‘Recipes are like magic potions. They promise transformations,’ says Bee Wilson in her introduction to Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake (Faber, £12.99), a collection of classic authors’ recipes. You have to pray that tinned tomato soup will indeed be transformed into something nice-tasting, or that Noel Streatfeild’s filets de boeuf aux bananas will not be as revolting as it sounds. Not much hope of that, I’m afraid – but this is more of a book to enjoy reading without tasting.
Some of the writers confess to failing miserably in the food department. ‘I am a very bad cooker, as the children put it,’ warns Beryl Bainbridge, as she launches into a heartless recipe for violently boiled mince. Others cannot help but insert stylish metaphors, just as they would in their day job. Instructing us on how to boil the perfect egg, Vladimir Nabokov says you know when all has gone wrong if the egg cracks in the water and ‘starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium in an old-fashioned séance’. Delia could have done with that line. This is a conversation piece of a book, completely eccentric – a definite for the literary person’s Christmas stocking.
By chance, a dazzling self-published book has come my way and is already a treasure on my shelf. Jess Elliott Dennison’s Midweek Recipes (order from www.elliottsedinburgh.com) is ideal for busy food-lovers. A former restaurant owner, now a cookery teacher with a studio in Edinburgh, Dennison shares her simple recipes in the year’s prettiest book, illustrated with her own atmospheric photographs. She is a pickles enthusiast, using them to add ‘layers of texture, colour and acidity’ to many of her recipes.
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