Jojo Tulloh on Favourite Cookbooks

Jojo, you’ve chosen French Country Cooking to head your list. Why?

Well, Elizabeth David is the first proper cookery writer I ever came across, as opposed to someone who just writes recipes. My granny gave me her copy of French Country Cooking, which she had for 40 years. The book is full of sensible advice and also makes you feel you could enjoy reading it as much as cooking from it – it’s very well written. It’s got lots of interesting passages, including a lovely bit about Gertrude Stein coming back to Paris after the war and seeing an etching of a chicken done by Raoul Dufy in the window of a butcher’s shop. And how wonderful it was, when there was no chicken in the shops, that somebody had the generosity and imagination to draw a chicken and cheer everybody up like that.

You think it worked or did it just make everyone more hungry and frustrated?

Well, it worked for Gertrude anyway. What worked for Gertrude Stein didn’t always work for everybody else.

True. But David seems to work for everybody.

Yes. French Country Cooking has got briefly written recipes that are encouraging but also kind of improving, if you know what I mean. It makes you feel like you need to try harder, which is a good thing, but then Elizabeth David says something like, ‘The merit of food, all different kinds of food, is less important than the spirit with which cooking is approached.’ As opposed to being determined to do it in a spirit of martyrdom, you see? She’s just such a sensible person. Cooking is part of her life. She’s the opposite of someone who’s obsessed with food. It’s part of her life and it’s completely woven into her life: cooking and eating well. But it’s not the sole purpose of her life.

The opposite of an eating disorder?

The exact opposite of an eating disorder, in the sense that food is part and parcel of enjoying every bit of your life, every day.

Elizabeth David is setting the bar for a cookery book. She establishes a tradition for many of us for reading about cooking, which is not just going to a book for recipes, but going to a book for a complete experience.

…When everything is that much tougher all round. So Elizabeth David is the original cookery book writer. She establishes a kind of template. But let’s move on to the second book on your list, which is by Deborah Madison. I noticed that you’ve included two Californians on your list. This one is from someone who runs a restaurant in San Francisco called The Greens Restaurant and there’s another one, Alice Waters, who runs a restaurant in Berkley. Let’s start with Madison’s The Greens Cookbook.

Or just about Greens in general. Madison’s been running this wonderful Zen Buddhist restaurant since the 1970s, and of course the book is named after it. And the amazing thing is that it’s the first book that was entirely vegetarian and didn’t make you feel like you were missing out on anything by only choosing vegetables. It sounds like heaven on earth.

So vegetables as something more than just a side order to your steak.

Something much more. Some of the recipes are very complex – and very liberating. I was only 23 when I got the book and hadn’t really heard of butternut squash, all the different kinds of squash. It was like a whole new world of vegetables.

Obviously you’re someone who’s very interested in vegetables. Your own cookbook sprang from your allotment.

But I’m not a vegetarian. I love, you know, pork products. So I’m totally not a vegetarian but I think I could probably live off vegetables and beans knowing I could go to this book because it’s got Japanese food in it and all kinds of chilli butters and herb butters that make eating vegetables a delight. It’s the opposite of eating your greens because you should.

Did you come to these cookbooks through cooking or travelling or what?

I think just reading mostly. My tastes sort of align from childhood, but my mum and dad were definitely not foodies. Outdoor, practical types, but not foodies. We went out mushroom picking. My dad is a biologist and granny is a botanist so there was a kind of a wild food aspect to our diet but we didn’t go in for anything exotic.

I sort of taught myself to cook because I became interested in food and didn’t have the traditional background or training. I find that lots of people that I like actually have done that as well, like Richard Olney. He came from Iowa and is the authority on Chateau d’Yquem.

Iowa kind of epitomising the redneck Midwest…

So there he was, a young gay man who went to New York and then he went to Paris and then he ended up in this kind of magical place in Provence in the hills.

Yeah – a lot of interesting people in the States seem to have come from the flat bits in the middle.

He started out as a painter and I think he carried on trying to be a painter in Paris for quite a long time and then sort of realised… As a chef he was self-taught but then rapidly became somebody whom even the French treated as an authority. What’s really annoying is that he wrote a biography and then died before he could properly edit it. So he never really tells us how he came from being a student in Paris to enjoying this extraordinary reputation as a chef and general foodie. He probably just read Larousse from cover to cover. Some of his food is very complicated, but I do wish – though I’m sure he would have been terrifying – that I’d lived with him in Provence on his lovely hillside and eaten the food he cooked for his friends.

He probably would have been horrified by my cooking.