Not gharsley at all

Like many others of my generation, I was taught to cook by the ineffable Elizabeth David. As a foreign correspondent in Manhattan with unsociable working hours, I was confined by circumstance to eating at home, and fried eggs and cornflakes palled quite quickly as a daily diet. I had somehow acquired French Provincial Cooking, and the Gristedes grocery on Amsterdam Avenue and 68th sold everything that Elizabeth recommended, much of it unimaginable back home in Britain in 1970: things like cherry tomatoes and basil and strawberries in any month of the year. My take on Julie and Julia* predated that book by 25 years as I worked my way through the glorious adventure of learning to cook.

It was Elizabeth David’s magazine articles, published in the gloomy austerity of post-war Britain, which first brought the bright sunshine of the Mediterranean streaming into our kitchens. She had lived and loved and cooked in France and Greece and Egypt and she introduced us to the light and colour and fragrance of a cuisine that was wholly unknown in the years before cheap air travel and mass tourism. A Book of Mediterranean Food, the first collection of her cookery journalism published in 1950, is at one end of the long bookshelf of works that have served to popularise cooking over the years. Jay Rayner’s Chewing the Fat is at the other.

Food and cookery are now a huge component of everyday journalism in newspapers, on television and, puzzlingly enough, even on the radio where Rayner himself hosts The Kitchen Cabinet, presiding over a panel of celebrity chefs who advise on culinary quandaries such as dealing with a surfeit of courgettes or exciting new things to do with beetroot. There is Masterchef, with or without celebrities, and Bake-Off which appears to create its own. There is Mary Berry on the cover of every other Daily Mail weekend magazine, the queen of British baking, beaming over her latest batch of something quite beautiful. There is still the occasional sighting of Nigella Lawson, although perhaps less so since her private life became more appetising for popular consumption than her helpful hints on how to perfect a softly boiled egg.

These days, there is also Ed Balls who has discovered that explaining the intricacies of slow-cooked pulled pork is infinitely easier than attempting to popularise the finer points of endogenous growth theory. Who’d guess! Meanwhile, the weekend papers are loaded with pages of lavishly photographed “food porn”; there are recipes for every mood and every household; there are pull-out supplements on things like one-pot suppers and teaching your toddlers to make toasties. “List journalists” are busy in the field, categorising the comparative freshness factors of one food against another or sourcing the more obscure sauces. There is an appetite for cookbooks which appears insatiable and there are restaurant reviews and endless columns – and look! here’s Jay Rayner again, whose Observer articles are collected in this slim volume.

What has happened over the years since the early elegance of Elizabeth David is that some journalists, like Rayner, have stopped writing about cooking and address themselves now instead to what I think is the somewhat distasteful subject of eating. Rayner writes of his distaste for middle-aged men who can rise from a meal without some of its constituent ingredients splattered on their shirts. “I make a mess of my clothes at the table because I take the business of eating seriously,” he writes. Well, I suppose that is meant to be funny and I grant there may be a gender issue here. The publicity for this book promises a “rollicking” read which I am guaranteed to find “hilarious” and some of my men friends tell me that they like Rayner’s writing and find him entertaining.

But I am not looking for laughs in a book about food; I am seeking, rather, inspiration for something I want to cook and serve to friends. I want food that nourishes the soul, that is a smile on the plate in summer, or brings comfort when it is cold, or something with apricity that offers the promise of sunshine in winter. Even though I am not myself in Rome, like Rachel Roddy, I want to be inspired to cook like the Romans do – as she inspires me with her anecdotage of her neighbourhood street life. Rayner’s journalism, in contrast, repels delight, rejects the pleasures of the senses employed in cooking for the solipsistic relish of indulgent eating. There is an entire essay on his dislike of garnish - and parsley in particular (“Nothing classed as garnish that is sprinkled on to food just before serving is ever necessary”) and he doesn’t even manage to quote Ogden Nash.**

Look at the words in the title of this book: “chewing” and “fat” and “greedy” are all ugly words that Mrs David would only employ with the disdain of which she was so eminently capable when she wished, indeed, to eschew some practice of which she disapproved. And the fact that they are all about eating, not cooking, provides, I believe, an explanation for the puzzling dichotomy between the massive amount of journalism about food and the lack of people actually doing any cooking.