...there's both eatin' and drinkin' in it

Category: Dinner (Page 9 of 30)

Spud Sunday: Michelin Spuds

Stéphane Robin smiled enthusiastically: “You must let us know if you try any of the recipes.”

I was sitting in a reception room at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud at an early hour perusing a copy of “Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud: The First Thirty Years” while around me, preparations were getting underway for the official launch of the book later that day. Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud is Ireland’s only two star Michelin establishment, an honour that it has held for almost 16 years, and Stéphane, the longtime manager of the restaurant, and founder Patrick Guilbaud had paused to chat informally about the book in between attending to the various tasks that comprised the business of, what was for them, a very special day.

Guilbauds 30 years

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Spud Sunday: The Why Of Cookbooks

So why, exactly, do we buy cookbooks?

The simplistic answer, of course, is that we buy them for the recipes, but in reality, it’s almost never that simple.

We may buy a cookbook because we’ve seen the corresponding series on TV. We may have come to like or, even better, to trust the chef-author based on past cookbooks, through a blog or by way of an associated food business. We may want to try our hand at a particular cuisine or we may want to learn the basics. We may be dedicated followers of foodie fashion or we may just like the pictures, and there’s no doubt but that good photography and styling helps to sell.

Increasingly, photography in cookbooks is used, not only to show what the food should, in theory, look like but also to convey a representation of the lifestyle associated with eating that food. Whether we are subsequently disappointed when our dishes (or our lifestyle) do not turn out “like in the pictures” is another matter entirely. And while it can be helpful to see what a dish may look like at the end of our endeavours, some of my most trusted and well-used cookbooks (take a bow, Madhur Jaffrey) have little in the way of glossy pictures and are no less loved by me for that.

In the end, while the pictures are nice, it is the words that count. My favourite cookbooks are the ones that are worth reading not just for the recipes. Give me Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery and an armchair and I will curl up happily. Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater I like as much for their writing as for the style of their recipes. It’s important too, though, that the recipes work.

Pieminister

The Pieminister Cookbook

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Spud Sunday: Simple Spuds

Roasted potatoes with bay leaf

Simple as they come:
potatoes roasted with a bit of inner bay leaf

I was struck lately by the seemingly relentless drive to label the recipes found in many cookbooks and (their often accompanying) cookery programmes as “simple” and “fast” – from Nigel Slater’s Simple Suppers and Simple Cooking to Jamie Oliver’s 30 Minute Meals, and a whole host of others in between. They all, in one way or another, address the perception that, as a race, we 21st century consumers have less and less time to cook and less and less of the kitchen skills required but, ironically, more and more time to watch cookery on TV.

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