Summer Cookbooks
It surprises me each year, when the newspapers run those annual features on which books people plan to pack into their suitcases, that so few folk ever mention cookery books or books about food. It's surprising, because if you intend to cook for yourself abroad, you will need a book about the food of the country you are visiting, to help you get the most out of the local food-shops and markets.
In addition, some of the finest food writing is also the most evocative of the culture of the country you are visiting - think of Richard Olney writing about Provence, or Colman Andrews about the Riviera, or Patience Gray about the Mediterranean. Few writers have described these individual cultures with greater felicity or precision. So, here are a few of the books I would shove into my suitcase.
Flavours of the Riviera by Colman Andrews, published by Grub Street, price £18.99 in UK
A first hardback printing here for Andrews's smashing study of the food found on the Mediterranean from Nice through to Genoa and on to La Spezia. Andrews is one of those super-serious American food writers, but he wears his considerable learning lightly, so in between debunking the whole concept of the Mediterranean diet and writing learnedly about pesto, he introduces us to the most fabulous and simple recipes.
The book is worth its cover price for the recipe for fava bean pesto alone, but everything Andrews describes and cooks in this book is worthy of attention. It is also beautifully written, so if you simply want to bask in the cuisine of the Riviera while basking in a French garden, it's the perfect companion.
Honey from a Weed by Patience Gray, published by Prospect Books, price £12.99 in UK, paperback
Gray's classic book is subtitled "Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades and Apulia" - all places the author and her sculptor husband, Norman Mommens, settled to avail of a marble found in small quarries around the Mediterranean. The book is ostensibly a cookery book - there are lots of interesting and achievable recipes - but its true appeal is the account of the simple, ascetic life which Gray and her husband lived, and how they thrived in the face of the most elemental challenges.
The prose-style is frequently astounding - writing about la merenda, the Italian practice of sharing a snack, she talks about how the time taken for la merenda is "an event insinuated between laying off work and the return to the polished anonymity of that little prison of perfection which is every Italian's home". That is one of those sentences which changes forever the way you think about how people create their homes, and this book is littered with such wisdom.
Elizabeth David Classics by Elizabeth David, published by Grub Street, price £16.99 in UK
This handsome volume brings together three of the late Elizabeth David's great books - Mediterranean Food, French Country Cooking, and Summer Cooking.
It has become fashionable to deride David's towering achievements in introducing us to the great food of France and the Mediterranean, as if the idea of writing about the cooking of the Med in the late 1940s was the most obvious thing in the world. It wasn't, of course, and her perseverance and perversity means that David's work is as idiosyncratic and original in its field as that of another great iconoclast, James Joyce. Beautiful food, beautifully written, with the power to change people's lives.
Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook by Alice Waters, published by Harper Collins, price £25 in UK, hardback
Certainly, David changed Alice Waters's life, when, at the time a student in France, Waters bought a copy of French Country Cooking "and I cooked everything in it, from beginning to end. I admired her aesthetics of food, and wanted a restaurant that had the same feeling as the pictures on the covers of her books".
Almost 40 years later, Alice Waters's
books and her restaurant continue to espouse that princely aesthetic of good food, and the seventh Chez Panisse book, Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook is a beautiful book packed with delicious, logical dishes from the Cafe: beef short-ribs with gremolata; savoury herb meatballs with spaghetti; polenta with duck sauce; angel food cake . . . unfussy and appealing dishes on every page. Waters may well be the US's greatest cook, but she obviously doesn't shift cartloads of copies on this side of the water, so you will have to get in touch with specialists such as London's Books For Cooks to order a copy (tel: 020-7221 1992; info@booksforcooks.com)
Easy Peasy Sweetie Pie by Mary Contini, published by Ebury Press, price £12.95 in UK
And here is the book to keep the children happy and contented and munching good things they have baked themselves. Mary Contini's book is the loveliest, funniest, most child-friendly baking book imaginable, and it seizes kids' attention from the word go. Start them with this Can't Go Wrong Cake and your tribe will be transformed into mini patissiers straight away. Contini tops this cake with a simple lemon-juice and caster sugar topping.
Can't Go Wrong Cake
3 large eggs in their shells, weighed
the same weight of soft butter
the same weight of caster sugar
the same weight of self-raising flour
1 lemon
2 tablespoons of milk
Turn on the oven to 190C/375F/Gas Mark 5. Put the eggs, still in their shells, on the scales. Weigh them and write down the weight in grams; weigh out the same amount each of soft butter, caster sugar and self-raising flour. Break the eggs into a small bowl and beat them with a fork.
Put the soft butter and the caster sugar into the big mixing bowl and, using the hand-held electric blender, beat them until the mixture turns pale, fluffy and creamy.
Add half the egg and a tablespoon of flour. Beat everything together. Add the rest of the egg and beat it in.
Sift in the rest of the flour and use the large metal spoon to gently fold everything together. Keep the mixture light and fluffy and be careful to mix in all the flour at the bottom of the bowl. Cut the lemon in half and squeeze out a tablespoon of lemon juice. Stir the milk and the lemon juice into the cake mixture. Now check that all the ingredients are in the mixture.
Use the spatula to scrape all the mixture into a cake tin, spreading it out evenly. Using the oven gloves, put the cake on the middle shelf of the oven and set the timer for 35 minutes.
When the time is up, use your oven gloves to take the cake out of the oven. Push the metal skewer into the middle of the cake. If it comes out clean the cake is cooked. If not, put the cake back into the oven for another five minutes or so.
Once it is cooked, let the cake cool in the tin for a few minutes before turning it out onto a wire rack.