Jojo, you’re the first person we’ve asked to talk about cook books and you certainly won’t be the last, I’m sure, to pay their dues to Elizabeth David. You’ve chosen "French Country Cooking" to head your list. Why?

Well, Elizabeth David is the first proper cookery writer I ever came across, as opposed to someone who just writes recipes. My Granny gave me her copy of "French Country Cooking" which says ‘Margret 1953’ and underneath ’To Jojo, Love Granny August 1992’ in exactly the same handwriting. So she had it for 40 years. The book is full of sensible advice and also makes you feel you could enjoy reading it as much as cooking from it. It’s very well written. It’s got lots of interesting passages, including a lovely bit about Gertrude Stein coming back to Paris after the war and seeing an etching of a chicken done by Raoul Duffy in the window of a butcher’s shop. And how wonderful it was, when there was no chicken in the shops, that somebody had the generosity and imagination to draw a chicken and cheer everybody up like that.

You think it worked or did it just make everyone more hungry and frustrated?

Well, it worked for Gertrude anyway. What worked for Gertrude Stein didn’t always work for everybody else.

True. But Stein works for David, right? And David seems to work for everybody.

Yes. "French Country Cooking" has got briefly written recipes that are encouraging but also kind of improving if you know what I mean. It makes you feel like you need to try harder which is a good thing, but then Elizabeth David says something like ‘the merit of food, all different kinds of food, is less important than the spirit with which cooking is approached’. As opposed to being determined to do it in a spirit of martyrdom you see? She’s just such a sensible person. Cooking is part of her life. She’s the opposite of someone who’s obsessed with food. It’s part of her life and its completely woven into her life: cooking and eating well. But it’s not the sole purpose of her life.

The opposite of an eating disorder?

So the exact opposite of an eating disorder. In the sense that food is part and parcel of enjoying every bit of your life every day.

Elizabeth David is setting the bar for a cookbook. She establishes a tradition for many of us for reading about cooking, which is not just going to a book for recipes, but going to a book for a complete experience. In the same way anyone would go to a really good book to immerse themselves in a world.

And she always tells you something you don’t know. She’s educating and improving. Also, not too serious. Very scholarly but not locked away. She got bad press at the end of her life but it’s quite wrong to judge people in the last 20 years of their lives…

French Country Cooking (Penguin Classics) by John Minton, Elizabeth David

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…When everything is that much tougher all round. So Elizabeth David is the original cookbook writer. She establishes a kind of template. But let’s move on to the second book on your list which is by Deborah Madison. I noticed that you've included two Californians on your list. This one is from someone who runs a restaurant in San Francisco called The Greens Restaurant and there’s another one, Alice Waters who runs a restaurant in Berkley. Let’s start with Madison’s "The Greens Cookbook".

Or just about Greens in general. Madison’s been running this wonderful Zen Buddhist restaurant since the 1970’s, and of course the book is named after it. And the amazing thing is that it’s the first book that was entirely vegetarian and didn’t make you feel like you were missing out on anything by only choosing vegetables. It sounds like heaven on earth.

So vegetables as something more than just a side order to your steak.

Something much more. It’s very complex; some of the recipes are very complex. And very liberating. I was only 23 when I got the book and hadn’t really heard of butternut squash, all the different kinds of squash. It was like a whole new world of vegetables.

Well obviously you’re someone who’s very interested in vegetables. Your own cookbook sprang from your allotment.

But I’m not a vegetarian. I love, you know, pork products.

(Both laugh)

So I’m totally not a vegetarian but I think I could probably live off vegetables and beans knowing I could go to this book because its got Japanese food in it and all kinds of chili butters and herb butters that makes eating vegetables a delight. It’s the opposite of eating your greens because you should.

Did you come to these cookbooks through cooking or travelling or what?

I think just reading mostly. I did some travelling but the most travelling I did was in Africa and that wasn’t a culinary experience really. It was an experience but I didn’t come back with lots of recipes. My tastes sort of align from childhood, but my mum and dad were definitely not foodies. Outdoor, practical types, but not foodies. We went out mushroom picking. My dad is a biologist and granny is a botanist so there was a kind of a wild food aspect to our diet but we didn’t go in for anything exotic

The Greens Cookbook by Edward Espe Brown, Deborah Madison

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Complicated fine foods…

I sort of taught myself to cook because I became interested in food and didn’t have the traditional background or training. I find that lots of people that I like actually have done that as well, like Richard Olney. He came from Iowa and is the authority on Chateau d’Yquem.

