15 Cookbooks That Changed EverythingThe most influential British cookbooks of the last 75 years; for better, or for worse, by Ruby Tandoh.
It is 75 years this year since Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food was published. It was her first book, and the one that, if Food People are to be believed, set in motion a complete change of attitude in British food. It has been credited – sometimes dubiously – with introducing us to the idea of the Mediterranean, to boeuf en daube, and to olive oil. But whether or not any of these claims hold up, the most important thing Mediterranean Food undoubtedly did introduce us to was the idea that a cookbook was capable not just of bringing in new flavours, but also of bringing about a genuine change of taste. In the decades since, Britain’s food has transformed. ‘Let’s face it,’ future Food Programme broadcaster Derek Cooper wrote in 1967, ‘food is not something you talk about.’ Today, we are more omnivorous, we know more about ingredients and cuisines, we do talk about food – sometimes to the point where I wonder if we might even have gone too far. Food writing, and specifically cookbooks, have been integral to this change. In the 1960s, journalists noted with alarm that 100 new cookbooks were being published in the UK every year. Now the figure can run into the thousands. Most genuinely aspire to change our food lives for the better – but it turns out that we almost never agree on what ‘better’ means. For the last few years, I’ve been working on a book about modern food culture, in which I’ve had to dig into what ‘influence’ really is, and where it comes from: the contorting forces of tech, new media pathways, supermarkets, migrations, marketing and industry. We talk a lot about influence, but we seldom clarify what, or whom, that influence acts on. Last year, T: the New York Times Style Magazine published a list of ‘The 25 Most Influential [American] Cookbooks From the Last 100 Years’. I love all the books on that list – from Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking to Molly Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook – which is how I knew something was up. Afterwards, the writer and historian Jessica Carbone pointed out that: ‘For the Times list, an “influential” cookbook offers narrative, rather than culinary, innovation.’ What this really means is that these are the cookbooks that changed cookbooks, which are not always – or even often – the cookbooks that changed cooking. The reality is that it is difficult for cookbooks, by themselves, to transform the way we eat. But at the right time, with the right backup, deployed at the right pivot point in the culture, they can change things. This list is about 15 books that have played a part in reinventing food culture in Britain – by means noble or nefarious, for better or for worse. 1. Great Dishes of the World, by Robert Carrier (1963)
Eleven million copies. That’s how many Great Dishes of the World is supposed to have sold, although this is so obviously not true that I can only assume the numbers came from Carrier himself – a lifelong PR man who described himself as ‘the most successful media cook in the world’. Here’s what we do know: it contained more than 500 recipes, weighed over 2kg, and cost 85 shillings, which is the equivalent of almost £100 today. The recipes ranged from lobster à l’Américaine to duck à l’orange and choucroute garnie. If Carrier had sketched out the ‘world’ he was talking about, it would have looked like a medieval mappa mundi, except with Provence, not Jerusalem, at the centre. And yet the 11 million myth does capture something about the outsized influence of Robert Carrier. There are famous chefs, and there are celebrity chefs. Carrier was the latter – a larger-than-life figure who got around by helicopter. After the success of the book, he opened a restaurant and became a TV star. But this first book is where his essence is most concentrated. Within the first few sentences, he references the Medicis, the collapse of the Roman empire and the Crusades, then moves swiftly on to foie gras in brioche. ‘Culture,’ he wrote, ‘stems from the stomach as well as the brain.’
Huge, wildly expensive status cookbooks – like some of those published by Phaidon today – were almost unheard-of before Carrier, and the ones that did exist definitely weren’t mass-market. Great Dishes of the World moved the dial. But the magic of this book is that, for all the camp, at its core it remains a highly usable collection of recipes. You’re not supposed to fantasise about the bombe au chocolat, you’re supposed to make it, and Carrier gives concise but robust instructions for doing so. You could travel the whole world from your kitchen, he insisted. Or at least, the world according to Carrier – and maybe that’s just the same thing. 2. Pressure Cookery, by Marguerite Patten (1977)
With more than 150 cookbooks published, and cumulatively tens of millions of copies sold, Marguerite Patten is perhaps the most prolific – and useful – British cookery author of the last century. She worked as a home economist for fridge and electricity companies, and was a radio broadcaster during the second world war, sharing practical recipes for a nation on rationing. By the time she started writing cookbooks in the 1950s, she had the approach down pat: she was a demonstrator, saying only as much as was needed to communicate the basics of a recipe. If her books tell a story, it isn’t through its words. Patten’s best-known book is Cookery in Colour from 1960 – a chromatically overcomplicated book with lurid photos and rainbow pages. It spoke to the realities of the time, even covering TV dinners, and within five years it had sold 800,000 copies. You could make a case that it made inexpensive colour cookbooks the new normal. But where Patten really flexed was in her crossover work with kitchen goods: recipe pamphlets for kitchen scissors and Turmix food processors, becoming an honoured member of the Microwave Association. What better way to influence how people cook than to change the equipment they do it with?
