How to Eat: the Pleasures and Priciples of Good Food
Nigella Lawson
(publishing information to come)
This is the time of year when all my cookbooks get a thorough work out. When I say all my cookbooks, I mean the ones that I've kept, of course, because a good cookbook is like a beautiful relationship - they'll never lie to you, they give you comfort when times get hard, and they'll encourage you to try new things. I have to admit that my attitude to relationships is much the same as my attitude to cookbooks in more ways than one; if once I am lied to about the amount of some crucial ingredient required, or if a recipe fails three times in a row for no discernable reason, I'm very unforgiving, no matter how pretty the book or how famous the author. Or in the case of Nigella (or 'Nige' as I affectionately call her, so inappropriately familiar with her have I become), how pretty AND famous the author.
How to Eat is a great book. I'm not English, but here in little old New Zealand, we've got a lot of the same culinary traditions, which are really only just now beginning to lose their vice-like grip. I still remember the years that my mother was stuck in the literally boiling hot kitchen at home, slaving away over a Northern Hemisphere-style Christmas dinner, while we kids lolled indolently on the deck in the sunshine. Cruel, I know. And how English is this book - there are numerous references to boarding schools, sweltering Augusts and Selfridges-abound, so it reads a little like the Secret Seven, but with less mystery-solving and more gorging yourself on cherry cake and lashings of ginger beer. Aside from the Anglophilia, Nigella writes in a really chatty kind of way, and isn't adverse to telling you about her mistakes, which is frickin' refreshing in the cookbook scene.
The other refreshing thing about this book is the fact that there are no pictures (although that might have changed with the newer editions, so don't quote me on that). Have you ever noticed that if whatever you make out of a cookbook doesn't look like the picture, then you feel a little cheated, no matter how much you tell yourself about the man-hours that have gone into spraying and primping and prepping and generally prettifying the food which is being photographed? I sure do. So the lack of photography is actually a good thing - again, that's just my opinion, I know there will be those of you out there who will feel bereft with no pretty pictures to drool over.
I only have two gripes about this book. One is a layout thing, which I doubt Herself had much to do with. The recipes run over pages, so you'll get half way through a recipe, turn over the page and realise that you have a billion more steps to go. Unless you were organised enough to read the whole thing through first, which I never seem to manage. The second thing is that everything is in grams, which while not a problem in that I am able to measure in grams (as I say, living in NZ, we use the metric system like pro's), but that as a fundamentally lazy person, I never measure. Consequently, as the result of many many many disasters, I've become rather adept at estimating grammage in terms of cuppage. "Ooh, 225 grams, that'll be about... three quarters of a cup..." Terrible, I know, but I can never be arsed hauling the scales out.
There have been accusations of snobbery levelled at Nigella, which I'm not going to defend her from, because she's right. You should use the best food that you can afford. You shouldn't by any means bankrupt yourself to make a chocolate cake, but you shouldn't be blaming it on Nige if you do. I'm certainly not advocating running around telling your guests or your family or whatever that the eggs used in the cake cost $15 per egg, because personally, if I was your guest, I'd think that ...
a. you were a moron for paying that much for eggs, and
b. that I wouldn't be inviting you around for any cake in case my eggs weren't good enough for you.
But before this turns into a big rant on snobbery in cooking (ooh, so much ammo there), this is a good book, particularly the sections on cooking for one and two, the dinner menus (ham in coca-cola is a revelation), and the baby section. You'll never be able to get it out of the library, so borrow my copy, if you can prise it out of my grip.
