"it’s about familiarising yourself with ingredients and understanding flavours." Alex Hely Hutchinson
There are so many things that you can say about recipes, the actual artefact that is, and from time to time I look at one or two of those things. Today I am looking the difference between writers who have essentially collected recipes from here and there and those who seem to have invented everything they create from scratch. The photographs above - Elizabeth David and Ottolenghi - represent the two extremes although of course it's never as simple as that - simply collecting and simply creating.
So before I start, I should say that what I am going to talk about today is from the limited perspective of recent history - the 1960's onwards - my life in cooking I guess and geography/culture - someone with essentially a British background. A purely personal rumination in other words. No long-time history here. Not today anyway.
As you know by now I have a large collection of cookbooks which date from the 60's when I began cooking without my mother hovering there to help when I didn't know what to do, to now, when you don't even have to have a recipe written down somewhere. You can just look it up online:
We probably all start out learning from our mothers - fathers rarely cooked back then. From them we learn all the techniques - how to peel, prepare and cook them - in the most basic way. Well even that has changed of course, because nowadays mothers have had a much broader experience than in my day. There wasn't even pizza or pasta in my day. My grandchildren would have learnt much more from their parents. We also learnt how to cook particular dishes - in my case - a roast, a stew, fish and chips, sausages... plus soup and green salad from my days in France. For some reason I was really interested in cookin - maybe I was and am just greedy - and had cooked a few things from women's magazines but that was it.
So when I married I saw this as an opportunity to lift my game and learn more, as well as a way of pleasing my man. I needed help to expand my repertoire however. Initially it would have been articles in the weekend paper magazines - Robert Carrier and the like. I'm not sure whether I read any articles by Elizabeth David, but when I saw French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David I grabbed the opportunity to learn how to cook all those wonderful things I ate in France. And so began my mini obsession with collecting cookbooks - an obsession that has never waned. That first book is falling apart - as you can almost see, and the pages are sort of crumbling to powder. I have a slightly newer edition, but I should really look for a brand new one.
A lot of time has passed since those early days and many books have been added to my various shelves over time. Some have been discarded, but not many really. One result is that nowadays if I want to buy a new cookbook it has to have something new to attract, because what is the point of having, for example, a new writer's version of those French Provincial dishes, no matter how gloriously produced. Hence the Ottolenghi mini obsession - and others of his ilk.
But I am straying from my 'thesis' of collectors and/or creators. I made it 'and/or' because, of course, none of the recipe writers from then to now have been exclusively one or the other, and both of those categories still exist.
So let's start with the collectors. Although Elizabeth David is, quite rightly, lauded as an innovator, somebody who changed the way we cooked and ate, revolutionised in fact the very way we cooked; nevertheless very few of her recipes seem to be inventions. Actually what she appears to be doing is to present recipes collected from here and there - from people she has met, from books she has read, and from restaurants in which she has dined. She even mentions them by name or by place every now and then. And yet. I cannot now remember the recipe but something I made fairly recently which was presented as a regional speciality could not be discovered as such online. Did she make it up, or did she find it in somebody's kitchen or restaurant and then present it as a regional speciality? It matters not really. Although the main point still stands - she collected recipes from the Mediterranean region, so that she could kick start us all into appreciating the world of cooking was so much larger and more exciting than roast beef and Yorkshire pud - which to us was the height of cuisine.
For her intention was to make us poor war torn Britishers realise that there was a whole world of sunshine and exotic taste out there, that could brighten our lives. And she did that. She probably turned us all into tourists as well - eager to go and try the wonderful food she described, and visit the places about which she so evocatively wrote.
Many of her contemporaries and those who followed closely after - Robert Carrier, Jane Grigson, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey were largely collectors as well, who introduced us to new cuisines - Morocco, India, the Middle-East, all of Europe, which spurred on the rise in restaurants, cafés, bistros serving those foods, if we couldn't be bothered making them at home. Those early tomes were also much more interested in 'authenticity' than the writers of today. Or were they? Were they truly authentic anyway or did they, like many cookbook writers, add their own spin to a traditional recipe, or, in fact, make something up in the spirit of those cuisines?
Today there are still collectors. Particularly those who want to introduce us to a new cuisine, although there can't be many of those left. Even the 'specialists' in a particular cuisine - like Rachel Roddy - will have a large number of recipes that have been gleaned from here and there. And since we are now much more aware of the cuisines of the rest of the world, some even revisit 'known' cuisines - such as British food for example, and those like Jamie's Great Britain, or Desi Kitchen go further in showing both the really traditional foods, and how the British cuisine has evolved to merge with the cuisines of their immigrant population - particularly Indian I guess. And there are those who publish collections of family recipes - Charmaine Solomon has done one of these, Claudia Roden too - sort of.
