Observer Guide to British Cookery

“One of the best things to eat in Britain is a top-quality pork pie. Perhaps I’ve been unlucky, but I have not eaten one since the small Langroyd Pie Company at Langham, south-east of Melton, closed in 1972. We bought their pies by post from the Anne of Cleves café at Melton Mowbray, after a chance visit in the late Fifties. There may, there must surely be butchers somewhere in the region making pies worth eating, but it has not been my fortune to find them – there or anywhere else.
….A pleasure of going back to the north again was tea at Betty’s in Harrogate, a place of elegant art nouveau twirls, good cakes, unique sizzling rabbits and deep curd tarts: you can have Bronte fruit cake and Wensleydale cheese, too.”

Observer Guide to European Cookery

“What, then, is ‘Italian’ food? Certainly, ‘Italian’ food existed once, at a certain level, in the Renaissance, when the high and grand city States vied with each other over dinner tables. Great families and church dignitaries demanded feasts to astonish their guests, cool buffets on the terraces of new palaces, dishes sharpened with the bitter oranges associated especially with the splendid Medici. For a while cooking diversified, refined itself, took off in this Renaissance Italy, a country of olives and grapes and gardens, of the world’s most civilised people, masters of city life and villa life.”

Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book

From the Arbutus to the Sorb Apple plus ever-popular strawberries, dessert and cooking apples and apricots, Jane Grigson enchants us with tales from past and present and illustrating fifty fruits with a treasure trove of recipes and advice. A beautiful book dedicated to the enjoyment of fruit whether freshly picked and still warm from the sun or preserved in syrup or savoured months later as a sorbet from the freezer. Jane quotes John Evelyn: ‘A handsomely contrived, and well-furnished Fruit Garden is an Epitome of Paradise.’

“I grew up in a northern town devoid of fruit. There were of course apples, oranges and bananas in the shops, and one or two friends had kitchen gardens, but fruit trees were not part of our lives. There was nothing to raid when summer came along. The few blackberries were dry and sooty.
This, I imagine, is why certain experiences of fruit in my childhood remain bright, an orchard in Gloucester where old trees bent into tunnels and tresses of plums, a huge basket of strawberries that an uncle produced one day when we were visiting him in Worcestershire, raspberry canes blobbed with red and yellow fruit that met over our heads in a Westmorland cottage garden, unending peaches and water melons of a student summer in Florence.”

Food with the Famous

Does lunch in Giverny with Claude Monet in his yellow dining room appeal, or would you like to take tea with Jane Austen, or rather dine in magnificent style with Alexandre Dumas? In this fascinating book which is part biography and part historical cookery, Jane Grigson shows you how. While researching this book, Jane acquired the manuscript recipe book of Lady Shaftesbury, whose husband, the statesman Lord Shaftesbury, is one of the ten notable subjects she chose to portray. Lady Shaftesbury’s valuable hand-written recipe notebook is now part of the Jane Grigson Trust Library held at Oxford Brookes University.

“From a selfish point of view this has been the series I have most enjoyed writing, in eleven years at the Observer. The excuse to re-read favourite novels, look again at favourite painters, visit places associated with them, spend hours in collections of letters and in journals, study early cookery books in the Bodleian Library and buy more than I could really afford, gave me a chance of relating cookery to life beyond the kitchen. Which is what, in the end, I think cookery should do.”

Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book

With poetry and history, fable and anecdote, Jane Grigson takes us on a kitchen garden tour with her superb collection of recipes old and new for this essential and delicious food. She considers the true appreciation of vegetables, either cooked or raw, to be a fairly recent development in the English home which makes this guide to 76 different vegetables a timely and welcome inspiration to both cook and gardener.