Iowa kind of epitomizing the red neck mid west…

So there he was, a young gay man who went to New York and then he went to Paris and then he ended up in this kind of magical place in Provence in the hills.

Yeah – a lot of interesting people in the States seem to have come from the flat bits in the middle.

Maybe the thing is seeing the horizon on every side and knowing that its not that different from the other side.

(Laughs)

He started out as a painter and I think he carried on trying to be a painter in Paris for quite a long time and then sort of realized… As a chef he was self-taught but then rapidly became somebody whom even the French treated as an authority. What’s really annoying is that he wrote a biography and then died before he could properly edit it. So he never really tells us how he came from being a student in Paris to enjoying this extraordinary reputation as a chef and general foodie. He probably just read Larousse from cover to cover. Some of his food is very complicated but I do wish – though I’m sure he would have been terrifying – that I’d lived with him in Provence on his lovely hillside and eaten the food he cooked for his friends.

He’s got an amazing description of the perfect scrambled eggs.

He had truffles on them

He had truffles on them. He also said that you should cook them in a bain marie to give perfect control of temperature. But its the way he describes the end result that made me want to cook them. He says something like ‘ barely perceptible curds suspended in a creamy, silky…

(Laughs) He was very strict. He probably would have been horrified by my cooking. He writes so lucidly, but you always feel like he’s not taking himself – the idea of himself – too seriously. Instead, he’s part of a tradition. All really good chefs are like that. Elizabeth David said ‘no cookbook could exist without all the other cookbooks’. And Olney’s the same. He’s not saying ‘I am a wonderful individual.’ He’s saying ‘I’m part of an amazing tradition and I’m going to tell you about all the things that I’ve learnt in the best way that I can.’

Yes, that’s interesting. The canon. And in a really good cookbook, as you’ve already said, there are two components aren’t there? The recipe, which is practical, and then the literary component which is the imaginative space which we inhabit when we read that book.

Its like cooking with them isn’t it? When you cook their recipes in their way, you’re kind of being with them.

And if you’re cooking with Richard Olney, then you’re also cooking with Elizabeth David and the great French chefs.

They had a meeting, you know, Elizabeth David and Richard Olney. And she teased him and said he was all about garlic and that he wouldn’t like her food. But in fact they were as waspish as each other and became bosom pals as soon as they met.

Having just written a cookbook yourself and having read lots of cookbooks, when do you think the tradition of cookbooks as we’ve been talking about them emerge? I mean the cookbook as something more than just a collection of recipes.

The 60s do you think? Elizabeth David was writing in the 60s and Richard Olney was writing in the 70s.

Just to give your book a quick plug here – one of the things I like about it is that its so beautifully presented. It’s a combination of photographs and illustrations, and obviously photography has evolved almost as rapidly as the way people write about food. But you’ve also included lots of wood block prints, which is, you know, the more old-fashioned way of representing food.

Andy English did a really nice jo I looked at lots of illustrators and they all did this kind of fashionable wiggly line drawings, but you could tell they hadn’t really looked at plants in a long time. Andy lives in a little village in Cambridgeshire and loves his garden and loves looking at plants. The advantage of illustration of this kind over photography is that it doesn’t date. And of course when you’re writing you always struggle with feeling worthy and I thought, ‘if Andy is actually carving wood for me then perhaps I am worthy.’

That’s nice. Its true that carving shows real love. Now let’s have a look at your third book: Patience Gray’s "Honey From a Weed", which I think is set in Tuscany?

Well it’s all over Italy actually. Patience Gray was kind of a Hampstead-living freelance journalist mother-of-two until her 40s and then escaped everything and ran off to Europe with a Dutch sculptor and they followed marble all over the place. They went first to Italy, then they lived on Paxos in Greece. They were following stone.

I presume you’re talking about seams of marble? Marble quarries?

And other stone from which he carved his sculptures. But the point is that wherever Gray was, she soaked up the local culture, to such an extent that she became the local witch. She was extremely learned in the classical sense but also she wanted to find out about the authentic ways of cooking wherever she was and then she recorded it all in this wonderfully eccentric but fantastically enjoyable book.

There are some fascinating recipes in it. Some of which, I assume, are not seriously intended for general consumption. Fox, for example. It’s not just about what you’d eat at home.

It’s about foraging too. Ways of living with the land which we’ve lost and which we’ll gradually have to go back to. She’s really way ahead of all of us in the sense that we have to go back to older ways of learning to live with what we’ve got. When you read Patience Gray, it’s a lot to do with cooking outside, ‘light your fire and then jump in the sea and swim across the bay and when you come out it will be ready’

Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia by Patience Gray

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That’s brilliant, but what are you going to do if you live in East London?

