Are my favourite cooks out of date?

I am increasingly aware of constantly referring to the same celebrity chefs/cooks when I write this blog. You must be getting sick of me constantly quoting Nigel Slater et al. So I decided I should check and see if I am thoroughly out of date and should branch out more. The answer is sort of a yes and no.

First of all not all celebrity chefs write cookbooks, and not all writers of cookbooks are chefs as such. Delia and Nigella for example would not call themselves chefs even though they are often described as celebrity chefs.

The picture at the top was from a British website and so, of course, the people depicted there are all British. I recognise all of them except the black lady at the end, but I don't think I'm going to get into Ainsley Harriott or Marco-Pierre White any time soon. Heston Blumenthal is always interesting in his extremes, and although I enjoyed Keith Floyd's antics on his TV shows I don't think I'm going to quote him much either. And he's dead now. Maybe I should check out Gordon Ramsay more though. When researching tarragon yesterday I came across this from Nigel Slater:

"I remember watching Gordon Ramsay roasting a piece of fish on television. The way he used his knife, placed the fish in the pan, let one side colour and then turned it before putting it in the oven was sheer poetry to watch. No printed recipe could have been as much help as watching a great cook at his craft."

It rather made me want to look into Gordon Ramsay more. And interestingly he is also a great admirer of Jamie Oliver:

"This summer I have cooked many a Jamie Oliver recipe for supper, not from his books, but from watching him cook what must have been the most thoughtful, inspiring and quietly informative cooking I have ever seen on television. I didn't need to see anything in print, I took the recipes in almost by osmosis."

That Nigel Slater article was sort of the impetus for this post, although he was saying something rather different - how he mostly didn't use other people's recipes - although he then followed these remarks with the ten best recipes by others that he uses on a regular basis. I suppose I don't use many recipes myself these days. I know I constantly say that I should, that I will, but I'm not being very successful at it. And besides I love collecting cookbooks.

Having decided that I was being boring by referring to the same old cooks over and over again I decided I should venture out a bit more and see who was currently the big deal in the bookshops. It turns out that out of the top ten cookbooks sold in 2017 anyway (I couldn't find figures for 2018), only four of them were what I would call a cookbook - 2 from Jamie Oliver - 5 Ingredients and Super Food Family Classics, Maggie's Recipes for Life from Maggie Beer and Basics to Brilliance - Kids from Donna Hay. All of the rest were associated with diet and/or health in some way - and Maggie Beer's was too. It's worth noticing that this year Jamie Oliver is touting Veg - as his Christmas book and Nigel Slater too continues his foray into vegetarianism with volume two of Greenfeast.

The really big sellers though are Michael Mosley and Pete Evans who are all about health - Mosley with the Fast 800 and Pete Evans with his various excursions into paleo food. And let's not discount institutions like CSIRO. If you look at Amazon's best sellers in cookbooks they are almost all health and diet books.

All of which I suppose is really good. But not of great interest to me. I don't think I want to hear one word more about gut health for example. It's my husband's favourite subject.

So I'm sorry guys you're going to be stuck with the same old people for some time yet. Though maybe I should have a look at Neil Perry and Bill Granger for starters even though they are probably a bit passé now. Maybe even Deliciously Ella - who seems to be the queen of English 'clean food'. I saw her being interviewed once and she didn't seem to be too far out. We'll see what turns up on Readings bargain table.