And Another Thing | 9 February 2008

There is more writing about food now than ever before, most of it feeble. There are exceptions. My Somerset neighbour Tamasin Day-Lewis descants admirably on the subject because she knows everything about the raw materials and has a stunning gift for turning that knowledge into noble repasts. She is quick and graceful too in cooking: watching her dance about her kitchen preparing a three-course meal reminds me of Margot Fonteyn performing Nutcracker. But most of the tribe are dull; off-putting too. All they convey is their own overweight greed.

My favourite writer on the subject is Lamb. Whenever he touched on it he struck gold. Consider his comments on a consignment of brawn, the work of a college chef, which his friend Manning sent from Cambridge:

Tis of all my hobbies the supreme in the eating way. He might have sent sops from the pan, skimmings, crumplets, chips, hog’s lard, the tender brown judiciously scalped from a fillet of veal (dexterously replaced by a salamander), the top of asparagus, fugitive livers, tender effusines of laxative woodcocks, the red spawn of lobsters, leverets’ ears, and such pretty filchings common to cooks.