Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 25 November 2006

issue 25 November 2006

Action Cook Book
(1965) by Len Deighton

The fact that the cover of this book by Len Deighton shows a chap cooking spaghetti while wearing a gun lends itself to many interpretations. Was spaghetti so expensive in 1965 that it needed an armed guard? Will someone be paying the ultimate price for overcooking it? Is she checking him for nits? Was Deighton’s sense of his own masculinity so fragile that he needed a shoulder- holster and bird in a negligée to write about cooking? Is that an insufferably solemn question? But these are matters perhaps for the cultural historian. I will confine myself to saying that Action Cook Book was Deighton’s second cookbook, after Où est le garlic? He had already published The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water and Funeral in Berlin, and contributed a series of ‘cookstrips’ to the Observer in which cookery was presented by means of cartoon diagrams.

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