Food for words…

CHRIS BENNETT looks back on a couple of old books…

I HAVE a small collection of cookery books. It is housed in a purpose-built bookshelf on one side of my kitchen, far enough away from the hob and the kitchen sinks to be safe.

Cookery books have been a very important part of my life since early childhood, and they remain so to this day. I suppose it is just another aspect of my voracious appetite for reading, which is at least less fattening than a voracious appetite for food.

Last Friday, doing duty in the little library in my village I spent the two hours listening to the Mozart C Minor mass, a most glorious ensemble of notes and voices, and reading the obituaries in the Telegraph.

There is nothing odd in this; a tad unusual I will grant you, but not odd.

Obituaries are startlingly revealing when well written; needless to say, in the Telegraph they are very well written.

I reread, with huge pleasure, the obit of Keith Floyd, the English TV chef who died in 2009, a year with special association for me.

I also read the obit of Jay Landesman, a rather notorious American who longed for celebrity “but forgot to do much that merited lasting fame”.

When I got the part that described how, at 14 years old, he had had a nervous breakdown triggered by a plate of prunes, my heart was won.

Years later there was an occasion when he had waited long enough in a steakhouse for the waitress to bring his pudding.

When she eventually arrived Landesman said to the waitress, "Madame, do you realise your aggressive delay in bringing my Black Forest gateau has undone 32 years of psychoanalysis? If I relapse into a pre-oedipal stage, it will be your fault!"

There appears to be no record of the good woman’s reaction, but a nervous breakdown might have been in order.

Browsing the cookery bookshelf last week I came across a small volume that I had acquired at a Volks auction* years ago as part of a mixed lot. It was the Book of the Frying Pan by Phillip Harben, published in 1960 by The Bodley Head.

Mr Harben was the first TV cook of which I was aware; that would have been sometime around 1958. A few years later, as a newsreader and announcer with the BBC in London, I was to work with his daughter Pippa, a studio manager, a most exalted role in broadcasting.

The book is simply illustrated, quite practical and down to earth. I tried the soda bread recipe and found his timings a bit wide of the mark; otherwise the bread was OK.

Books about food have come a long way since 1950, when one of the most important of the 20^th century was published.

I say most important because the war had ended only four years earlier.

Moods in Britain were low and when a recently repatriated Mrs E. David released A Book of Mediterranean Food (John Lehman; 1950) it was well received. The book was an expression of her experiences with the food of the Mediterranean, where she spent the war years in Greece, Crete, Alexandria and Cairo. That highly respected Sunday paper The Observer said in its review, “Mrs David has assembled as potent a bundle of spells as ever made a culinary Witches’ Sabbath … (the book) deserves to become the familiar companion of all who seek uninhibited excitement in the kitchen.” And it did.

To her overwhelming delight Elizabeth David received a letter of glowing praise from one of the greatest of British novelists, Evelyn Waugh.

*The Pretoria auction house Volks conducted some magnificent book sales in the days when I was a bookseller; maybe they still do.

CB

11/3/11