chouf mountains makes me ache with nostalgia for messy, beautiful Lebanon. This is the dish I cook most often. Like Nancy, I consider it a meal.

Green beans with olive oil and tomatoes

3lb green beans, topped and tailed, cut into 2-inch lengths

1 cup finely-chopped onion

1 garlic clove, finely chopped

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

2 cups chopped fresh tomatoes or chopped drained canned tomatoes

1 tsp sugar

1 tsp salt or more to taste

1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

In a saucepan large enough to hold the beans, cook the onion and garlic in the oil over medium heat until the onion is thoroughly golden and starting to brown, about 10-15 minutes. Rinse the beans and, with the water that clings to them, turn them into the onions. Stir to mix everything together well, cover, and lower the heat to medium-low. Cook for about five minutes, just to meld the flavours.

Uncover the pan and add the tomatoes, sugar and salt. Cover again and cook for about 40 minutes or until the beans are thoroughly softened and the tomatoes have dissolved into a sauce that naps the beans. Stir in the lemon juice. Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more salt If necessary.

My note: French beans are good in this but best of all are runner beans – before they get too woody. I make it using half the quantity of beans, as I prefer it saucy. You will need to keep splashing the onions and garlic with water to stop them burning. Finish it with black pepper and a good slurp of olive oil. Nancy suggests serving it with “salad, a wedge of cheese, and good bread”. She’s spot on.

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy is shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year. The End of the World Is a Cul-de-Sac won the John McGahern Prize for debut Irish Fiction.

Neil Hegarty on Fruit Book, by Jane Grigson

From my window, I can see the two greengage trees we planted seven years ago. They fruited this year bountifully, but it wasn’t difficult to know what to do with the resulting mountains of translucent-skinned, delectable green plums. I gave some to neighbours, but I kept more for ourselves: I made jam and chutney – and I tried out a greengage jalousie, with the fruit sandwiched between layers of buttery puff pastry and baked until their juices ran hot and sweet.

I found the jalousie recipe in my copy of Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book (1982) which, with her Vegetable Book (1978), are at the centre of my stash of cookery writing. I admire Grigson’s warm, elegant, witty prose – and I’m appreciative of her scholarship and of the insights she offers into the place of ingredient after ingredient in our human story. “In northern Europe, the greengage had a royal beginning” – thanks to Grigson, I know that this green plum was introduced from Italy into France, where it was taken up and popularised by Claude (1499-1524), wife of François I.

I doubt if Claude ever had garden dirt lodged under her royal fingernails but still, she did us all a service – and the greengage is still known in France as the Reine Claude; while we speak of the “greengage” on account of Sir William Gage, who brought trees from France to his English garden in 1724. I think of Grigson when I look at our greengage trees; I also know, thanks to her, that a jalousie is just a fancy name for a turnover and that the key is to cut slits in the pastry. These slits, adds Grigson, “should have the look of a Venetian blind, or jalousie”.

Neil Hegarty’s latest novel is The Jewel

Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi on Recipes For A Nervous Breakdown, by Sophie White

I love cooking but during the pandemic both the joy I derived from cooking and my normal eating pattern disappeared. As the cost of living increases and I can no longer afford copious amounts of takeaways, I’ve turned to my favourite cookbook, Recipes For A Nervous Breakdown (Gill Books, 2016) by Sophie White to guide me back to the stove.

White’s cookbook took pity on me. It didn’t assume I had any grand culinary ambitions. It made me laugh and reminded me the kitchen can be a refugee from the confusing “badness” of the world and one’s own mind. Before reading her cookbook I’d never heard anyone formally reference condensed milk. I’d presumed condensed milk was a unique Nigerian experience. I grew up pouring it in porridge, cups of tea, custard, and pap (pudding made from fermented corn or beans flour). I too would “elope with [condensed milk]” if I wasn’t dairy intolerant now, in my mid-20s, when I can finally afford to buy cartoons of the sweet stuff.

This is a story-driven, genre-defying cookbook packed full of fusions of Asian, European and Polynesian recipes. It boasts 70 dishes to choose from, with manageable ingredient lists, and simple, approachable guides to assembling each meal. I’ve revisited two recipes: White’s version of Thai and Indian curry. Apart from tomato sauce, curry is the one food I pride myself on making well. Curry has everything I love, onions, garlic, ginger, chillies and, most importantly, is best accompanied by rice, a personal staple. I enjoyed her unapologetic cooking style, her uncompromising desire and determination to cook and eat deliciously rich, jaw-droppingly indulgent food, such as “French toast with bacon and maple syrup ice cream” and “deep-fried Mars bars” described as “dangerously nice”. I’ll have to take her word for it.

Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi is an Igbo-Irish writer, performer, literary editor and arts facilitator. She is a commissioned poet on the Poetry as Commemoration project and is working on her debut poetry pamphlet.

Rosie Schaap on Savoie: The Land, People, and Food of the French Alps, by Madeleine Kamman

You won’t hit a recipe until page 132 in Madeleine Kamman’s fascinating 1989 book Savoie – and I love that about it. Before you get to the instructions for Leaven for Tasty Bread, you’ll have learned about ancient Savoyard history (“The Celtic migrations took place first as a trickle, then as powerful waves between 500 and 400 BC”), modern Savoyard history, geology and topography, flora and fauna, vernacular architecture, pottery, traditional headdresses, and much more. Long before the word terroir was on the lips of every chef and food writer, Kamman insisted on the importance of learning about a place first if you would presume to cook and know its food.

Kamman grew up poor in wartime Paris and spent six childhood summers and one school year in Savoie. She reminds us that the mountainous region’s affluence is a recent phenomenon, and many of the book’s recipes are testaments to culinary resourcefulness born of want. “This is true poverty cookery,” Kamman writes in the headnote for her recipe for Soupe de Galeots du Bas Faucigny – flour dumplings in broth spiced with aniseed, coriander seed and cumin. “It may seem awful to you, but you have no idea how good it tastes when one is ravenously hungry.” (I can tell you that it also tastes very good even when one is not).

The opinionated Kamman, who died in 2018 at age 87, was known as an exacting chef, a demanding (but generous) teacher, and a feminist. Her scholarly, detailed provision of context, scrupulous clarity, and depth make Savoie an antidote to the bourgeois preciousness that often characterises the “foodie lifestyle” (two terrible words that are especially terrible together) and the publications engineered to satisfy and perpetuate it. And its robust mountain recipes – such as cabbage stuffed with chestnuts, gratin of mixed root vegetables, cheese tart with walnut crust – would warm up an Irish winter table, too.

Rosie Schaap is the author of Becoming a Sommelier and Drinking with Men: A Memoir. The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country, her book about moving to live in Glenarm, Co Antrim, will be published next August by Mariner Books.

Séamas O’Reilly on Cooking The Books: An Irish Literary Cookbook, by Veronica O’Regan and Fionnuala O’Reilly

Cooking The Books is, nominally, a book of recipes derived from Irish literature but it is mostly to be recommended as a treasure trove of insights, stories and asides about some of our finest authors, meted out in luxuriously large and addictive portions.

Far from being an academic tome, it hums with the joy of any Irish kitchen in which your host might pour your wine while saying they’re just dying to tell you the latest. Everywhere, one finds tasty morsels like Joyce’s fondness for getting blithered on white wine, the Francophile tendencies of Kate O’Brien, or Shaw’s cheerfully passive aggressive letters espousing the virtues of vegetarianism. There are gossipy comments from diarists lamenting poor manners and bad guests, the grandiose appetites of self-anointed gourmands, the dietary peccadillos of penniless eccentrics, and the abysmal service and suboptimal dinners put on by the great and good of Irish literary life.

Indeed, it sometimes seems as is if the whole pantheon of Irish literature was seized by two parallel passions; one, the neverending series of dinner parties to which they were all invited, and two, the mandatory practice of retiring to their writing desk at evening’s end, to pen letters of revulsion at what they were offered.

Here you will discover the pompous appetites of George Moore, once so dissatisfied with an omelette prepared for his supper that he summoned a policeman to arrest its cook; and the hungry childhood of Sean O’Casey, who stared wistfully at the van loads of bread that passed his family home. And you will find Oliver St John Gogarty bisecting both, observing the former incident in his own writings, and driving the latter “much too fast” to his own wedding feast.

It is in this interconnectedness, this great sense of setting, scene and characters, all at the one banquet, that Cooking The Books derives its greatest power and its purest pleasures.

Which is not to forget the recipes themselves, 80 in all, ranging from meals cited in conversation, essays or letters to and from the authors profiled, or those mentioned by characters in their works. Gloriously, there are even offerings direct from O’Reilly and O’Regan themselves which, they freely own, have little to do with the canon at all, only that they remind them in some sense of the person under discussion.

This is after all, an Irish kitchen, and to scrimp would be a sin. Pull up a stool and lift the glass, your host has a story they’re dying to tell.

Séamas O’Reilly is the author of Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

Adrian Duncan on The Domestic Godless by Stephen Brandes, Irene Murphy and Mick O’Shea

It’s not often you come across a cookbook with a skull and crossbones on the front cover, but then the Domestic Godless are unlike any chef or chef collective I’ve encountered. They are three artists, Stephen Brandes, Irene Murphy and Mick O’Shea, and have been cooking up extraordinary, sculptural banquets for two decades now in venues such as IMMA, The Glucksman Gallery, the Athens Biennale, Lismore Castle, The Science Gallery and MoLI.

