Cooking I find easy and satisfying. Preparing microwave dinners, on the other hand…

When some years ago I stopped having to go to an office, mainly because nobody wanted me to go to one, I started to do quite a lot of cooking. I am no natural cook, but I had ambitions. I bought more and more cookery books — Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, that kind of thing — far more than I was ever going to consult. And as it turned out, I found myself relying mainly on just two books — Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking for Italian dishes, which are generally satisfying and quite simple to make, and, for similar reasons, on Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course for traditional English roasts and puddings (though for bread-and-butter pudding I liked to refer to the late Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth Cookery Book, where it is puzzlingly found in the index not under ‘B’ but under ‘D’, for ‘Duke’s Bread and Butter Pudding’).