Twenty-first century cookbooks are dangerously seductive, their gorgeous, pouting covers and soothingly whispered reassurances inducing an instantaneous culinary swoon. This book, you think, is about to change my life. But alas, only rarely is this so. Confession time (no shame in this column). Last year, I kissed more than a few new cookbooks, each one more devastatingly handsome than the last – and yet only in one case did a serious relationship bloom.
And so it was that I decided to begin January with an old and rather less glamorous lover in my arms in the form of Jane Grigson’s English Food, a book that will be 50 years old this year. My copy of this classic is rather plain looking – a few tiny woodcuts are all it offers in the way of illustration – and its author’s tone, though not unkindly, is of course sometimes rather stern (NB I mean this in a strictly non-kinky way). But to wrestle with it, whether in the kitchen or in the boudoir, is nevertheless a fully satisfying experience. This is a book so good, even when it’s at its most old-fashioned, it still seems modish: exciting, even, if you’re in the right mood.
