The excellent writer Peg Bracken, who died in October and whose 1960 I Hate to Cook Book was a beacon of hope to we culinary incompetents, remarked that every woman had a "big fat cookbook that tells you everything about everything". Its drawback was that it contained too many recipes. "Just look at all the things you can do with a chop, and aren't about to! What you want is just one little old dependable thing you can do with a chop besides grill it." The situation today has changed. Popular authors squeeze out an annual quota of recipes cowering beneath a flashy superstructure of typography and photographs. The search for something useful on lamb chops may cover 20 books and as many minutes.
This year sees no staunching of the flow. As the Jacobean dramatist Philip Massinger had it, "portly and curious viands are prepared to please all kinds of appetites". First in point of size is 1080 Recipes by Simone and Inés Ortega (Phaidon, £24.95), a translation of a long-running favourite from Spain. The same publishers were responsible for The Silver Spoon from Italy, which had a remarkable commercial success. They each work to the same recipe: mainstream sales of millions at home seem to guarantee English-speaking readers the tantalising prospect of authenticity. But just as a 1950s reworking of Mrs Beeton hardly represents all that's best in British cooking, so these are pale reflections of robust national character. The first recipe I turn up in it is for little bread rolls with a slice of ham and Philadelphia cream cheese - hardly the daily fare of Galician fisherfolk. This is a bourgeois cookbook for the urban middle classes, the recipes removed from their original contexts and refined to appeal to homogenised palates. This is not entirely to the book's disadvantage. We sometimes make too much of a business about genuine this and genuine that, when what we really need is to produce a meal on the table at eight o'clock sharp. And here are more than a thousand dishes, much as they would be cooked in metropolitan Spain, with plenty of salt cod, a chapter on offal, and the full low-down on flans and caramels. Another bonus is that it looks and feels like a heavyweight gift.
Production values are high with this and with other Phaidon books, such as Creole by Babette de Rozières (£24.95), translated from French, which explores the cookery of the French West Indies. It's hot stuff on acras, blaff and anything to do with coconut, but indigenous cookery is prettied up to tie it to modern fusion (though having spent some time in Martinique in search of good food, I might say that such prettification is no bad thing). And handsome too, though whimsical, is the same publisher's Pork and Sons by Stéphane Reynaud (£24.95) which offers a French take on pig cookery (though none on making sausages or hams, which seems fairly hopeless).
The most successful recent British contemplation of the pig was Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating, to which he has added a second part this year, in collaboration with Justin Piers Gellatly, called Beyond Nose to Tail (Bloomsbury, £17.99). This is no big book but confirms that small is surely beautiful. The range is select and the recipes remarkable for their earthy yet refined simplicity. Half the book is given over to baking and sweet things, with plenty of puddings and ice-creams. What is most pleasing is Henderson's laconic style. You read, and cook, with a smile. Everything feels as if it has been done before, many times, to the authors' satisfaction. This can be reassuring.
Genuineness of address is important to a cookbook, and that quality so nicely developed by Henderson is also found in the latest instalment from Sam and Sam Clark. In Moro East (Ebury, £25) the couple who run Moro venture physically no further than the Manor Garden allotments (now bulldozed for an Olympic highway) where they have dug for seven years in concert with a heterogeneous band, each apparently intent on growing a little piece of heaven in Hackney Wick. The right tone never deserts them: from English earth sprout Mediterranean wonders, drawn from north Africa, southern Spain, Turkey and the Middle East, but never much from Italy or France. The transformation is magical and captured as appealingly by the photographs as by the recipes themselves. Gardeners will find clever inspiration to use their products to the last leaf (anyone for onion tops or poppy leaves?); cooks will want to try something different. The Clarks' earlier books had a solemn tinge to them, but this is simply joyful. And if you can't be sure, eat it at Moro before you try at home.
Another writer who encourages you to take a culinary chance is Simon Hopkinson. As a professional cook, he would produce dishes of exemplary comfort that made you feel much better. But he was also more open to experiment and innovation than you might expect. I may be showing my age, but it was he who first introduced me to Thai fish sauce. In his most recent outing, called Week In Week Out (Quadrille, £20) - which he frankly admits is another airing of his weekly column in the Independent that ran from 1994 to 2002 - he combines the simple (grilled fillet steak with mushroom and tarragon butter) with things we are less likely to carry in our file of old standbys (squid dumplings, aubergine with miso and sesame). What sets Hopkinson apart is that you want to eat everything he writes about. Another angle might be that he is an Elizabeth David tribute band with an infinitely expanded repertoire.
This round-up has been mostly concerned with good cookery books, leaving no time for anything more tangential. Among a wealth of alternatives (some good, many middling) I would strongly urge a reading of Beans by Ken Albala (Berg, £14.99) which entertainingly unravels that most complicated of legumes through space and time; and A Movable Feast by Kenneth F Kiple (Cambridge, £15.99), which draws on the donkey-work put in by The Cambridge World History of Food (one of the most indigestible books ever published) to construct a succinct and instructive single-volume account of human diet, its spread and its consequences. Tom Jaine runs Prospect Books, a specialist food imprint.
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