In an interview on Favourite Cookbooks

…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. He writes so lucidly, but you always feel like he’s not taking himself – the idea of himself – too seriously. Instead, he’s part of a tradition. All really good chefs are like that. Elizabeth David said, ‘No cookbook could exist without all the other cookbooks’. 

Yes, that’s interesting. And in a really good cookbook, as you’ve already said, there are two components, aren’t there? The recipe, which is practical, and then the literary component, which is the imaginative space that we inhabit when we read that book.

They had a meeting, you know, Elizabeth David and Richard Olney. And she teased him and said he was all about garlic and that he wouldn’t like her food. But in fact they were as waspish as each other and became bosom pals as soon as they met.

When do you think the tradition of cookbooks as we’ve been talking about them emerge? I mean the cookbook as something more than just a collection of recipes.

The 60s do you think? Elizabeth David was writing in the 60s.