A Tale of 12 Kitchens: Family Cooking in Four Countries
by Jake Tilson
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20, pp288
Cookery books are not actually necessary. Nobody has ever failed to nourish herself or her family simply because there was no book of recipes to hand. They sometimes serve as manuals when precise instructions are needed. On the rare occasions I want to make Yorkshire pudding, I have to consult Mrs Beeton for the (to me, elusive) proportions of milk and flour to eggs. But most cooks have no difficulty remembering their personal canon of recipes and the utility of cookery books lies almost entirely in their ability to inspire readers to enlarge their repertoire.
This is the only explanation needed for the success of recent classic cookbooks - for example, Elizabeth David's books in the 1950s and, a little later on, those of Julia Child, Jane Grigson, Richard Olney, Marcella Hazan and Barbara Kafka. Claudia Roden's books on Middle Eastern cooking caught the culinary public's attention because the food they described and evoked was, for the most part, outside our experience and interesting. It is worth noting that none of these was a professional chef, but were domestic cooks writing for others like them.
The other string that ties these books together is authenticity. We value the recipes given because, whether learned from another cook or originating in research, we can tell they reflect their own experience and culture. It is on this score that I admire Jake Tilson's radical cookbook. Few recipes in it are new to me; but that is not why I'll cherish this book long after the rest of the cookery books published this year (and probably next) have made their way to the remainders shelves.
This is a memoir of a life recorded in meals. Jake Tilson is a member of a family of artists, the son of Joe and Jos Tilson, and is married to another, Scottish ceramist Jennifer Lee.
His book recalls childhood meals in 1960s pop art London, and the Tilsons' 1970s self-sufficiency rural idyll in Wiltshire, where the neighbours included the families of Howard Hodgkin and Dick Smith. I had the good fortune to be present at some of these country art world celebratory feasts, including one where a puckish painter contributed a series of cupcakes, each iced with a random letter, which, arranged on the table, spelled out 'X [the name of the currently powerful Sunday newspaper art critic] sucks'.
Soon after, the Tilsons turned up in Tuscany, and agrestic Italian food was added to recipes picked up in Manhattan diners, such as the shudder-making Cherry Cola-baked ham. (As he knows, food doesn't have to be good to inspire nostalgia - just look at his 1980s recipe for a Chinese restaurant Thanksgiving dinner, with every element, including the sickly marshmallow sweet potatoes, prepared in a tower of dim sum steamers.) Mexican recipes picked up in Los Angeles and Palm Desert, surprisingly orthodox Scottish dishes and ethnic oddities from his present home in Peckham (where his artist companions in food include Tom Phillips) are much more attractive.
But the revolutionary aspect of this book is the book itself. Tilson has created every detail of this substantial, beautiful and amusing object. The writing is pleasing (bar the use of 'hopefully' as a sentence modifier) and the photographs range from wonderful (close-ups of food and table settings) to (usually collaged) wacky. He has designed every page and even created some of the fonts, explained in some learned notes at the back of the book. In this elegant artefact, Tilson brings a real artist's eye to bear on food and finds visual correlatives for the contexts in which we eat and cook, how food is grown, packaged and bought and sold - and, most difficult of all, for the memories and emotions that surround eating and cooking.
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