Foodie thoughts

WELL THUMBED ON MY KITCHEN BOOKSHELF

2020 was a year like no other and I don’t know about you, but food and cookery books helped me through it. So I’m sharing some of my favourites with you.

Nigella, inset, went viral recently after her pronunciation of microwave (“meecro wavé”) on her TV show. It’s hilarious and very endearing – Twitter responded with hundreds of folk saying “we have pet words for kitchen stuff too!” She might have slipped it in for the sake of a bit of publicity, but it’s a great show, and her book Cook, Eat, Repeat is a joy. It’s three years since her last one and she says: “It’s a strange thing to start a book in one world and finish it in another.” Written during lockdown, there are fewer recipes than usual and more reflective musings about the joy of brown food and the day-to-day comfort of cooking.

Di Murrell has spent the last 20 years navigating the waterways of France, Belgium and the Netherlands in her barge Friesland. A Foodie Afloat is the story of a cook’s journey through France. Her main preoccupation is to make sure that tasty food arrives on the table each day; she shows through her recipes how the cuisine changes with the landscape. Whether bought in the market, dug from a lock-keeper’s garden or foraged along the towpath, the food she finds and cooks is seasonal and local to the region.

Scoff is not so much a cookery book as a guide to food trends and etiquette. Pen Vogler is a food historian and some of the facts she’s unearthed are gobsmacking; long before lactose intolerance was invented, the English were keen on almond milk – in the 15th century, Dame Alice de Bryene, of Acton Hall, Suffolk, made her own, to be used during Lent when dairy was forbidden. If you were a guest at a posh dinner at this time there’s a chance the cook will have passed off porpoise and beavers’ tails as “fish”. Who knew? Vogler is a keen chronicler of class and taste, and Scoff is a proper page-turner.