BON APPÉTIT! Miranda York’s latest book draws on the rich legacy of female cookery writing
The charming prose of the great women food writers continues to inspire new generations of cooks
Two piles of books sit at my bedside; clumsily stacked novels tower precariously next to cookbooks and flea-market finds, all with the power to transport me to a time and place far from my London home. Great writing comes in many guises, and for me, the women who belong to the long tradition of English cookery writers, from Eliza Acton in the 19th century to Nigella Lawson today, conjure up worlds as complex and absorbing as any piece of fiction.
Acton began it all, penning what many now consider to have been England’s first truly modern recipe book in 1845. Aimed at those with limited culinary experience, Modern Cookery for
Private Families included separate lists of ingredients, as well as precise measurements and timings rather than vague directions to ‘cook until done’. It was later ruthlessly plagiarised by Isabella Beeton, whose bestselling Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management quickly eclipsed its muse. Yet Acton’s elegant style and sly humour still sets the tome apart: her recipe for Publisher’s Pudding, which ‘can scarcely be made too rich’, is a luxurious combination of Cognac, cream, Muscatel raisins and fresh almonds, while her Poor Author’s Pudding is a comparatively meagre recipe using stale bread.
While 19th-century cookbooks existed to inform the aspiring middle classes on how to navigate their new social sphere, Dorothy Hartley’s 1954 Food in England acts as a living link to the cooks, farmers and country life we have long left behind. An anthropologist in the kitchen, she interviewed everyone she came across, from eel catchers to ditch diggers, threading each anecdote with her endearing charm. ‘Please consider this book as an old-fashioned kitchen,’ she wrote. ‘Not impressive, but a warm, friendly place, where one can come in any time and have a chat with the cook.’
Like Hartley before her, Jane Grigson’s work resists definition, mixing cookery and memoir with history, art, folklore and botany. She punctuated her recipes with literary musings and cultural lore, ‘catching the imagination’, as Alan Davidson wrote in her obituary, ‘with a deftly chosen fragment of history or poetry’. At first glance, her Vegetable Book (1978) and
Fruit Book (1982) are simply alphabetical guides, but closer inspection reveals imaginative compendiums weaving stories and stanzas into pithy prose, with flawless advice and a refreshing openness. ‘No cookery belongs exclusively to its country, or its region,’ she said. ‘Cooks borrow – and always have borrowed – and adapt through the centuries.’
For the fiercely independent author Lesley Blanch, food was a doorway to other cultures. She spent decades exploring the Soviet Union, Central Asia and the Middle East, where she collected tales and recipes for her 12 books, including From Wilder Shores: the Tables of My Travels (1989), a ‘sketchbook’ for those who ‘enjoy cooking as much as eating and travelling’. ‘Benign fate whisked me elsewhere,’ she wrote, ‘to follow less restricted ways, travelling widely and eating wildly.’
Margaret Costa may have published just one book in her lifetime, but her friendly, conversational style set the tone for contemporary food writing. Her passion for good ingredients imbues every sentence of her Four Seasons Cookery Book (1972): rhubarb is ‘shrilly pink’, while gooseberries ‘rain into the pan like hail’.
These wise and witty women have written books to live with and learn from, to keep among the pots and pans, scatter across the kitchen table or curl up with, well-thumbed and reassuringly familiar. ‘No one who cooks cooks alone,’ said the late American novelist Laurie Colwin. ‘Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past.’ In writing my own book, I have turned to these authors for guidance, and perhaps also because of a feeling that we have lost something of our food culture over the years – our connection to the land and the seasons, and to our culinary heritage. To reclaim it, we must look to the past as well as the future. ‘The Food Almanac: Recipes and Stories for a Year at the Table’ by Miranda York (£16.99, Pavilion) is out now. (www.atthetable.co.uk).