It has been a slow graduation to the present situation of dire confession on the part of cookery book queens and kings. Americans call it “sharing”. Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Dinners (Michael Joseph) is even subtitled “Real Life” and opens with a portrait of the new Holy Family: Jamie and Jools with their well-fed, munching kids.
The swing to positive family values has been good for everyone, not least of all home chefs constantly on the lookout for simple things with maximum appeal. Oliver begins his “Top Ten” with the words, “this is a friendly book about everyday dinners for all of us”, and he moves on to a dewy-eyed recollection of mum’s roast chicken, burgers, spuds and simple angina attacking lasagna weighed heavily with bacon, minced beef and belly of pork.
For the stressed out there’s a section on “Five Minute Wonders” including things to do with a snackwich Breville that Oliver claims is making a comeback. (The machine he purchased is shaped like a cow and it moos when opened!)
Forever the nice guy, Oliver’s trademark is the down to earth community values he brings to his books. So we have a tribute to Andy the Gasman with a stew tailor-made to roast while the boys are bashing heads at the football match. Jamie’s Dinners is a scrapbook illustrated with endless images of boy wonder at the fishmonger, with the blokes down at the corner caf …
Gone are the days when cookery books were written by world-class hostesses and illustrated with empty table-settings of the best cut glass. Nowadays it’s unpretentious family values and a return to tradition all the way. So we have Nigella Lawson’s Feast (Chatto & Windus).
To prove her community credentials Lawson has delved deeply into the customs and traditions of various cultural groups. Feast kicks off with a rambling section on Thanksgiving with a sugar-coated look at things you can do with turkey or goose. This rounds off with a strange but standard American combination of sweet potato mash with a marshmallow topping.
Feast is great book (apart from the single imperfection — the now notorious mistake wherein the publisher decided to add butter to a low-fat recipe for chocolate cake) loaded with diversity. That’s just the point. Lawson, as she tells us in the section on the Muslim feast of Eid, sits on the advisory board of a group called Common Threads. This is an attempt to bring people together “through food”. So we have Lawson’s brave and meaningful sections on the Jewish Passover, the New Year, Chanuka and Georgian and Venetian feasts.
On a note more frugal but no less meaningful, there is the unheralded release of South African Indigenous Foods (IndiZA) subtitled “A Collection of Recipes of Indigenous Foods Prepared by Generations of Women”. In the light of Lawson’s mammoth look at traditional eating this little book shows that there is no need for personality punting or deep and meaningful probing in order to do good.
If the book has any flaws it’s in the over-endorsement from officials — previous arts and culture minister Ben Ngubane, former deputy minister Bulelwa Sonjica, director general Rob Adam of the department of science and technology and Tshidi Moroka of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. The fact that the book is directly related to the task of poverty alleviation in the regions shouldn’t mean that its peripheral content has to read like an official press release.
Each book on indigenous African cuisine — and they are few and far between — is a landmark. South African Indigenous Foods is no exception. There is much for vegetarians and, in keeping with the overall brief, lots to do on a shoestring and the recipes are really easy to boot. The book is divided into provinces, with suggestion that although there is some sense of conformity in indigenous cookery methods it is the availability of regional ingredients that influences what people eat.
What South African Indigenous Foods lacks is the personal touch. One may feel some relief that it’s not swimming in personality from celebrity chefs but anecdotes from the experienced, regional cooks who contributed would be welcome. The international cook book industry has reintroduced the food memoir with great success. And over the past few years we have had enough local chefs pouring out their hearts.
A meaningful outpouring comes from national hero Garth Stroebel, recipient of a gold medal from the 1992 Culinary Olympics in Frankfurt. As the title suggests, Stoebel has virtually single-handedly defined Modern South African Cuisine (Struik). If you want to know how and why then read the introduction to his book. Stroebel started out as a surfer and ended up at the Mount Nelson hotel where he has cooked for Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama among others.
There is a potted history of the colonial Dutch, African and South East Asian eating clash. It didn’t turn out so bad — and while books like Stroebel’s gloss over certain ugly historical realities there is a positive outcome: the food.
Stroebel’s lavish history lesson is relaxed yet unpredictable. Local is lekker with odd things like fried bobotie wontons, tea-smoked springbok loin for first course, wild mushroom and Kalahari truffle risotto, kingklip baked in banana leaves and an array of curries for mains and beautifully dressed fruity creations for desert. The weirdest just has to be the rooibos and beetroot cake.
Modern South African Cuisine is a far cry from the new English trend towards home cooking with heart. Okay, so that’s not to say that Stroebel is heartless — but where are the pictures of him with the wife and kids? (Nigella’s got hers dipping marshmallow sosaties in melted Toblerone fondue!)
This year the local industry has produced a book that sits halfway between the home and the banqueting hall — taking both experiences into account. This is Franck Dangereaux’s Feast.
The author probably didn’t know that Lawson was going to release a book with the same name. If she catches up with the book someday, she’ll see one of her own innovations therein: the author’s children, eating. Dangereaux grew up in the South of France and that is where he got his Mediterranean bent. Today he is the owner of the award-winning Le Colombe at Constantia Uitsig. Feast (Quivertree) is almost 300 pages long, swimming in gold ink. It is divided into seasons and each season is further divided into cooking for the home and the restaurant.
Dangereaux’s Feast is full of great dishes — many of them done with the flair that is unmistakably French. While dishes from the restaurant sections have long names and demand ambition (for example pan fried duck foie gras with root vegetables in their own syrup, or cepe and champagne risotto with gambas and drops of red oil), the dishes for the home are indeed homely and hardly out of reach.
So we travel, from the winelands to a steamy, high powered kitchen in the heart of New York. You’ve got to love Anthony Bourdain for his abrasiveness, for his passion and his downright cheek. He’s the Gordon Ramsay of the United States.
His eagerly awaited Les Halles Cookbook (Bloomsbury) is full of things rich, French and dead. Chapter names scream from the pages: like “Pig”, “The Knife” and “Blood and Guts”.
Perhaps the best description of his book comes from Bourdain himself: “The kind of French cooking we’re talking about here did not originate from cooks with a lot of money to throw around. Most of these preparations and recipes evolved from shrewd, enterprising, hard-pressed, dirt-poor people who, like all great cooks, in all great national cuisines, were simply making the very best of what they had. Which in many cases was sweet fuck all.”
Bourdain goes on to say that his recipes should not be intimidating just because they have French names. There’s truth in that. But one wonders why, in the course of guidance, does he have to be so mean? No cuddly babies here.