Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
If I could keep only one cookbook, this would be it. There’s an intelligence to the way she writes, and she expects a certain intelligence of her readers as well. It’s quite clearly written by someone who adores food. And she wants you to love it too.
So your first choice is Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat. This was, I believe, her first book and the one that really launched her career?
Yes it was. If I could keep only one cookbook, this would be it. How to Eat suits the way I cook. It is as if Nigella is sitting on a stool next to me in the kitchen as I’m cooking. It’s almost like she’s chatting to me. There’s an intelligence to the way she writes and she expects a certain intelligence of her readers as well. Her recipes don’t patronise. There’s nothing reverential or sombre about the food she writes about, or the way she writes about it.
She mentioned at a talk in New York recently that when one of her recipes calls for two carrots that’s normally because that’s what she happened to have in her refrigerator. It’s really up to you if you want to put in one carrot or three… There is a school of thought that recipes are set in stone and that you have to follow them word for word. The lovely thing about Nigella’s writing is that her recipes do work in spirit as well as in practice. You can do exactly that, you can think, ‘Well actually I’ve got three carrots, I’ll just put three in.’
She is always very generous, and it’s quite clearly written by someone who adores food. With every page, you know she loves this stuff, and she wants you to love it too. It’s a very, very special book for me. My own copy is falling apart.
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Nigel Slater is a cook who writes. He has been food columnist for The Observer for 16 years and is presenter of BBC1’s Simple Suppers. He has just been voted Food Personality of the Year at the BBC Food and Farming Awards. He is the author of eight cookery books, and his latest book is called Tender. Almost a thousand pages and four years in the making, it is published in two volumes. The first – the story of his vegetable patch – has just been published. The second volume is due in 2010.
