The pictures might be kitsch, the ingredients might be basic, but there is a value in simplicity
Although I haven’t yet cooked my way through the entirety of the St Michael All Colour Cookery Book, close reading suggests that the prize for worst recipe must go to “brussels sprouts in a mould”, a dish in which everyone’s least favourite brassica, having first been pureed, is mixed with mashed potato, cream, butter, an egg and some nutmeg, and baked in the oven in a bain-marie for 45 minutes. “In wintertime, it makes a welcome change from the usual vegetable dishes,” reads the preamble. A photograph, however, suggests otherwise. On the menu tonight: a Polo-shaped lump of cold porridge, from the centre of which watercress unaccountably sprouts like fungus from a damp wall.
Regular readers of this column will recall that, not so long ago, I vowed to kick my addiction to cookbooks. Fearing that I would be found, like Leonard Bast in Howards End, crushed beneath a vast pile of old Jane Grigsons, I decided that I would buy no new cookbooks in the near future; and those I hardly ever opened, I duly delivered to Oxfam. But some things are so hard to give up. The other day, there I was quietly minding my own business when I happened on an interview with Niki Segnit, the cook whose singular book, The Flavour Thesaurus, has sold 250,000 copies and is esteemed by everyone from Heston Blumenthal to Yotam Ottolenghi. In the course of this encounter, Segnit, who is very funny and larky, but also highly practical, admitted that her most beloved cookbooks are Moro by Sam and Sam Clark, from 2001, and – wait for it – The St Michael All Colour Cookery Book by Jeni Wright, first published for purchase by customers of Marks & Spencer in 1976.
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