Books & kitchen
The Cookbook That Writes Things Down
Half a century on, a book largely concerned with where recipes came from turns out to have been arguing our case for us.
The verdict
A cookbook that treats a recipe as a record rather than a set of instructions — and is a better read for it.
There is a particular kind of cookbook that tells you what to do and nothing else. It is efficient, it is often perfectly good, and it is completely replaceable. Jane Grigson’s English Food is the other kind. It tells you what to do, and then it tells you who was doing it, where, and roughly since when — and the effect is that you finish a recipe knowing something rather than merely having eaten.
The structure is unfashionable and better for it. Recipes arrive grouped by what they are rather than by how long they take or how many people they impress. The headnotes are short and do actual work: a sentence on a regional name, a note on which version came first, an aside about what was available when the dish was invented and therefore why it contains what it contains.
A recipe with no provenance is a set of instructions. A recipe with provenance is a thing somebody did, somewhere, for a reason.
Why we are reviewing it here
Because it makes a case we ended up making in software without meaning to. Grigson’s recipes are inseparable from their notes — remove the surrounding paragraph and you have lost most of what the entry was for. That is exactly what happens to a family recipe when it is copied into a phone as a list of ingredients: the instructions survive and everything that made it worth keeping does not.
It is also a book that takes regional naming seriously, and cheerfully records that the same dish has three names depending on which county you are standing in. Anybody who has tried to build an ingredient dictionary will feel a certain solidarity.
The reservation
It assumes a cook who is not in a hurry, and it assumes a shopping trip that Britain has largely stopped making. Several recipes begin with an ingredient you will have to plan for rather than buy on the way home. This is not a flaw in the book so much as a change in the reader, but it is worth knowing before you take it down at six o’clock on a Wednesday.
Read it for
- The headnotes, which are the reason to own it
- Puddings, treated with the seriousness they were owed all along
- Any recipe whose name you have heard and never quite pinned down