Cooks and chefs always seem to be in the news these days. We’ve had Jamie Oliver campaigning to bring about an improvement in school dinners. Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant openings continue to make the papers, as do his reality TV shows – peppered, of course, with his famously brutal management style and expletives. And my personal bugbear, Delia, can guarantee massive sales of a food item or kitchen utensil just by using it on one of her shows (remember how suddenly everyone was using sun-dried tomatoes?), although these days she’s almost as famous for her antics at Norwich City FC.

One of my favourites, though, is about as far removed from this type of celebrity chef as you could imagine. Healthy eating’s anathema to her – she uses prodigious amounts of lard and butter in her recipes, and she admits to a pathological hatred of carrots because her father used to feed them to her with slugs on them. She’s not a woman of the people – her father was surgeon to the Royal Family, and her mother was an Australian heiress. Where Gordon Ramsay started his career as a footballer before reinventing himself, she initially trained as a barrister before she turned to her career in food. She’s not the director of a football club, but she’s got enough first names for an entire football team. Step forward, Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright!

What’s so great about her? It’s not the recipes as such. Many of them are a bit too eccentric to ever be part of most households’ menus. And I wouldn’t hold her up as a paragon of kitchen virtue either – I used to wince every time I saw her and her partner in Two Fat Ladies, Jennifer Paterson, put their hands into a mixing bowl because I knew they’d still be wearing all their rings!

I think her blunt, no-nonsense attitude has a lot to do with it. (For those of you who’ve never seen her, think Peggy Mount in all her dragon lady roles.) Where all the other TV chefs are doing their best to set trends or at least go along with them, she cheerfully bucks them. Calorie-counting and vitamin RDAs are for others to worry about; if it tastes good and looks good, that’s what counts for her – although presentation takes a back seat to taste, as it should. And she’s got no truck with PC; it’s no surprise to find that she’s an active campaigner for the Countryside Alliance.

But most of all, you get a feeling with Clarissa Dickson Wright that this is someone who’s lived their life to the full. In spite of the privileged background (her BBC profile describes the Dickson Wright household as one “where eating caviar and pheasant shooting were the norm and pigeons were flown in from Cairo for supper”) she’s not always had it easy. Although she won a place at Oxford, her father (who was a violent alcoholic) refused to support her unless she studied medicine; so she went to University College, London instead and studied law. She became an alcoholic for 12 years after her mother’s death and has been bankrupted twice. So she’s been through the mill. But she’s also thrown herself energetically into whatever she’s done. She was the youngest ever woman called to the Bar, at just 21 years old. Her keen interest in food writing (she worked for several years at the “Books For Cooks” bookshop in London before starting her own shop in Edinburgh) led her to be described as “the world’s leading authority on cookery books”. Her anthology Food is superb reading. And she continues to make some of the most marvellously eccentric TV programmes around, even after Jennifer Paterson’s death.

And now, among her many other activities, she’s a motivational speaker. A very good one, I don’t doubt – but I can’t help thinking of the stereotypical girls’ boarding school games mistress: “Get some BALL, you bunch of soft nellies!”…

Food
What we eat and how we eat

Clarissa Dickson Wright
Hardback, 320 pages
1999, Ebury Press
ISBN 0091868114

 

The Prawn Cocktail Years by Simon Hopkinson & Lindsey Bareham - a review

Simon Hopkinson established himself early on as a successful British chef, after opening his own restaurant before he was 21. He swiftly, and deservedly, found himself as one of Britain’s most acclaimed young chefs, and his friendship with one particularly good customer, Terence Conran, led to other successes. He retired as a chef in 1995 to concentrate more on writing. His first book, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, also written with Lindsey Bareham, won several awards including the Glenfiddich Award.

Lindsay Bareham made her name as a restaurant critic and food writer. Twenty years of reviewing the best and worst restaurants gave her a unique background for cookery writing. She has previously authored several other successful cookbooks.

I own both of the books by this duo, Roast Chicken and Other Stories and The Prawn Cocktail Years, but I use the latter more so it is this which I’m reviewing this time.

The premise of the book is that, as food fashion has changed, some dishes have been “loved and lost”. In many cases this is a good thing – brown Windsor soup, anyone? But some dishes are inherently Good and, despite going out of fashion, remain popular to this day. “Everybody, but everybody, loves Prawn Cocktail”.

Dishes which were once exciting (Coq au Vin, Spaghetti Bolognese) “have been slung out like old lovers, while we carelessly flirt with the flavour of the month”.

The authors’ “mission” is to rehabilitate these classics – and they are classics because they’ve stood the test of time – in “a country now obsessed with culinary novelty”. All the dishes in the book “have the potential to be truly excellent”, and were good in the first place. As stated in the book’s introduction: “The purpose of this book is to redefine the Great British Meal and rescue other similarly maligned classic dishes from years of abuse…”

There are eight chapters, taking us through the eras of Great British dining out. From the 1950s hotel dining room to the Gentleman’s Club, the Sixties Bistro, and more, culminating in Chez Gourmet. It’s an interesting culinary tour through modern social history.

Having lived abroad for many years, we eat all kinds of food – Indian, Thai, Lebanese, and Italian mainly – but sometimes nothing but a good old-fashioned British favourite will do. And that’s when I reach for this book for ideas. Some of the photography is wonderful and makes you think, “Cor, I fancy that!” Flicking through just now I just spotted a picture of Cornish Pasties. Had I not already got all the ingredients ready for tonight’s meal (Korean) I would’ve been making pasties tonight!

However, for my taste, there aren’t enough photos in the book. I like to see a picture of everything! Given that I don’t really follow the recipes anyway, it’s better if they show a picture of what it’s supposed to look like. But that’s just a personal preference.

Most of the recipes come with a bit of nostalgia or other interesting observation wittily written. On Trout with Almonds (Sixties Bistro chapter) they have this to say: “Finding a wild river trout these days is about as easy as not coming across sun-dried tomatoes on the menu of yet another fashionable restaurant.” (Remember the book was published in 1997. Maybe a future book will be called The Sun-Dried Tomato Years.)

There are plenty of good things to try here, not new ideas but all good classic stuff. It’s a handy reference point if you want to make an old favourite. It’s also an informative and entertaining read if you’re interested in food. The recipes are good and varied with several different cuisines. After all, Spaghetti Bolognese (the Tratt-era chapter) – a firm British favourite – isn’t exactly traditional. “Why this became the great student stand-by is a mystery. Carbonara would have been a) cheaper, b) easier to prepare, and c) possibly less difficult to turn into a complete disaster.”

This book is worth buying if you love all these old favourites; I use it fairly often and will vouch for their Prawn Cocktail recipe (if you’d like to find out more, please see my attempt at it and the accompanying photo essay). For once I did actually follow the recipe and the result was superb. [Don't go overboard on the modesty – Sub Ed.] I’m glad it’s in my collection.

The Prawn Cocktail Years

Simon Hopkinson & Lindsey Bareham
Hardback, 256 pages
1997, Macmillan
ISBN 0 333 68460 5
RRP: £20.00