Tasty Tomes: Writers' Favorite Recipes (from the National Book League of Great Britain)

By Meredith Brody Sun., Jan. 25 2009 at 9:55 AM

Categories: Books, Brody

Thackeray (of whom I've read, well, not much, but I have seen movies based on Becky Sharp and The Luck of Barry Lyndon, and I have a subscription to Vanity Fair!) once said "Next to eating good dinners, a healthy man with a benevolent turn of mind, must like, I think, to read about them."

To which I say "Amen!," though I am not a man, nor do I vouch for any benevolent turn of mind. I love to read about food. Though I possess, well, lots of cookbooks, and know many people who read cookbooks as though they were novels, I'm not quite one of them. (Reading cookbooks makes me hungry and envious, as watching the Food Network and other food-porn TV does. I do it, but not without some pain.)

I'm fonder of what many call, generically, gastronomy: books about food, whether they're histories, sociological texts, or (possibly my favorites) personal -- memoirs about the food that has shaped the writer (in more ways than one!).

I have a special fondness for celebrity cookbooks (I think I have five based on Elvis Presley's appetites alone). Recently I picked up a copy of Writers' Favorite Recipes, compiled by Gillian Vincent and the National Book League of Great Britain (St. Martin's Press, 1979). I have a sneaking suspicion that I have another copy of this book in a box somewhere, but this one was only $1 at Community Thrift (which has the best book section of any thrift store in town, by the way), so who cares.

And in fact that cannily invested dollar has yielded more pleasure for me than almost anything I've read recently. Some of the entries are extracts from the writers' books (such as E.F. Benson's Lobster a la Riseholme from his side-splittingly funny Mapp and Lucia series, about the rivalry between two society hostesses in a little English village), and some of them were written specifically to be included in this volume -- surprisingly, the never-known-to-be-gregarious expatriate Patricia Highsmith offers a wistful recipe for cornbread stuffing ("I speak with nostalgia, because I can't always get the cornbread now I live in France"), which includes a not-very-genuine-sounding recipe for cornbread, which, because it includes oat flour and wheatgerm, I think was added by the British editors.

The presence of several other genre writers (mystery, spy, hard-boiled) in addition to Highsmith (including Len Deighton, who writes pages and pages about his favorite cookbooks, and eventually wrote a series of cookbooks of his own; Graham Greene, represented with an excerpt from The Ministry of Fear ; and Ngaio Marsh, who offers an elaborate recipe for an old-fashioned chaud-froid of poultry) makes this a cross-collectible.

Since most of the writers are British, there's more than one entry (among the nearly 200) that begins something like "I am a very bad cooker, as the children put it," (Beryl Bainbridge, whose rather nasty recipe, for something like an English Sloppy Joe, reinforces that idea), or "I myself am an inexact and inspirational cook; some would say slapdash," (John Bowen), or "My family has never been very good on the subject of food," (Anita Leslie, whose rather moneyed family includes Lady Randolph Churchill), or "All I ask for in food is that it doesn't harm me" (Monty Pythoneer Michael Palin).

But perhaps the saddest entry is that of James Cameron, not the Titanic director but the barrister, journalist, and novelist, who writes:

"I am the very worst person to write about food. I accept that eating is necessary, but the process gives me no pleasure. I think that the dilettante gastronome is the world's bore. I once spent a time in hospital when I was fed through a hole in my arm, if you please, and I loved it. No choice, no foolish menus, no meal times, just on and on like a browsing sheep. I can offer no serious contribution to the aesthetic of eating. What I live on mostly is bread, spread first with Marmite and peanut-butter, topped with chopped onion. I take this as a rule around 4 a.m., for I have the eating habits of an alley-cat, snatching things from the fridge and eating them in solitude."

Leaving aside the question of whether alley-cats actually do snatch things from the fridge, we finish with the startlingly prescient words of Sybille Bedford, novelist and essayist who occasionally wrote about food:

"What I look for, in whatever country, in whose ever kitchen, are first-rate materials -- in season, fresh, cooked according to their nature with simplicity, skill and taste, presented with large-hearted ease, eaten at leisure, in the evening, mind at peace, with friends.

In England I like oysters and prawns; home-grown potatoes and vegetables; picked at dinner time and picked small (broadbeans the size of peas, and peas the size of pins) smoked fish, bacon, and ham, games birds, spit-roasted; apples, cream, country cheeses. In America, roast sirloin on the bone (rib roast) savagely under-done, carved thick, never wafer shaved; clams, soft-shell crab, New England lobster, corn-on-the-cob, Virginia ham. In France, I like the serious scholarly attitude to food that survives at least in private houses. I like the modest hors d'oeuvres of a sliced tomato and a few rounds of saucisson, the soup of the evening, the chicken roast in butter without a trace of stuffing or sage (but then a chicken that's a chicken is almost extinct): I like the quick sautees and the slow-braised daubes, the little gratins and the vast regional dishes, potees and cassoulets and pots au feu and the aillouli and bourride of Provence, I like gigot roast saignant, garlic and sorrel, the occasional sauce honestly made without shortcuts and I like at least three-fifths of their three hundred cheeses.

I am interested in and much enjoy all oriental food; and most of all perhaps I feel at home with the Italian way of eating, their regard for texture and freshness, their respectful care of anything growing and green. I could live happily for a great many days on those young salad leaves, on hand-made pasta, grilled fish, Parmesan, mountain ham, peaches and grapes.
I detest minginess, cheating on quality, grey meat, soggy vegetables, anything over-cooked, over-herbed, over-sauced, over-elaborate. Nothing can go very far wrong at table as long as there is honest bread, butter, olive oil, a generous spirit, lively appetites and attention to what we are eating. There must be talk about food. I have not mentioned wine. Wine makes bad food tolerable, indifferent food unnoticeable, good food...well no adjective; those who know do know, and those who don't would shrug. Good food then and good wine. And the better, the better."

You go, Sybille! This reads as if it were written in 2009 rather than thirty years ago, and is full of good points.

If your appetite for reading more of Writers' Favorite Recipes has been piqued, I note that on my favorite used-book Web site, Advanced Book Exchange.com, there are currently a number of copies available, priced between $10 and $45.