Home cooking triumphs

One of the good things about the unabashed patriotic sentiment this year, what with the Olympics and the Jubilee, is that it spilled over into food. Supermarkets latched onto the trend with real alacrity. So it was a bit less of Italy as the default setting for British food and a bit more roast beef salad and sherry trifle.

It’s high time, then, for the reissue of Arabella Boxer’s Book of English Food (Fig Tree, £20). She’s an elegant and feisty writer, who was married to the cartoonist Marc Boxer, and her book is a manifesto as much as a collection of recipes. She’s knowledgeable about Italian cooking but she is quietly indignant that it has simply displaced the indigenous sort. How did it come about, she asks, that pesto is now a national dish? Or, she might have said, that pasta has replaced potatoes as the carb of choice for most Brits.

Her cookbook interestingly focuses on that period between the wars when Edwardian formality was abandoned and “uncomplicated elegance” was the keynote. It was all too rapidly overtaken by war and rationing, by which time the nation was ripe for Elizabeth David. But Arabella Boxer shows how good and interesting the recipes of the time were. And it’s funny how culinary fashions come round. I cooked a macaroni cheese from Arabella Boxer and read another in the Little Paris Kitchen — so good. This is a book that deserves a wide readership, particularly among the lemongrass brigade.

In fact, the native culinary tradition can sometimes surprise you. Darina Allen remarks in the new edition of her Irish Traditional Cooking (Kyle Books, £25) that artichokes have been cultivated for many years in Ireland, so the notion that they’re a novel ingredient is just wrong. This is a fabulous book with the kind of food I remember and want to cook and eat: honest food. But it’s never boring. I mean nettles and wild garlic, fashionable to a fault nowadays, are there in the tradition. The book is a labour of love, the fruit of years of research. It cheers me up just reading it.

But there’s a reason for the popularity of Italian cooking. The book I’ve used most since getting it is Russell Norman’s rather wonderful Polpo (Bloomsbury, £25), recipes from the Soho restaurant. It’s Venetian in inspiration; the dishes are simple, with relatively few ingredients, but they’re inspired. The grilled courgettes with toasted breadcrumbs, for instance, was sublime. The pages of my book are already smeared with olive oil and egg; a good sign.

The blockbuster of the year is Claudia Roden’s The Food of Spain (Michael Joseph, £25), a magisterial account of the country’s culinary history from a writer whose Jewish family has Spanish roots. She is alert to the influences on Spanish cookery — Jewish, Moorish and Christian — and receptive to the traditions of the regions. Her Catalan dish of peas and artichokes, for instance, is subtly flavoured with cinnamon. Spanish cooking can sometimes baffle Brits — much of its goodness depends on excellent ingredients; this is the best introduction we can hope for.

Iran has an extraordinary rich culinary tradition, little known here, something Ariana Bundy, author of Pomegranates and Roses (Simon & Schuster, £20), is determined to put right. This is a loving account of Persian cooking, much of it drawn from the author’s extensive foodie family. It’s a fascinating cuisine, with Zoroastrian (as in the sour-sweet balance) and Jewish elements, but I have to warn you, it’s labour-intensive. The recipe for perfect fluffy rice made me tired just reading it and mine ended up burnt, but the multiplicity of flavours in something like the quails stuffed with berry-studded rice and rose petals was rewarding. The Persian housewife is made of sterner stuff than me.

I came to Rachel Khoo’s Little Paris Kitchen (Penguin, £20) not entirely bent on being pleased; the fuss made of the author was, I thought sourly, probably down to her striking looks, a product of a Malay-Chinese father and an Austrian mother. Easy on the eye she is, but you know what? Her take on the French culinary tradition is delightful: unpretentious but confident, interested and inviting. And I’d say a renaissance in French bistro cooking is long overdue.

One element of that tradition is of course pastry — and Tom Parker Bowles, in his Let’s Eat: Recipes from My Kitchen Notebook (Pavilion £25), invaluable if you’re entertaining his mother Camilla or their friends, remarks that he never really got the hang of it. So he and others of the pastry-shy brigade should get to grips with Richard Bertinet’s Pastry (Ebury, £20), which is a very French take on the art. His breadmaking book, Dough, transformed my baking. And this approach to pastry is interestingly different: the shortcrust pastry, for instance, is pressed and folded. It’s very good.