In 2018 they released The Munster Collection, a range of high-proof beverages: Seán Mór (a sea-lettuce vodka), Amhránaí Beag (a chanterelle and rocoto mouthwash), Uisce Brón (human tears, steeped in spirit and infused with caraway and roasted apricot kernels). Almost everything they propose should be taken with a very large and puckish pinch of salt. The paperback cookbook they published in 2017 is filled with macabre and caustic dishes such as Ghetto Gateaux – “an ideal confection for those occasions, when opulent hedonism is to be mixed with abject misery”. The gateaux base should be split and on the bottom half pour a mixture consisting of:

3oz unsalted butter

4oz icing sugar

1 tsp of cold espresso coffee

1 small handful of charred woodcock bones

The recipe then tells us to finish the top of this gateaux with “hand-carved balsa wood hovels, arranged into a street scene. Flash burn ... with a chef’s blowtorch and serve immediately while still smoking”. I don’t of course cook any of these recipes, but I return often to this book to read its lists of Bataille-like ingredients, its bizarre almost poetic instructions and to take in the lovely if playfully gruesome illustrations and collages.

Adrian Duncan’s latest book Little Republics: The Story of Bungalow Bliss was published by The Lilliput Press

Martina Evans on French Provincial Cooking, by Elizabeth David

I associate recipes with people rather than books. Nuala’s handwritten Top Ten Cake on blue-lined notepaper – Camp coffee, toasted almonds, cooked in a heart-shaped tin. Sushila’s Spinach and Corn Pie scribbled on the back of an X-ray request form, I feel the heat from the film processor we used as a table. Fahima’s best Pol Sambol buried in my inbox for years – I must save it. Rekha’s tips for best Potato Pilao, told in the darkroom as we developed chest X-rays, weren’t even written down. My neighbour Gurn recommending fresh fenugreek leaves over the fence. For years, my friend David kept a recipe for a dark chocolate cake written in German by his aunt Emilia. The handwritten scrawl was finally translated and baked in Israel by his cousins in 2016.

I go to Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking for her people not her recipes: “Twice a week at dawn, Madame, whose purple face was crowned by a magnificent mass of white hair, went off to do the marketing.” Because of her high blood pressure, Madame was advised to cut out meat one day a week, “On Wednesdays, the day chosen, Madame would sit at the table tears welling up in her eyes as she watched us helping ourselves to rôti de veau”. And that mysterious, honeymooning couple spotted on a steamer in Rouen in 1855, working their way through 12 evocative courses before finishing with “coffee and two glasses of absinthe and eau dorée, a Mignon cheese, pears, plums, grapes and cakes. Two bottles of Burgundy and one of Chablis were emptied between 11am and one o’clock.”

Martina Evans won the 2022 Piggott Prize for American Mules, her latest poetry collection

Helen Cullen on Neantóg Cookbook: Gaby’s Favourite Recipes, by Gaby Wieland

There are inevitably very personal reasons why a cookbook becomes a favourite; often they are linked to families and the passing down of knowledge between generations. I am no exception to this instinct for the preservation of culinary rituals, but I also have the distinctive pleasure that my favourite cookbook was written by my mother-in-law, Gaby Wieland.

Three months after my husband and I met, I received a signed copy of the Neantóg Cookbook with a simple dedication – Happy Cooking – and that’s what I’ve been doing with it as my guide for over a decade. Gaby inherited her love of cooking with fresh produce from local markets from her grandmother in Frankfurt and now we have inherited that same passion for sustainable cooking from her.

Attempting to recreate my husband’s favourite family meals could have been intimidating but the tone of Gaby’s writing is so friendly and encouraging that I always felt I was just being gently guided along. My in-laws are German but have lived in Sligo since the 1980s and so this cookbook has allowed me to experiment with traditional German recipes and connect with their culture.

Long before it was mainstream, Gaby’s cookbook offered delicious recipes to accommodate dietary requirements and a host of gorgeous vegetarian and vegan meals, so, whenever we have friends over for dinner, it is always to Gaby I turn for inspiration. This cookbook shows you how to embrace cooking that is nourishing for the body and soul – wholesome meals that never compromise on taste but maximise on goodness. And every time I pour a bowl of Spicy Pumpkin, Ginger and Apple Soup, pick elderberries to make Elderflower Lemonade, make a batch of Gaby’s Barley Burgers and Tomato Sauce or have the aroma of Oat Coconut Cookies wafting in the kitchen we feel we have a little bit of home with us in England. Happy Cooking.

Compiled by Martin Doyle, books editor