Cookery book reviews: First, find your raw ingredients

Published on Thursday 22 July 2010 12:57

As far as I'm concerned, if you can read, you can cook: find your cookbook, read the recipes, follow 'em, and Bob's your uncle. As regards the cookbook, we're very much spoiled for choice right now.

The spoiling starts with Sarah Raven's Food for Friends and Family (Bloomsbury, 30). It's a succession of seasonal recipes which I've used endlessly since it came out, almost always to good effect. The author runs a cookery school and she's a gardener as well as a cook, so it's full of brilliant ways with fresh produce, set out by season, including recipes for drinks and cakes. The references to gluts of courgettes and her casual way of heaping soft fruit on puddings bears out the fact that this is not a woman who has to buy raspberries for two quid a small punnet or courgettes for 1.50 a pound from the farmers' market, but once you've swallowed your envy, you appreciate this groundedness in the produce. The style, the substance, is very English, but it's imaginative and playful with it. There are reliable recipes which will stand you in good stead for the day-to-day stuff, as well as eyecatching things for dinner parties.

As it happens, Darina Allen, the Delia Smith of Ireland, also has a cookery school. Forgotten Skills of Cooking (Kyle Cathie, 30), her latest book, has a crusading element to it and was inspired by a student who overwhipped some cream. Rather than throw it out, Darina showed her how to turn it into butter by whipping on. (Funnily enough the same thing happened to me, years ago: my next-door neighbour, a farmer's daughter, showed me how to make butter.) From there, it was a short step to the other skills that smallholders once had: foraging for wild fruit and mushrooms, making bread and cakes and jam, growing herbs. Some of the skills are perhaps a bit outr - not every reader will want to learn how to make black (blood) pudding, but her little outburst about why it's hardly ever made now (food safety officialdom, natch) tells us a good deal - yet every chapter has something illuminating or useful, and excellent, simple recipes. I can't say that my own efforts on the dairy front were entirely successful - my cottage cheese might have got somewhere if it weren't that the only rennet I could lay my hands on was eight years past its sell-by date - but God, how many cookbooks suggest that you could make your own cream cheese, or mascarpone?

There's been so much written in praise of Yotam Ottolenghi that it seems redundant to go on about Plenty (Ebury, 25), a collection of his vegetarian recipes for the Guardian, but let me add my mite anyway.He's a genius: his isn't exactly Middle Eastern cooking - he's from Jerusalem - but it draws its very breath from the explosive colours and tastes of the region. If I were to quibble, I would say that this book falls short of his first in that there's nothing in the way of cakes and puddings. But that leaves an awful lot to like.

The publisher Phaidon's record for blockbuster cookbooks continues unabated with The Book of Tapas by Ines and Simone Ortega (24.95) - the definitive, look-no-further guide to the best elements of Spanish food, those little dishes that you graze on in bars. They're very fashionable now. The recipes are unselfconsciously retro, and none the worse for it. I mean, when was the last time you made Russian salad? I cut some corners with the ones that call for sauces but the end results are good, unpretentious little dishes: things like stuffed eggs or tomatoes, meatballs, tortilla or - get this - simple sandwiches. Mind you, the raw materials that are cheap and easy in Spain are less so here: elvers, anyone?

God knows, there's a market glut when it comes to books on cupcakes (tip: make bloody fairy cakes with a Victoria sandwich recipe) but I have a soft spot for the magnificently camp-looking Eat Me!, by Xanthe Milton (Ebury, 15). If you can drag yourself away from the fey pictures of the author as Red Riding Hood, there are some very appealing recipes for seasonal (yes, cupcakes are seasonal now) cakes and biscuits. Mind you, to a man, my family turned up their noses at the ones with courgettes.

Richard Bertinet is a pin-up in my kitchen by virtue of his two bread books, Crust and Dough, which will transform your way with dough, and he's now produced a general cookbook, Cook in a Class of your Own with Richard Bertinet (Kyle Cathie, 19.99) complete with DVD. It replicates the easygoing approach of his cookery school in Bath, and the recipes include answers to all the obvious questions of a novice cook, as well as useful techniques. It's a generous approach to cooking.

Food critic Charles Campion has written Eat Up (Kyle Cathie, 16.99), a charming series of recipes from places around the UK in which he has eaten really well. His enthusiasm for good cooking and good ingredients is infectious. Eat Up makes you want to do just that.