HIDDEN CORNERS: A cook’s guide to the food collections

Cookery writer Jojo Tulloh finds that the literary qualities and classic recipes of the Library’s food titles of the past still have much to offer the contemporary gastronome.

Anyone who studies in the Library regularly will know that food can be a hard subject to banish from your mind. In the hour before lunch, the growl of an empty stomach quite often breaks the silence of the Reading Room. It doesn’t help that the Library is riddled with food. Up on the fourth floor, in Fiction, Kim begs a fried cake and a bowl of rice and curry for his lama; in Biography, Colette is matching a pink wine with a green melon; while in Topography’s basement home, Patrick Leigh Fermor feasts like an ogre on a sizzling joint of roast lamb.

Of the million books in the Library’s collections, very few can be without some reference to food. This isn’t much of an insight. Food is a universal subject; we all have to eat. But within the entire collection there are a large number of books (more than 1,400 titles) that deal specifically with food. To read down the list of the separate food shelfmarks is to go back to a Victorian system of classification and a sensibility that described food and drink as a commodity rather than a pleasure. The list – Beer, Cheese, Cocoa, Coffee, Fruit, Drink, Hops, Salt, Sugar, Tea, Vegetarianism, Vines and Wine – has the unfortunate side effect of reading like a recipe for indigestion.

When passing through the stacks in Science & Miscellaneous towards the Food section, one must banish all thoughts of the way food is generally presented in modern books, newspapers and magazines. If they work on the senses like a surfeit of luridly iced cupcakes, then the Library’s collection, like a water biscuit with a slice of good cheese, offers a less obvious but no less enjoyable pleasure. Anyone looking for the latest glossy, photo-heavy tome by any of our current celebrity chefs will be disappointed. The characters represented in this collection are all from the past (and a good deal more colourful).

Illustration from Alexis Soyer’s The Gastronomic Regenerator (1846).

The celebrated Victorian chef, Alexis Soyer (1810–58), was also a writer, inventor, campaigner and entrepreneur. In his Culinary Campaign (1857), Soyer describes his efforts to improve the British Army’s food during the Crimean War (1853–6). Soyer was a technical innovator, designing state-of-the-art kitchens with watercooled refrigeration at the Reform Club, and inventing a portable ‘magic stove’. He was also a compassionate man of action. As well as going to the Crimea, he ran a soup kitchen in Dublin during the Irish famine that fed thousands. He also lost a fortune opening an ill-judged culinary theme park named the Universal Symposium of All Nations, on the site now occupied by the Royal Albert Hall. The Library has his Pantropheon, or, History of food, and its preparation, from the earliest ages of the world (1853) and The Gastronomic Regenerator: A simplified and entirely new system of cookery (1846).

Devotees of pared-down seasonal cookery should search out the recipes of the original Evening Standard chef, Xavier Marcel Boulestin (1878–1943). Boulestin was an unpretentious French cookery writer who sought, in his witty, unpatronising way, to help English men and women achieve the ‘excellence, simplicity and cheapness’ of French bourgeois cookery. Writing in the 1920s, Boulestin appealed to everyone from society hostesses to those cooking on a one-ring burner in a bedsit. In 2011, even the humblest and least practical of cooks could do well with What Shall We Have To-day? 365 Recipes For All The Days of the Year (1931). Boulestin’s recipes seldom run to more than four ingredients, often fewer. Whether he is writing about the suitability of pairing fresh watercress with roast chicken, or describing a soup of peas flavoured with sorrel and chervil, his recipes have that rare and praiseworthy quality of being both immediately appealing and thoroughly achievable. His biography, Myself, My Two Countries (1936), offers further insight into his straightforward yet elegant approach to cooking.

Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977)

Members interested in baking can start with Eliza Acton’s The English Bread Book: For domestic use, adapted to families of every grade (1857) and go on to Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977; revised edition 2010). The latter is a history, a practical guide to every aspect of bread making, from flours to mills to bread ovens, and a huge collection of recipes. Those who like her writing (and all her more famous works are in the Library) might also look up the less well-known Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen (1970). In it David describes the ‘English love affair with Eastern Food and Arabian Nights ingredients’.

The book’s introduction doubles as a masterclass in cookery-book writing. It also explains how David’s own interest in cooking began with Hilda Leyel’s The Gentle Art of Cookery (1929). Although Leyel is better known as a herbalist (she founded the Society of Herbalists and Culpeper’s, the chain of herbalist stores), it was this book, with its ‘wild and imagination catching’ recipes and emphasis on appreciating fruit, vegetables and salad in their own right, that first propelled David into the kitchen as a young woman and shaped her approach to her own work.

Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845)

Eliza Acton (1799–1859) was another of David’s heroines. Her book Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) is, like David’s work, written in a style that is as practical and succinct as it is elegant and observant. Alan Davidson, in his supremely enlightening Oxford Companion to Food (1993), describes Acton as possibly the ‘most accomplished’ cookery writer in the English language. He likens her lucid style and quiet wit to Jane Austen’s. This wit is revealed in the titles she chooses for her recipes in the book. ‘Poor Author’s Pudding,’ a simple baked pudding made with milk, eggs, lemon and cinnamon topped with bread, for example, is contrasted with a far stodgier sounding concoction, ‘The Publisher’s Pudding’, consisting of almonds, cream, macaroons, beef suet and marrow, flour, sugar, raisins, dried cherries, candied lemon peel, eggs and brandy. The latter, says Acton, can ‘scarcely be made too rich’.

