WOMEN IN THE KITCHEN TWELVE ESSENTIAL COOKBOOK WRITERS WHO DEFINED THE WAY WE EAT, FROM 1661 TO TODAY
ANNE WILLAN Scribner, 305pp, £20, ebook £11.99
‘No better person to look back at the great food writers of the past’
Anne Willan has been a celebrated figure in US gastronomical circles for nearly 60 years. The founder of the La Varenne cooking school in Paris, she is the author of 30 cookbooks and winner of the prestigious James Beard Prize. No better person then to look back at the great food writers of the past and how they influence us still. And she includes recipes.
The earliest entry into Willan’s hall of fame is Hannah Glasse, the 17th-century English author of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. Thereafter her women are American – including Amelia Simmons, author in 1796 of the first New World cookbook, and going down through the centuries to Alice Waters and, of course, the redoubtable Julia Child (Willan’s often-mentioned great chum). Robin Mather in the Chicago Tribune particularly enjoyed the Simmons chapter, noting that the author’s ‘deep understanding of culinary history’ comes into its own on the details: ‘She describes the equipment that a cook of Simmons’s era would have at hand to cook over an open fire, from the three-legged skillets called spiders to Dutch ovens to spits for roasting. She notes that Simmons offers a variety of sturdy pastries to use to build a pie shell for meat pies for readers who didn’t have pie pans.’
In the Sunday Times, Victoria Segal found the biographies a bit cursory but enjoyed the surprises. ‘Today’s enlightened vegans might be shocked that Hannah Woolley in 1670 included a recipe for almond milk.’ She regretted, however, that Willan ‘has no time for recent developments such as the effects of Instagram chefs or wellness gurus’, pointing out that ‘food doesn’t always have to be a matter of good taste. Novelty – as chaculato-loving Woolley would have known – can also be illuminating.’