Quote(s) of the day - part one

"Every serious cookbook should tell a story" Neil Perry

It's Sunday - Life and Leisure day and this week it actually turned up two or three potential subjects, but I will stick to just one - an interview by one celebrity chef (Ben Shewry) with another (Neil Perry). The latter being so celebrity that he featured on a set of stamps issued by the Post Office. So I guess this is a sort of 'A Word From' piece. But not quite. And actually I think it will be more than one 'A Word From', because there were at least three things he said that made me think a little bit. Which is interesting because I know very little about his food really.

He has written quite a few cookbooks but I don't have any of them. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe if one of them crops up on the Readings bargain table I'll buy one. Anyway as I was skimming this article as one does on a Sunday morning the quote above jumped out at me and made me ponder on whether my favourite cookbooks could therefore be considered 'serious'. Did they tell a story?

I'm a member of two book groups and one year, for 'my' book I decided to tackle the question of cookbooks. I asked all the members of the group to bring along their favourite cookbook and tell us why. I honestly can't remember them all, (but it was a really good session) but I do remember that at least one, and I think maybe two or three, were actually handwritten recipes handed down from mother to daughter in carefully cherished notebooks or folders. So they were more than a collection of recipes they were a memento of a beloved mother. A memory of a massive number of things. A story of a life - of lives.

I think, for my favourite I chose Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking. As you can see from this scanned picture, my copy is battered and torn, with pages falling out, though my lovely daughter-in-law did give me a rather more recent edition which is in rather better condition. Interestingly, though, I find myself turning to my old copy rather than the new. And I think it's because it reminds me of the time I used it heavily - almost every week. The time that I was teaching myself, with Elizabeth David's help, to cook like the French with whom I spent so many happy times in my teenage years. The time of the first years of my marriage when I was trying to worm my way into my husband's heart through his stomach. The actual physical book tells me a story. A personal story of my young life.

But the book itself also tells a story. It tells Elizabeth David's story of discovering French food in the days of dreary English food and wartime restraint. It told a story of traditions and simple perfection. it told us the story of a cuisine nurtured through history by ordinary people into one of the world's greatest cuisines. It was a very, very serious cookbook written by a very, very serious lady. A personal memoir that meant a huge amount to her and also to a whole generation of English cooks. It was game-changing.

And what of my other cookbooks? Are they all serious? Do they all tell a story? Some of them obviously do because they are self-consciously telling of a journey, with a greater or lesser degree of success, of a journey through a particular place or of a venture of theirs. Superficially there is a story being told, sometimes successfully and very interestingly, sometimes not so much. In many a personality shines through - Delia Smith, Nigel Slater, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, Maggie Beer, Robert Carrier - whether you like that personality or not. In others, somewhat curiously in some instances, the personality is more absent - Claudia Roden, Stephanie Alexander, Beverley Sutherland Smith, Madhur Jaffrey, Charmaine Solomon sometimes. But nevertheless their books do tell stories, personal ones sometimes too.

I'm not sure about Donna Hay and her ilk. Having tried her beef and beetroot curry for my husband's special meal I am still not sure. I find her food looks sensational. And this was an interesting concept - beetroot and curry? Her books and magazines are most beautifully presented. The food looks mouth-watering. The recipes are relatively simple. And yet the result lacks something. The curry was tasty - yes - but somehow not as tasty as I thought it might be, even though the ingredients were all pretty authentic. And there was not really a story. Though, on second thoughts perhaps her section on beetroot in her latest magazine was telling a story of the versatility of the vegetable. But I have no sense of Donna Hay as a person. I even sometimes wonder whether she is a person (well yes I know she is), or a conglomerate of people. The director of a team. I don't have a sense of passion, other than of making money.

And no doubt Neil Perry is that too. I doubt he actually cooks himself much any more. He now has ten restaurants, several cookbooks and consults for this and that - at one point he was the creative food director for Qantas - I don't know if he still is. Appearances here and there. I gather that early on in his career it nearly all ended catastrophically - the original Rockpool in Sydney was losing millions - but then came the Sydney Olympics and he has never looked back.

I guess it's a little unfair to say that some cookbooks do not tell a story. I'm sure that all of them tell some kind of story, even if it's jumping on the bandwagon of somebody else's story. There must be a concept behind every one surely, even if that concept is just to make money. You might think there are loonies out there in the cookbook world - in my book that's the extreme dieting, clean food kind of people, but I'm absolutely certain that they are trying to tell a story - whether you like the story or not is a different matter. Same with novels, films, etc. etc. They all tell a story - just some do it better than others.

So is that really what Neil Perry is saying? That the truly great cookbooks, of which there are many, speak to the user, all users, on a personal level. If I had not gone to France all those times as a teenager, and if I had not had such a great interest in their food, would Elizabeth David's book have spoken to me in the same way? I'm sure it doesn't mean the same to my children - even though I have talked it up to them many, many times.

"my story was how important both Eastern and Western food was to me. When you believe in something, it's not a fad. You can still be influenced by things around you, but you always bring it back and make them your own." Neil Perry

Does serious just mean game-changing. Is the story theirs or yours?

POSTSCRIPT

A second quote which doesn't really have anything to do with food but is worth reporting is:

"It's a cliché, but find something you love and you'll never work a day in your life."

I think this one is just too hard for most people. We either don't have anything we love enough to make a career of, or it cannot be moulded into a career that pays the rent, or what we love turns out to be hard grind anyway - and to be fair to him he does sort of admit this:

"by the time if finished the third straight night of rolling tortillas at 3am for the opening of Bar Patron last mont, I was pretty wrecked."