More Christmas Robert Carrier and food photography then and now
"A unique feature is that each of the 260 recipes is illustrated with a full-colour photograph; these show exactly how the finished dish should look, and the numbered steps make it impossible to go wrong in following the instructions."
So says the publisher's blurb on the flyleaf of the cover of this 1973 book that my lovely son gave me for Christmas. It is second hand and a little worse for wear, but inside one of the pages was a pressed flower and the corner of a page here and there was turned down. There is something special about having a pre-loved item such as this. Other hands have turned the pages. Other hands have cooked the dishes - and where the pages were turned down it was intriguing to wonder which of the four dishes on the page had been cooked. And why the flower?
As you know by now, I am a huge fan of Robert Carrier, but he does cheat a bit. Several of his recipes appear in several of his books - word for word in some instances. But this is sort of interesting because (a) it shows which recipes are dearest to his heart, and (b) it shows how he did slightly tweak things as he grew older, of if he didn't interesting to know that he thought they needed no tweaking. And I mention this because I did indeed notice a few recipes that I had seen elsewhere. Some changed, some not.
"How often have I sat back confidently, secure in the knowledge - or so I thought - that I had at last perfected a method of cooking a dish, only to have some exciting new possibility of making it even better reveal itself like a bolt from the blue, often by sheer accident. And so the search for perfection starts all over again." Robert Carrier
I was also struck by that publisher's blurb. Carrier's earliest cookery books had no photographs - well there were a very few colour plates that took up a whole page and were intermittently spaced throughout the book. Some of them illustrated particular dishes but the majority were sort of still life pictures of meat, vegetables, fruit, etc. Back in the day when I began cooking in earnest there were no photographs. Which might have been a good thing. The publisher's stricture that the pictures "show exactly how the finished dish should look" is really a bit daunting if your finished dish doesn't look like it's theoretically supposed to. And it has to be said that the pictures are a bit old-fashioned somehow and prissy as well.
This is how it was all laid out. And do consider that this was revolutionary - well possibly not quite as revolutionary as the publishers would have you think, but nevertheless, rather unusual. Mostly, even in magazines and newspaper colour supplements there were no pictures of the finished dishes. Sometimes there were hand-drawn illustrations, but not often an actual photograph. The pictures are not as large as they would be nowadays though. Donna Hay's books, for example, are very largely pictorial.
Anyway I thought I would find one dish that he has used in a few books over time and show how the photographs evolved. I'm not going to look at the evolution of the recipe itself, but it's a project I could return to from time to time.
I have chosen for this little experiment - Carré d'agneau provençale - which is a roast, herbed rack of lamb. The name in the Carrier universe has a few minor variations through time, but it's basically the same thing - roast rack of lamb with a herb and breadcrumb crust. Here are the photos I found.
From left to right, top to bottom - Cooking for You 1973 (Carré d'agneau persillée), Great Main Dishes 1978 (Carré d'agneau persillée), Feasts of Provence 1992 (Carré d'agneau provençal), Great New Dishes of the World 1997 (Racks of lamb with green herb crust).
Interesting is it not, that the first three have a sort of traditional name and the last one has a more descriptive title, though to be fair persillée really means green herb crust (well parsley anyway). And no prizes for which one looks the most enticing. Which shows how our perceptions must have changed over time.
Also interesting is how we are gradually zooming in on the food. The first picture is of a very fussy presentation - complete with those little paper kind of chef hats they used to put on chops and the tomatoes look very plain, almost uncooked. These days they would be smaller - still on their stalks, probably a bunch of small ones in fact, and wrinkled. By 1978 they seem to have lost the chef hats, but the presentation is similarly fussy, and the tomatoes similarly plain though more artfully arranged and photographed side on with more emphasis on the crust. It's a bit more shiny. The third one, to be fair again, is photographed in a restaurant - no doubt Michelin starred, and therefore is very elaborate - complete with chefs hats. The tomatoes have gained stalks though. Feasts of Provence had a number of mini chapters on a meal in a particular restaurant - with recipes - so this recipe may well have been a little different, and the last picture is taken by Carrier himself. He seems to have taken all the photographs in this book and also in Great Dishes of Spain. Somebody may have photoshopped them but they do look pretty good and pretty modern for something that is now around 20 years old. A very close close-up of very juicy succulent looking meat and much more colourful than the previous editions. The emphasis is on the meat, not the presentation.
I'm sure that at the time all of these books were published we thought the photography to be the bees knees. We were probably amazed to have a photo of every dish. I guess the downside of not having a photo is that you have no idea what it is supposed to look like so don't even know whether you want to try the recipe or not. An enticing photo is meant to entice you to cook the dish. Donna Hay and Marie Claire are the past masters at this, but I could not find a photo of a similar dish. Much more slow cooking going on these days when it comes to lamb. This is the closest I could find from Donna Hay - Haloumi crusted lamb with tzatziki. And I also found a Jamie recipe that was accompanied by rhubarb. So really should look at the evolution of this recipe some time.
Jamie's is comfortably messy and exuberant - like Jamie himself, and Donna Hay's is elegantly restrained. Lots of white - colourful sides - including a cut tomato, and very artfully arranged.
I look at these pictures and ask myself why the first one of Robert Carrier's in particular really does look old-fashioned and dated, in comparison to the cleanness of the one on the right - or even the last of Robert Carrier's. Is it a case of less is more these days? All interesting though, but it's slightly worrying that the outdatedness of the photos in this book might put me off trying the recipes. After all I constantly cook things from his even earlier books (no pictures) quite happily, and this recipe is, in fact, almost identical to the one illustrated by his last photograph above. It sure shows the power of the image over content.
