Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
French Country Cooking has got briefly written recipes that are encouraging but also kind of improving. 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?
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.
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Jojo Tulloh is food editor of The Week, and author of Freshly Picked: Kitchen Garden Cooking in the City, which brings together stories and recipes inspired by Jojo’s eight-year tenure of an allotment in Leyton, East London. She talks to FiveBooks about her favourite recipe books, and their writers.
