Book review: Cooking
Given Scottish chef Jeremy Lee's culinary career - Simon Hopkinson and the recently departed Alistair Little both appear on his CV - and his obvious mastery of prose it’s a wonder why it has taken him so long to pen his first book. Yet, with all good things, it is worth the wait.
The Quo Vadis chef’s ebullience and wonderfully extravagant personality transfers effortlessly onto the pages of the book with his too brief potted life history and general observations that make up the introduction a beautiful overture for what’s to come – only Lee can make a description of a daily porridge-making ritual so beguiling or quote T. S. Eliot without sounding pompous.
A glimpse at Lee’s bookshelves provided within the book give as good as clue as any to the kind of chef he is and the type of cooking that inspires him. While a few modern books can be seen – Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, Nuno Mendes’ Lisboeta, and St John’s Complete Nose to Tail to name but three – his shelves sag under the weight of far older, well-thumbed books from the likes of Julia Child, Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David and Madhur Jaffrey. As he describes the recipes in Cooking himself, this is home cooking rediscovered after a lifetime spent in professional kitchens.
To the recipes themselves, and in typical Lee style they are laid in a logical yet higgledy-piggledy fashion. Logical because, rather than taking a snacks, starters, mains, desserts type approach that remains the norm for most books, Cooking’s contents are instead dictated alphabetically; haphazard because this means chapters such as chocolate sit between those on chard and equipment and ‘sweet somethings’ comes after soup and precedes vegetables.
None of this matters, because Cooking is a book that demands to be continually flicked through so that you almost stumble across recipes rather than know what you’re looking for (with the possible exception of the section on pies). The fact that the chapter on blood oranges contains just two recipes, one of which is a drink, or that halfway through the book you stumble across information on stand up graters purely on the basis that equipment begins with the letter ‘e’ just reflects the singular nature of Lee and his approach to everything.
For his spirit boundless spirit alone, Lee should be classified as a national treasure. Likewise, this book is one to treasure.
Cooking: Simply and Well, For One, For Many
Jeremy Lee
Number of pages: 404
Standout dish: Steamed kid pudding
Publisher and price: 4th Estate, £30
