BEST BOOKS ON... COOKING

THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. YEP, it’s that time again: to get in a truckload of currants, chop sticky mixed peel, track down that weird barley wine. For those of us who do things by the book — be it Nigella or Delia — Stir-up Sunday is the first act of our Christmas feast.

Of course, you can buy it all readymade, but that, surely, is missing the point. Good cooking, done with care, thought and attention, sends a message; the consumer feels nourished and loved.

Good books are full of food. The cooking and eating of it says so much about our characters.

In Laura Esquivel’s Like Water For Chocolate, Tita is forbidden to marry her lover Pedro, so he weds her sister instead. Tita becomes chef to the family, and all her emotions go into her food, quite literally. Tears fall into the wedding cake while she mixes it and the whole party goes down with food poisoning. That’s what you call sending a message.

‘Your family has a diseased relationship with food,’ says one character in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. It’s clear from their table: ‘When the liver was lifted a faint suction could be heard. The sodden lower crust was unspeakable.’ Of course, they’re a miserable lot. Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse spends all of Part One worrying about dinner: will her boeuf en daube be a success? It seems absurd, as the whole world is about to be engulfed in turmoil. But she knows she is creating a memory that will last for years — after the Great War, even after her own death.

So think of that as you stir up this Sunday. Yes, after all that steaming and tying and whatnot, this year’s offering will be gone in minutes. But it will, somewhere deep down, be remembered, for ever. Because you will have made it for them.