Food for plutocrats and the people

The New English Kitchen
by Rose Prince
Fourth Estate, £18.99, pp. 468, ISBN 0007156448

The Dinner Lady
by Jeanette Orrey
Bantam, £16.99, pp. 259, ISBN 0593054296

If a Martian were to read these three recently published cookery books, his postcard home would conclude that for Earthlings money is the root of all cooking. Alain Ducasse’s Grand Livre de Cuisine is huge and enormously heavy, (it weighs 111/2 lb). Ducasse is considered by his peers one of the three greatest chefs of the 20th century (with Fernand Point and Paul Bocuse). He has been awarded three Michelin stars for two restaurants at once (the Louis XV in Monte Carlo and the Plaza Athénée in Paris). The 648 recipes in his book, all set out in alphabetical order by main ingredient, are wonderfully sophisticated, calling for such ingredients as 12 cockscombs, 12 rooster kidneys (notice that the sex of the bird is specified), ‘wild wood pigeons from high in the Pyrenees’ and ‘olive oil pressed from very ripe olives’. A self-sufficient peasant might once have produced these things, or a king ordered them (indeed the book’s introduction cites peasants, fisherfolk and royal households as the fount of cooking), but these days, very few people outside Michelin three-starred restaurants will ever taste them.

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

So who is this book for? Not the domestic cook. It is more likely to become an object of veneration for other chefs. (This certainly was the fate of Ferran Adria’s El Bulli. I once saw three chefs poring over it, before it was translated from the Spanish, understanding not a word, but sighing at the pictures.) There are few recipes in Ducasse’s book that even the most confident amateur could pull off, and in any case few could afford to. One sauce, for eight people, calls for 9lbs clams, 33lbs cockles, 3lbs razor clams and 2lbs of periwinkles, and the tiny black batons sprinkled on many of the dishes are cut from black truffles.