Patten had always been a pressure-cooker advocate, but Pressure Cookery, which somehow managed to make these machines relevant to everything from taramasalata to beef olives, was a turning point. It kickstarted a late-70s pressure-cooker movement that you could compare to the air-fryer boom today – brands got involved, money was injected, more cookbooks were made, more cookers were sold. It joins the many gadget and appliance cookbooks that have transformed perhaps not what we eat, but how we cook it: from Mary Berry’s Aga books to my grandmother’s cottage pie recipe from a late-1950s Belling electric oven cookbook – a book that is slimmer than a Screwfix catalogue and has about as much charisma. This is where the power is, for better or worse: air-fryer cookbooks accounted for more than half of the top 10 best-selling cookbooks last year. 3. A Sainsbury Cookbook: Cooking with Herbs and Spices, by Josceline Dimbleby (1979)
Food writers have long been troubled by a loveless truth: the reason people eat what they eat is, more often than not, because that’s what the supermarkets sell. You can write against this, or you can use it to your advantage. There have been many supermarket cookbooks. In the days before supermarket recipe magazines, you could buy these in-store at the same time you decided which ingredients to pick up a few aisles away. Cooking with Herbs and Spices was one of the earliest, and the most ambitious. Josceline Dimbleby talked about the root-to-stamen school of medieval flavourings, how the Victorians fumbled basic seasoning, and the mission to bring spices back. She wrote recipes for lamb’s liver with paprika and cumin, spiced eggs with cucumber and Marrakech meatballs. ‘They were a little worried,’ she explained later. ‘This was 1979, and then they still only stocked little drums of mixed spice, mixed herbs, and thyme.’ But the book did so well that Sainsbury’s expanded their range. The books inserted themselves into real-world systems of supply. As food historian Polly Russell put it to me recently, supermarkets went from selling products to selling taste. Over the next 15 years, Sainsbury’s commissioned a couple of dozen cookbooks, covering everything from Chinese cookery and regional French cuisine to cooking for one. The authors included Jane Grigson and Ken Hom. The spice range continued to grow, and packets of wok-ready noodles rose through the shelf hierarchies to eye level. These books are just one part of the negotiation between retail and writers: Delia’s red button through to Sainsbury’s HQ; Jamie Oliver’s supermarket ads; Claudia Roden consulting for supermarkets; Rosamund Grant advising brands. The recipe dreamers and the retail tacticians – the heart and the head. After the paywall: Jamie, Delia, the books that changed our relationship to Chinese food, to chefs, to British produce; books that changed how we talk about food, how we feel about food, and more. 4. Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, by Delia Smith (1982)
The success of Delia’s Complete Cookery Course is that it gave neophobic British cooks the things that they liked, all in one place, and with absolutely no room for misinterpretation. When you make the English salad sauce, you boil the eggs for ‘exactly nine minutes’. You simmer gently. You cover and uncover pans when Delia says so. Ingredients are calibrated down to the quarter-teaspoon. Delia speaks to risk-avoidant British cooks on a soul level. We avoid surprises at all costs, even if they might be good ones. And so a cookbook of reliable recipes will fare better, among home cooks here, than one of potentially – but not provably – delightful ones. Luckily for us, Delia manages to be both. The only books that have spent more weeks in the bestseller charts in the last 50 years are Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus and A Brief History of Time. The cosmos, the unfathomable science of heterosexual gender relations, and then Delia – here to remind you that a soft boiled egg takes a minute at a simmer, then another six minutes off the heat.
5. Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery, by Ken Hom (1984)
Ken Hom wasn’t the first cook on the BBC, but he was the first cook the BBC truly made. Delia had newspaper columns before she went on television, Madhur Jaffrey was an actor, Mary Berry wrote for Hamlyn, but Hom was an American who, until Chinese Cookery was filmed, was totally unknown. The television preceded everything – including, or especially, the book. There was the world-building TV show, through which you got the feeling of Chinese cuisine – touring a Hong Kong fishing village, eating in a dim sum restaurant – and then the cookbook, which unpacked how to recreate this stuff at home. ‘[TV] is a medium of emotion and general impression, but not a medium of detail,’ as TV exec and Ready Steady Cook mogul Peter Bazalgette put it, and so ‘the programmes axiomatically give rise to the need for recipes’.
And the recipes are great – this is what sets Hom’s book apart, and pulls the Ken Hom media empire’s centre of gravity a little back towards the written word. He discusses the regional dishes of China and gets into the morphological differences between woks. Northern-style stewed beef and kidney and beancurd soup run alongside the Cantonese dishes that British people would have been more familiar with. It’s a thorough cookbook, ambitious and unpatronising. It kickstarted a 15-year period of Ken Hom domination; by 2001, it had sold well over 500,000 copies. There had been earlier advocates for Chinese cooking, not least Kenneth Lo, whose books and cooking school popularised Chinese food among the 1970s and 80s foodie class. But Hom went further, through TV shows and books, through personal appearances, through a mail-order Chinese ingredient kit and Ken Hom-branded steamers. When he put his own name to a wok, it came with a 64-page booklet and a cassette tape. The secret of his influence was to create an entire extended culinary universe: all interconnected, all purchasable. 6. The Observer Guide to British Cookery, by Jane Grigson (1984) Subscribe to Vittles to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Vittles to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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15 Cookbooks That Changed Everything
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