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’.