In an interview on Favourite Cookbooks

Now for your last book: Marcel Boulestin’s Recipes of Boulestin. He’s the only Frenchman on the list – the only non-Wasp.

But he was always an anglophile. He used to be the secretary and ghostwriter for Monsieur Willy, you know, the husband of Colette. Monsieur Willy put Colette to work writing the Claudine novels and I think the whole business – the coercive nature of it and so on – was too much for poor old Marcel and he ran off to Britain. In Edwardian London he had a small interior design shop. But then the First World War came and he went off to fight and when he came back he had no money and tried to get a novel off the ground. The publishers weren’t having it and so he suggested, ‘What about a cookbook?’ and they said, ‘Yeah’. 

He writes wonderfully about his French childhood and his garden. His vegetable garden as a child has become my ideal because its totally unruly – you can wander round sniffing a rose and plucking a pea. But his recipes now read as very modern. He writes very simply and there’s usually a maximum of four ingredients. He’s very encouraging and I think would have been wonderful to be around. He had an enormous nose as well, they say. There’s a caricature of him by Max Beerbohm where he has the biggest nose you’ve ever seen – like a parrot or even a toucan.

Something very disarming about a large-nosed foodie.

He was the first ever cooking columnist. He wrote a column in the Evening Standard and then he was the first ever TV chef: he appeared on something called What Shall We Have for Dinner?, a weekly programme in the 50s. There’s still a restaurant called Boulestin in Covent Garden. He was a real giant of the London food scene. Gordon Ramsey’s got nothing on him. And he loved England, but he never forgot France. He had this to say about France: ‘I must give France its due. The French, I’m told, have many failings, but they can make wine, coffee and salad – it is a great deal.’

When you die, Jojo, would you like something like that on your gravestone? That Jojo has many failings etc, but that she can toss a good salad?

I’d like them to carve ‘Cooking was my pleasure’. Because people are always worried that cooking is a bother. But it’s not. Not if you approach it, like Elizabeth David says, in the right spirit. It’s never a bother. It’s always a pleasure.