2018 will in future be known as the year of the Great West Norwood Cookbook Cull. But which books to get rid of, and which to keep? The Random Recipe Adventure will help us decide (you can read a bit more about the premise here). Each week, a book will be taken from the shelves, examined, and cooked from. Losers go to Oxfam – winners stay on the shelves, with a promise that they will no longer be neglected quite as much as they have been for the last decade or so.
WEEK 13
The book
Cuisine Bon Marché by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
How/where/when did I get it?
Bought when first released some time in the mid-1990s.
Have I used it since then?
A lot when I first bought it – pages are dog-eared and gravy-splattered, as should be the way with all good cookbooks. Much less in recent years.
What Did The Random Recipe Generator throw up?
Spaghetti soufflé and real Welsh rarebit
So, what about it?
Written before Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, if you see what I mean, this is the archetype of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall books.
Value for money is the driving force behind it. It’s not so much a cookbook as an encouragement to change habits. It’s a paean to the cheap cut, the leftover, the kitchen garden and the local market. It’s a persuasive argument, well presented.
Sections are organised by ingredient, each one with a rundown of how best to use and cook it. And then there are sections with actual recipes, many supplied by the chef at a selection of HF-W’s favourite restaurants of the time (don’t look for them – they’re not there any more).
I remember using this book often when I was young and innocent and finding my way in the kitchen. There’s a lot of good stuff in here.
And yet.
There’s a decent reason the spaghetti soufflé has evaded my attention all these years. It’s not that it didn’t work. It was fine, but when it comes down to it I don’t really see the point of a soufflé with a pile of spaghetti at the bottom of it. Soufflé, yes; spaghetti, yes. Together though? Hmm.
And the real Welsh rarebit… well, yes, put beer in it. I know this. Once, I didn’t, and was grateful for the knowledge. But now…
As I leafed through the book, remembering the things I’ve cooked from it – successes and failures alike, the latter much more my fault than the author’s – I wondered how often I’d continue to use it. And, slightly surprisingly, I found the answer was ‘not very’. For all that it covers important ground, it’s ground covered elsewhere on my shelves, or so deeply ingrained that I don’t need to consult a book to remember it. It’s nothing to do with the quality of the writing, nor the effectiveness of the recipes, or anything else really. It’s a very good book. But for some reason, perhaps nothing more than a temporary feeling of mehness, it left me feeling lukewarm.
I might, in a couple of months, regret this parting of the ways. But somehow I doubt it. And perhaps someone else will pick it up and enjoy exploring it the way I did all those years ago.
The Verdict: Keeper or Chucker?
A slightly left-field chucker, as it were.
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Right – you have me now – I’ll have to toss one knitting book?