My Favorite Brits and Their Books

There are so many incredibly talented British cooks and cookbook writers these days it is hard for me to choose my favorites. I currently have 29 cookbooks written by 13 English cooks (not including several from Australia and Ireland). Some of them are nearly household names, even here, like Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, thanks to their numerous television appearances. And others are just splendid cooks, often heading up restaurant kitchens, who write beautifully and create wonderful dishes to share with us, their readers: Fergus Henderson, Simon Hopkinson, Gary Rhodes, John Torode, Simon Rimmer, and Nigel Slater to name a few. I have cooked from all 29 of these cookbooks. While I can’t say that all the recipes were equally successful, the great majority were very good indeed. In London this spring I made notes of a number of cookbooks which I hope will get published here in the next few months. More by women too. I’ll keep you posted.

Nigella Lawson is stunningly beautiful, funny, astute, and can create both complicated and simple dishes with great wit and charm. I’ve never seen her on television so all my impressions come exclusively from her many books.
Nigella Bites (2002)
Favorite recipes: Italian Sausages with Lentils (recipe below), Chocolate Lime Cheesecake, and Chocolate Pots (December 8, 2009 blog)
How To Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking (2001)
Favorite recipe: Pizza Rustica
Other cookbooks: How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food (2002), Forever Summer (2003), Feast (2004), Nigella Express: Good Food Fast (2007)

Jamie Oliver is passionate about getting people to cook and eat better, without a hint of preciousness or elitism. He is congenial, even folksy, in his cookbooks, making them seem accessible to people who haven’t cooked much, especially guys. If you want to see for yourself, check out his web site and watch his TED acceptance speech. Then cook his food. You’ll be convinced.
The Naked Chef (2000)
Favorite recipes: Pappardelle with Sweet Leeks and Mascarpone, Spicy Couscous, Spiced Slow-cooked Lamb Shanks, Marinated Chickpeas with Chilli, Lemon, and Parsley, and Farfalle with Watercress and Arugula Pesto
Happy Days with the Naked Chef (2002)
Favorite recipes: Shrimp with Chilli, Parsley, Ginger and Garlic on Toast and Sirloin of Beef with Bok Choy, Soy Sauce and Ginger
Jamie’s Dinners (2004)
Favorite recipe: Sticky Toffee Pudding
Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook (2007)
Favorite recipe: Indian-style Broccoli with Spiced Yogurt (May 19, 2010 blog)
Other cookbooks: Jamie’s Food Revolution (2009)

Simon Rimmer, an avowed carnivore, bought a vegetarian restaurant called Greens in 1990 in Manchester, England with no experience running a kitchen or cooking in one. He and his partner who had been waiters previous to the purchase threw themselves into transforming “stodgy” vegetarian fare into remarkable dishes and learning to cook really well along the way.
Rebel Cook: Breaking the Rules for Brilliant Food (2006)
Favorite recipes: Warm Potato Salad with Garlic Sausage (recipe below), Warm Vietnamese Chicken Salad, and Simple Green Salad, Chinese Style
The Accidental Vegetarian (2004)
Favorite recipes: Smoky Roasties, Rendang Shallot and Asparagus Curry, and Butternut Enchilladas with Mole Sauce

Nigel Slater wrote Real Fast Food way before the “fast” thing kicked in over here. The ingredients are few, the skills required negligible, and the results quite delicious. His 2004 memoir Toast is both sad and revealing of the various situations that may lead to an interest in cooking.
Real Fast Food (1995)
Favorite recipes: Brussels Sprouts and Bacon (recipe below) and Spinach and Orange Salad
Appetite (2000)
Favorite recipes: A Smooth and Creamy Paté, and A Creamy Calming Pasta Dish
Other cookbooks: The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater (2006)

Two of the three recipes I’m about to give you call for sausage. The third calls for bacon. It’s safe to say that I am extremely fond of both sausage and bacon. One of my favorite easy meals when I was newly married was sausages and baked acorn squash halves filled with butter, brown sugar, and walnuts. Sound familiar? The truth is sausages are great with just about anything. Recently I made them to accompany a very tasty bulgur salad. I suggest you buy the best you can, preferably from a butcher you trust. And if you are serving them to friends, try them out yourself first to make certain they are worthy.

Day 3: London to Oxford

We had an amazing dinner at Fifteen last night. Fifteen is a restaurant which Jamie Oliver (yes, him again—you might think that I am spending all my time in London chasing after him like a teenage groupie; you wouldn't be far from the truth) started seven years ago in order to train at-risk English youth to be chefs and kitchen workers. All the profits from the restaurant go into the Fifteen Foundation to support the teaching efforts. So it is a very worthy cause. And it was a very worthy dinner. It was a tasting menu. I’m not going to tell you the cost. If it were in dollars, you would think it reasonable.

I’m only going to tell you briefly what I tasted. If I told you everything, I would vastly exceed the time I have at this internet café in Oxford. I had burrata, zucchini and ricotto cheese-stuffed ravioli, a pollack (fish) for the main course, and panna cotta with rhubarb for dessert. Just great.

I’m in Oxford now, just down the street from All Souls College. The new and the old side-by-side. We had a lovely lunch at our hotel Malmaison, a refurbished prison in the Old Castle. Small rooms (Katherine reminded me that they were originally cells after all) and ours must have been inhabited at one time by Robert Ogilvie. His name is on the door. Lunch was a smoked haddock chowder and a spring vegetable crumble. Just what we needed on this very chilly spring day.

