To mark 200 issues of Observer Food Monthly, we pick the most significant books published in the years since the magazine launched
My most loved food books sit close to the stove, warped by steam from the kettle, sauce spattered, spines cracked and sticky taped, spilling pages torn from magazines.This hard-working reference library of about 40 books provides both instruction and inspiration and it just about squeezes into a small double bookshelf. Most committed cooks have something similar and when I’m in an unfamiliar kitchen I find myself drawn magnetically to these collections, propelled by a combination of professional curiosity and sheer nosiness. The selections are often more revealing of culinary personality than their owner cooks might like. This list of the really great books of the last 17 years may help fill some of the gaps on your shelves. They’re a mix of essays, recipes, reference and memoir, and they show just how much things have changed in the food-writing world. The mostly female scholar-cooks of the past have been supplemented by globe-trotting chefs and bakers, food scientists, polemicists, offal-eating restaurateurs and moonlighting novelists. Some of the more familiar names speak to us as friends, the kind who encourage rather than admonish.
These books have strong individual voices with something useful to say. Many breathe life into culinary tradition, rephrasing it and making it fresh and achievable. In the past few years, we have become more knowledgeable and discerning: we can now see past the latest TV tie-in or the posturing Michelin-starred chef blinded by his own fame. We crave new tastes alongside the familiar. We may not have the energy to honeymoon in a camper van and seek out unknown flavours in the eastern Mediterranean, but we love Sam and Sam Clark for doing it for us. In David Thompson’s Thai Food and Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan Cookery we live vicariously through the long years of research these dedicated teacher cooks have undertaken. While Paula Wolfert and Claudia Roden go beyond the method to give you the anthropology, the history and geography of a country’s cuisine. Yet as much as we want to get closer to our idols and draw back the curtain, there is an extremity to some of these voices that’s good to experience at one remove, such as hard-living culinary star Gabrielle Hamilton.
Continue reading...