I guess each generation needs a new version of the same old things - Classic recipes from the cuisines we have all come to love, each in our different ways. If you are young and you want to learn how to cook French provincial food, then I guess you are more likely to go to Guillaume Brahimi or Rachel Khoo - or some Instagram or TikTok influencer of whose existence I am completely unaware - than to Elizabeth David et al.
Then there are the creators. Many of those early collectors, were creators too. How could they not be? Surely anyone as interested in food as they were, would be interested in creating something new. Some of them after all were trained chefs - Robert Carrier was certainly a restaurateur, I'm not sure whether he actually had chef training. And if you own a restaurant or cook for someone important then your reputation - and those Michelin stars - probably depends upon your creativity which inevitably must stem from what has gone before.
I'm not sure at what point creation became more important than collecting. Maybe with Delia, and Jamie, who although well-versed in classics - Delia through experience and Jamie through training, were soon putting their own spin onto 'classical' recipes. At the high end of haute cuisine, scientific labs were being created by people like Ferran Adrià, René Redzepi and Heston Blumenthal - to create food beyond mere mortal capability.
But then came Ottolenghi and a new generation of cooks and chefs, and recipe developers. Yes recipe developers. It's a new profession to add to those in the culinary world. These are people who either work on their own at home or in test kitchens that service magazines, their own careers or those of others. These people are aiming at us - the ordinary cooks, trying to get excited at cooking again, after years of cooking for uninterested teenagers but also because there is always a desire for the new and the exciting. Although, of course, all of them are building on what they have learnt from here, there and everywhere, so that they finally understand those ingredients and techniques, and how they can be blended to make something simultaneously familiar but new. Many of them describe themselves as recipe developers rather than as cooks or chefs.
Not to mention TikTok, Instagram and the endless varieties of digital creation. Extreme sport perhaps. In the case of Tiktok perhaps, but don't forget those thousands of websites and blogs out there where housewifves and foodie enthusiasts create their own recipes with greater or lesser reliance on influence from elsewhere.
However, even they acknowledge that they have learnt from what has gone before, and their recipes often begin with a riff on something well-known, or a riff on what their mothers and grandmothers cooked. Nostalgia is a fashion but so is the twist to the tried and true. Ottolenghi's latest book is called Comfort for goodness sake and is said to be based on the team's memories of times gone by, places they once lived, people they met ... Almost collecting again. But that's what evolution is isn't it? Building on, with the hope of improving on, what has gone before.
I should also not forget the cooks of whom Nigel Slater is the most well-known component, and maybe Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall too. Even Nigella. Those who artfully seem to be presenting what they cooked for dinner last night, with what they had in the fridge. And let's not forget Jamie's heroic Keep Cooking and Carry On programs, made during COVID in his home kitchen, filmed by his wife and seemingly making something up from what was available at that particular point in time. Thrown together, impromptu and above all - simple. Sometimes recipes that are hardly recipes at all. At first glance they look like something your mother might have put on the table, but look a little closer and you will find all sorts of original ways with ingredients - both how they get cooked and what they are paired with. It's sort of collecting - ideas from here there and everywhere, knowledge gained in professional kitchens, at home and from research, and then turned into a new creation that maybe nobody has thought of before - although usually somebody has. I sometimes wonder how truly 'of the moment' these things are, but they certainly convince you of that vibe.
Al I know is that without those stars of the 60s and 70s - our stars of cuisine today would not be where they are. They also would not be anywhere without their mum and dad - even if that particular experience is a negative one. "We are what we have been", said Penelope Lively - a favourite and fundamental quote for me. Mostly I have applied it to my personal life, but I now see that it applies to cookbooks too.
"The best cookbooks – and they’re not the best sellers necessarily – always offer more than just recipes. They must, because there’s a vast ocean of cooking instructions on the internet if you want to know how to make your dinner. A good cookbook charms and transports you, shares new techniques and ideas, inspires you to eat good things, or tells you things you didn’t know before. They deserve a place on your bookshelf regardless of whether you cook from them." Sue Quinn
And they almost all are the result of a collection of memories and experiences transformed into something new and occasionally mind-blowing. Even pure collecting - as Elizabeth David's process almost was - is transformative. Those recipes were new to her, and they changed her outlook, and so she changed ours. Because that's what life, even something as simple as cooking, does for you - you evolve and you learn. Every day.
POSTSCRIPT
September 20 - I've skipped a few days myself here - silly busyness and lots of false starts leading nowhere.
2023 - Cabbage rolls from long ago - for some reason one of my most popular posts
2022 - Nothing - back home from holiday but probably catching up with the everyday
2021 - Odds and sods
2019 - Spring
2016 - Nothing
I always associate Elizabeth David and Lawrence Durrell, because of their parallel lives in Europe after WWII. Partly becasuse as I explored Europe and it food it was in the aftermath of reading Durrell's Alexandrian Quartet, which changed my life, in much the same way that Elizabeth David and Durrell affected each other too, and indeed wrote to each other.