Can you tell we're having a good time?

Day 2: London

Actually I have a little bit to report on last night’s dinner. I went to an Argentinian place called Gauchos. Apparently there are 19 of them in the UK and one in Amsterdam. All their beef comes from Argentina, which is well-known for the superiority of this product. I set aside my concerns for sustainability and the costs of shipping the beef over here. I must say I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Rib eye steak with green peppercorn sauce, humitas (a delicious slightly sweet corn mixture spooned into corn husks nicely tied on each end) and fresh spinach. A glass of Malbec. I sat at the bar which had a perfect view of the open kitchen. These guys were so good at grilling steak that they hardly had to look at it to know that it was ready—and perfectly cooked. (I took pictures on my IPhone but can’t get them to load on this PC. I'll do it when I return.)

So today. Lots of walking—about 8 miles so far. I first walked down to one of Jamie Oliver’s two retail stores and cooking class locations. It is way off the tourist maps down in Clapham, maybe two and a half miles from where I’m staying. It is painted pink, with some of the signs in Jamie’s inimitable ‘big love’ friendly and accessible language. He was not there. I was only able to get a couple of photographs before a salesperson told me that photos weren’t allowed inside the store. I did buy a Jamie magazine. What does this guy not have? A class was going to start at 12:00 noon. I was invited to stay and watch. But I decided to move along on my walking journey.

After putting some band aids on the back of my heels, I set off to my local tube station to ride to the Notting Hill stop for a nice walk to Books for Cooks, a splendid cookbook store which I had been wanting to visit for ages. With only a few missteps, I got there just in time to be told that the cafe in the back had run out of food. Never mind, I could hold out a little longer. I carefully looked over the books. I was especially interested in some of the Brits who were new to me: Jason Atherton, Skye Gyngell, Aaron Cruze, and Celia Brooks Brown among others. I didn’t buy any for the same reasons as yesterday but I sure do hope that their books eventually make it over the Atlantic. They look great.

I walked back to the Notting Hill tube via Portobello, just minding my own business, when I spotted the Hummingbird Bakery Café. I knew the name from the cookbook which Marie Clare found at Anthropologie down on Fourth Street in Berkeley and which I bought her for her birthday. I believe that her first blog featured cupcakes from that cookbook. Well I stopped in and bought myself a gorgeous and generous piece of Red Velvet Cake. So good. I ate almost all of it (I wrapped up the rest in a napkin for Katherine Fulton to taste after her day of work). I would have saved some for Marie Clare. But really, it would not have been very tasty in ten days time. Sorry, Marie Clare.

Keepers of the Flame

A couple of weeks ago, Katherine and I spent an afternoon pasting hexagonal post-it notes on a large conference room wall at her office in San Francisco. On each hexagon (see examples in the photo) we wrote the name of a recipe or a story that has appeared on my blog since the middle of May. It was quite an impressive collection. We sorted the recipes by appetizer, soup, main dish, etc. and the stories by a more complicated system. Our purpose was threefold: to see what I had done in these last nine months, to look for any holes which I might want to fill in the next stretch of time, and to ponder the question of how to turn this blog into cookbook. We didn't get very far on this last issue except to determine that I still want to create a cookbook.

Here are the stats on what’s appeared: 7 appetizers, 4 soups, 23 main dishes, 18 salads, 7 salad dressings, 6 grains/starches, 10 vegetables sides, 5 relishes, 6 desserts, and 8 baked goods. The main dishes broke down as follows: 4 chicken, 1 beef, 3 ground meats, 3 pork, 2 shrimp, 7 vegetarian, and 3 pasta. No fish. So starting today with three nice warming winter soups, I’ll be filling in some of the missing pieces.

But something more important bubbled to the surface that afternoon.
“Keepers” for me has always referred to the fishing term. Keepers are the fish you keep to eat. Everything else gets returned to the pond. The recipes I give you are the ones I love the most. Recipes worth keeping.
But there is another meaning as well.

Those of us who cook regularly, who buy produce and raw meat, who chop and sauté, who dish out steaming bowls of home-made soup are “keepers” of a cooking tradition. Not unlike Ancient Rome’s Vestal Virgins who tended the sacred flame of Vesta, the goddess of hearth and home, and prepared food for rituals necessary for the health and well-being of Rome, we cooks, male and female, moms and dads, standing at our stoves, are keepers of the flame. Sitting with our loved-ones at a table over a home-cooked meal, we too tend to the health and well-being of our friends, our families and ourselves.

In my darkest moments, I worry that we keepers of the hearth may cease to exist. After one or two more generations of families with no one cooking in the kitchen (will houses cease to have kitchens?) and with the food industry doing everything it can to process our food for us and pumping it full of cheap ingredients that make us fat or fatter, what is the future for the home-cooked meal, made from real ingredients that nourish and sustain? Who will teach the next generation how to cook? Who will teach them the difference between a tomato and a potato?

This morning, I watched the TED speech of Jamie Oliver, a celebrated British chef, who won this year’s TED prize ($100,000 and the help of everyone in the TED audience to accomplish his goal) and who, at 34, wants to change how people eat in Great Britain and now here. His acceptance speech is tough, challenging and inspiring. His wish is to form a strong sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity.
We who are the current keepers of the flame need to find a way to join him, to find each other, and to make sure that all the recipes we love, our “keepers,” get passed along to the next generation. Our future depends on it. Are you with me?