Going back even earlier, the Library’s safe contains one of the most famous cookery books of the eighteenth century, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747). The chapter headings range from the everyday – ‘Of Roasting, Boiling & C’ – to the obscure, ‘A Certain Cure For Bite of Mad Dog’ and advice ‘For Captains of Ships’. You can learn how to tell if a hare is young or old (look at the cleft in its lips and check its claws) or how to dry lemons (string them with a needle and thread and hang them up in the kitchen).

At the back, a month-by-month list of what is best from the kitchen garden provides a sharp lesson in the poverty of our current fruit and vegetable varieties. Who could not be seduced by a description of ‘Roncival and winged peases’ or ‘The Nutmeg, Isabella, Perfian, Newington, Violet, Muscal and Rambouillet Peaches’. It’s still an enticingly direct and tasty read, and only slightly spoilt by reading Glasse’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Food. She is described here as an unscrupulous plagiarist who loudly and erroneously claimed innovations in style and layout of recipes, none of which were hers. Glasse’s success was down to luck and her own vigorous marketing efforts.

For those who love recipes that instruct and improve, combined with eloquent and pithy writing, it is a pity that the Library does not have the American food writer and painter Richard Olney’s classic book, Simple French Food (1974), or indeed any of his hugely influential recipe books. You can, however, read Reflexions (1999), his posthumously published autobiography. It was hastily brought out shortly after his death and is far from perfect, but does reveal the life glimpsed in the margins of his cookbooks. In it he describes his friendship with Sybille Bedford, a woman with whom he shared a ‘passion for the table, for freshly plucked or dug vegetables and creatures pulled from the sea the moment before being eaten alive, grilled or sautéed’. The casual descriptions of the food he cooks for her and other friends in his Provençal kitchen – lamb chops rolled up and skewered with a rosemary branch, rubbed with olive oil and salt and grilled over fruitwood embers, and dishes of scrambled eggs with truffles – give a flavour of his recipes.

Illustration from Honoré de Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons (1847), 1897 edition

One of England’s greatest epicures, Edward Bunyard (1878– 1939) was moved to write an entire and lyrical book, The Anatomy of Dessert (1927), on the subject of fruit eaten unadulterated and at its best. Even if you love making puddings, it’s worth reading as a lesson in how to really taste fruit and as an inspiration to seek out and grow as many old varieties as you can. The title is a bit misleading; by dessert Bunyard means a course of fresh fruit served after the pudding. He may well have eaten puddings, too, but it is clear that fruit is his overwhelming passion. It is a sensual and beautiful book that reads like a love letter to lost varieties.

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink (2007), edited by David Remnick, collects the magazine’s best food articles and cartoons from the 1920s to the present. If you aren’t already aware of her, it will introduce you to the apposite and scholarly world of the American food writer, M.F.K. Fisher. In this collection she describes a sinister if impeccable lunch in a French country inn where she is fed to the gills against her will. It has an unsettling yet very memorable tone. The only other of her books in the Library is With Bold Knife and Fork (1983, revised edition 2001), a collection of recipes and essays. Still in New York, anyone thinking of encouraging their child to become a chef should first read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000), a good introduction to the seamier side of fine dining (oddly shelved in S. Hotels &c.).

Patience Gray’s extraordinary, autobiographical cookbook Honey From a Weed (1986) is a paean to the Mediterranean peasant traditions of fasting, feasting and foraging. It’s not in the Library, but fans of Gray can find two of her more obscure books on the shelves. Ring Doves and Snakes (1989) describes a year spent cooking and eating in primitive conditions on the island of Naxos; the book ends in an atmosphere of menace and foreboding that is as good as any thriller. Those wishing to know more about Gray can also read her huge, rambling Work Adventures Childhood Dreams (1999), as much history and autobiography as food writing.

This wildly subjective list hardly scratches the surface of the Library’s food collections. Many of the books are as enjoyable for their prose style as works of fiction, such as Claudia Roden’s Book of Jewish Food (1997), Jane Grigson’s English Food (1971) and The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954). What of the current world of food writing? The journal of food studies and history PPQ (Petits Propos Culinaire) is in the Reading Room, as is the slightly less dry American journal, Gastronomica, and a recent addition, the excellent The Art of Eating, also American.

The food collections are capacious and can satisfy the whims of the most contrary reader. I should know; I am one. In recent weeks I have flitted from Catalan Cuisine by Colman Andrews (1997) to Andre L. Simon’s A Catechism Concerning Cheeses (2011), in search of a recipe for goat’s curd. I have quailed on reading Honoré de Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons (1847; 1897 edition), a book that reads like a cautionary tale written for gourmets, and dipped into Jason Hill’s Wild Foods of Britain (1939) for inspiration when foraging. I follow no method but my appetite and, for this greedy reader, The London Library is a perfect match..