LITMIR.BIZ

       INTRODUCTION

      I am delighted to have Action Cook Book republished. Now I can have a fresh new copy to replace the dogeared old one that is on a shelf in our kitchen. Of all the books I have written none of them is dearer to me or more personal than this one. Although the ‘cook strips’ ran in the Observer newspaper for many years they were not created for publication; they were just my notes.

      I grew up with an interest in food and cooking. My mother had been a professional chef and, during my six years as a student, I had enjoyed vacation jobs in the kitchens of some top restaurants. I had acquired a small library of cookery books, including some of the classic ones, and I didn’t want to see them become stained or gravy-spattered. It was for this reason that I never took them into the kitchen. Having carefully noted the details of each recipe, I pinned these up over the stove. I was an art student and it was inevitable that the notes included little diagrams and drawings. During a dinner party, Ray Hawkey, a graphics specialist who was at the time radically changing newspaper design, came into the kitchen and spotted the fluttering collection of recipe notes. He suggested that they could be published if they were more carefully drawn and my scribbled lettering replaced by that of a lettering expert. It was Ray who added the grid and generally supervised the improvements. Through Ray I found a lettering artist who was creative and resourceful. It was not an easy task for him, and I soon found that it was best to let him do the lettering first, and then fit my drawings into the spaces. This is why some of the pots, pans and basins are of unorthodox shapes.

      The next hurdle was to convince the Features Editor of the Observer that he would get a reliable and continuous supply of the strips. I was not a journalist and had very little previous contact with newspaper people, who seemed to suspect that all artists were unreliable drunkards. To build up a credible supply of cook strips I retrieved old notes from where they had been stuffed behind the flour bin on the top shelf. For this reason the early recipes were mostly the ones that I liked best and had cooked regularly. And this is why Action Cook Book remains so personal.

      But as the first set of notes was used, I became more systematic in selecting recipes and I devoted a lot of time to testing them in my cramped kitchen. I was dismayed to find how many well-established recipes simply didn’t work. They had been copied from cookbook to cookbook by writers and journalists who were too busy to put them to the test. I turned to cooks I admired, whether they were experienced professionals or accomplished amateurs; French, German or British. I was delighted to find that almost all of them were prepared to share their skills and secrets. My mother was a superb cook but never consulted recipes nor wrote them. The steak and kidney pudding and the English trifle are samples of my mother’s recipes and they remain favourites of mine. The Christmas pudding won the BBC Cookery Club prize when a Mrs Dashfield reintroduced the old idea of using soft breadcrumbs to lighten the texture and make a pudding which even foreigners enjoy. At the time this was a radical innovation but now almost all recipes use breadcrumbs. I remember that Mrs Dashfield expressed regret that I’d put the rum butter recipe into the same cook strip as she thought it did not go with the pudding. Mrs Dashfield was a purist.

      Publication of the cook strips in the Observer did influence cooking, mostly by advocating better ingredients instead of the inferior wartime

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