Another kind of simple

"The recipes that follow are not simply quick to cook, they attempt to make the whole of your cooking life - and as a consequence all of your life - easier." Nigella Lawson

I asked for a Nigella Lawson cookbook for Christmas. Well I don't have any, and she is one of the biggest of the celebrity chefs. I have always rather dismissed her because of her flirty presentation and carefully cultivated image, but now and then I have come across recipes by her that looked pretty tempting. And then when I was doing that post on spaghetti with marmite I came across this quote from Anna del Conte, who had created the spaghetti dish, and it gave me pause for thought.

"Nigella has taken a lot of my recipes, always giving me full credit, and somehow always makes them better. Her changes are slight, yet they are distinct improvements. I don’t quite know how she does it. She’s very clever. She knows ingredients very well; she has a very subtle palate." Anna del Conte

And then Nigel Slater is obviously a fan - his book Real Food, which I now own has several recipes from Nigella in it. So I thought I shouldn't be such a snob, if that's the right word.

Anyway this is the Nigella book I received from my lovely son and his partner. I have only just started reading it so I suspect I shall have more to say on the subject, but so far it has been an interesting contrast to Yotam Ottolenghi's Simple, and an interesting comparison to Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking.

'Good Food Fast' is the subtitle and I have to say she won me over with the very first recipe in the book Smoked Cod and Cannellini.

I haven't ever thought about that before - the importance of the first recipe. I must have a look through my cookbooks with a view to writing something about it sometime. Whenever I get a new cookbook I start to read it from the beginning. I read the introduction carefully - it may have material for this blog after all, quite apart from the sheer pleasure of doing so - and then I start flicking through the recipes. If there are introductions to them, then I read them too. This way I get a little insight into the personality of the cook - or at least their personality as they want it to be seen - and a general idea of the kind of food they suggest.

So yes, the first recipe is important - if it features things you don't like or if it is complicated and either involves a lot of time or a lot of ingredients, then it is less tempting to read on and definitely less likely to tempt you to make something. This one, though, I might try. It uses canned beans and smoked fish - I'm guessing you could use any kind of smoked fish - and I'm guessing it would take no more than half an hour, probably less, (but I am slow), to get on to the plate.

The book echoes Yotam Ottolenghi's different definitions of 'simple' - which in this case means 'fast' but is arranged differently. He gave every recipe a symbol representing the kind of simple involved, but the book itself was arranged in a standard sort of way. Nigella on the other hand has arranged her book in sections representing her different kinds of fast. So far I have read about 'Everyday Easy (speedy suppers, day in, day out' and 'Workday Winners (weekday entertaining made easy'.

I suppose that Yotam Ottolenghi's book was more daring, although mainly because of the ingredients he used, which is really just a matter of shopping, but also because of the things he mixes together - the new and exotic combinations. There were a few very simple recipes in there, but none, I think as simple as some of Nigella's.

Take, for example, Naan pizza. Now I don't think I shall necessarily be making this particular pizza topping - drained mixed mushrooms antipasto from a jar, and fontina cheese, but I was won over by her statement that:

"while shop-bought pizza bases are vile, packet naans, when heated, are not."

I felt quite inspired to give this a go sometime. I have never been that impressed by pizza bases, or pitta breads for that matter, so I might give the naan a try. She might not be right of course but it's worth trying. And then there's Turkish bread too. Maybe I should try that.

And this recipe is also an interesting comparison to Delia, whose book also relied extensively on off-the shelf products but Delia made the mistake of naming particular products. I'm sure she was doing it because she thought that those particular products were the best of their kind, but she sure got a lot of flack for naming names, even though she claimed not to have been paid for mentioning them. I know some of you will think I'm naive, but I really do think that her mission was to research and name the best. Nigella, however, does not fall into that trap and simply mentions a type of product not the manufacturer, even if there is only one. Although, that said, even she, I notice, every now and then mentions a particular brand. I wonder if she got paid for that? Ottolenghi, on the other hand, did not mention many off-the shelf products at all. He was more about being simple with 'real' raw materials.

So I shall be reading on with interest.

"So much is written about the need to reduce the time we must spend cooking it's as if the kitchen were a hateful place, almost an unsafe place, and that it must be only reasonable for us to avoid it. But here's the problem: the day doesn't have enough gaps in it for me to do much shopping and the evening ... doesn't yield much time to cook. But I must eat, and I must eat well - or else what is the point of it all?"

Nigella Lawson

Indeed.