If you’re living in the East End, there’s lots of wonderful recipes for chickpeas and lentils, paellas, all kinds of rustic foods. Get an allotment! And while she’s telling you about those, she’ll quote Herodotus.

Apparently there’s a passage on the virtues of anarchy.

Yes, I just read that. The anarchist mentality of the Carrera quarry workers which sprang from the danger of moving huge blocks of stone around all day. They had this kind of ethos where there was one man in charge but if there was sudden danger, the man who spotted the danger was immediately in charge of the situation. It gave them a real, communal, anarchic sort of individuality. If they didn’t feel like working that day, they didn’t have to. They always did what they wanted. Then the big machines came and they couldn’t keep up.

It’s the opposite culture in restaurant kitchens isn’t it? Where everyone has to call chef ‘Chef’ and he’s kind of a dictator.

Well there’s no softness in Patience Gray either. She’s not macho, but she’s certainly not soft. She moved to the heel of Italy, where she lived a very Spartan sort of existence. Her editor came to stay for a bit and came back horribly shaken because there was no running water and it was all about cooking on the fire.

How frightful for him.

Her son still lives there in the house.

Have you ever seen it?

No, but I think I might. I met Gray’s daughter the other day. She was just wonderful.

Let’s move on to Alice Waters, who, like Deborah Madison, owns a restaurant in California – in Berkley to be precise. Her book is called "Chez Panisse Vegetables".

All the Chez Panisse books are great; hard to choose one. But "Chez Panisse Vegetables" is great because Alice Waters is the woman who globalised the whole fresh groceries thing. She started the Farmer’s Market movement with her emphasis on organically produced food, that tastes wonderful and her recipes are very simple but inspiring because you think if you do cook seasonally, your food is going to taste good. She was very much inspired by Richard Olney.

Did they know each other?

They did. He was quite reclusive but he had some friends.

That’s the thing. Reading these cookbooks, you get a sense of a life lived perfectly in proportion. How could one possibly have a nicer time than to be surrounded by close friends, eating delicious things and drinking delicious things in a beautiful place? What could you possibly want? And yet the thing is that many chefs are quite lonely.

Elizabeth David was. Olney lived alone as well. I hope I don’t end up lonely.

I think a lot of writers are like that, you know, very obsessive people making themselves lonely because their most significant relationship is with their work.

Doesn’t leave you much time for other people really.

Chez Panisse Vegetables by Alice L. Waters

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Except supper time! But now for your last book: Marcel Boulestin’s "Recipes of Boulestin". He’s the only French man on the list - the only non-WASP.

But he was always an anglophile. He used to be the secretary and ghostwriter for Monsieur Willy, you know, the husband of Colette. Monsieur Willy put Colette to work writing the Claudine novels and I think the whole business – the coercive nature of it and so on – was too much for poor old Marcel and he ran off to Britain. In Edwardian London he had a small interior design shop. But then the First World War came and he went off to fight and when he came back he had no money and tried to get a novel off the ground. The publishers weren’t having it and so he suggested ‘what about a cookbook?’ and they said ‘yeah’. He writes wonderfully about his French childhood and his garden. His vegetable garden as a child has become my ideal because its totally unruly – you can wander round sniffing a rose and plucking a pea. But his recipes now read as very modern. He writes very simply and there’s usually a maximum of four ingredients. He’s very encouraging and I think would have been wonderful to be around. He had an enormous nose as well, they say. There’s a caricature of him by Max Beerbohm where he has the biggest nose you’ve ever seen – like a parrot or even a toucan.

Something very disarming about a large nosed foodie.

But he was the first ever cooking columnist. He wrote a column in the Evening Standard and then he was the first ever TV chef; he appeared on something called ‘What Shall We Have for Dinner’, a weekly program in the 50s. There’s still a restaurant called Boulestin in Covent Garden. He was a real giant of the London food scene. Gordon Ramsey’s got nothing on him really. And he loved England, but he never forgot France. He had this to say about France: ‘I must give France its due, the French, I’m told have many failings, but they can make wine, coffee and salad – it is a great deal.’

When you die, Jojo, would you like something like that on your gravestone? That Jojo has many failings etc, but that she can toss a good salad?

I’d like them to carve ‘it was my pleasure’. Because people are always worried that cooking is a bother. But it’s not. Not if you approach it, like Elizabeth David says, in the right spirit. It’s never a bother. It’s always a pleasure.

Recipes of Boulestin by X Marcel Boulestin

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