“The artichoke is an edible thistle. To John Evelyn it was the ‘noble thistle’; to a nineteenth-century writer on food, E.S.Dallas, it was an amusing moral lesson, ‘It is good for a man to eat thistles, and to remember that he is an ass’. John Evelyn – as one might expect – is nearer the mark, for the artichoke was the aristocrat of the Renaissance kitchen garden, as the asparagus was of the Roman.
….So we are back with the private gardener, which could soon include everybody. Perhaps lively vegetables, the improvement of varieties, have always depended upon him, since Adam put his foot on the spade, with Eden in mind. Now we might extend the picture to include high-rise blocks, patched with vegetation on every balcony – Marmande and plum tomatoes in pots, herbs in window-boxes, courgettes and squashes  trailed round the doors. Inside there could be aubergine, pepper, chilli and basil plants on the window sill, jars of sprouting seeds, dishes of mustard and cress, with mushroom buckets and blanching chicory in the dark of broom and airing cupboards. In my most optimistic moments, I see every town ringed again with small gardens, nurseries, allotments, greenhouses, orchards, as it was in the past, an assertion of delight and human scale.

The Mushroom Feast

Jane Grigson’s collection of more than 100 recipes for edible fungi which include cultivated, wild, and dried kinds. She writes: “The idea of writing this book came to us in the woods of the commune of Troo, a village in the Bas-Vendomois, where for the last twelve years we have made our second home in the human dovecot of its sheltering cliff.” The opening chapter is a useful guide to the twenty-one best edible mushrooms with simple, excellent recipes for each kind.

“The dark life of these tunnel-quarries is extraordinary. Shadows lie deep on the walls which are cut, mile after mile, in a pleated effect, where the stone has been removed in regular courses….As we walked and walked about, we often had to jump aside for the efficient little machines that trundle about with trays of mushrooms or loaded baskets. They may spoil the antique calm of the industry, but the introduction of machinery has meant that everyone can be paid twice as much as they were ten years ago, without the price of mushrooms being raised at all…. Everyone buys them.”

English Food

A triumphant celebration of the food and domestic cooking of England plus some recipes from Wales and Scotland. In her introduction Jane Grigson calls us to respect our past: ‘We need to renew and develop the old tradition of Hannah Glasse, Elizabeth Raffald, Maria Rundell and Eliza Acton…. We are always after some new thing. Which is fine in many ways, but in matters of  food often disastrous. We are so busy running after the latest dish, that the good things we’ve known for centuries are forgotten as quickly as the boring ones.” A revised and updated edition with a foreword by Sophie Grigson appeared following the death of her mother.

“English cooking – both historically and in the mouth – is a great deal more varied and delectable than our masochistic temper in this matter allows…. the English cook has a wonderful inheritance if she cares to make use of it….Our classical tradition has been domestic, with the domestic virtues of quiet enjoyment and generosity.
….No cookery belongs exclusively to its country, or its region. Cooks borrow – and always have borrowed – and adapt through the centuries. Though the scale in either case isn’t exactly the same, this is true, for example, of French cooking as of English cooking. We have borrowed from France. France borrowed from Italy direct, and by way of Provence. The Romans borrowed from the Greeks, and the Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians and Persians.”

Jane Grigson’s Fish Book

A bulging fishnet of history, practical information and recipes for this most precious yet still under-valued wild food. The 1993 edition with an introduction by Caroline Waldegrave is a revised and expanded version of The International Wine and Food Society’s Guide to Fish Cookery of twenty years earlier.

“I remember as a child listening to my father’s tales of going out with the herring boats from South Shields or Tynemouth. He talked about the cold and the fierce sea, the sudden energy required and the cups of strong sweet tea that kept people going. When the nets were pulled in, the silver catch tumbled into the boat for what seemed like hours, the mesh stuck solid with fish. He came to appreciate Scott’s remark in The Antiquary,’It’s nae fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives.’ “

Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery

Jane Grigson’s first book on food was the culmination of four years’  dedicated research. It is a truly comprehensive guide to the cooking and curing of the pig from snout to tail with hundreds of interesting and delicious French recipes. Few books exist on this subject and this is one of the finest, now regarded as a kitchen classic.

“It could be said that European civilization – and Chinese civilization too – has been founded on the pig. Easily domesticated, omnivorous household and village scavenger, clearer of scrub and undergrowth, devourer of forest acorns, yet content with a sty – and delightful when cooked or cured , from his snout to his tail.

Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery….Sausage, saucisse, saucisson, derive ultimately from the Latin salsus, salted, probably by way of a late Latin word salsicia, something prepared by salting. The Romans are, in fact, the first recorded sausage makers, their intention being – as the derivation suggests – to preserve the smaller parts and scraps of the pig for winter eating. Though unwise to say so in a Frenchman’s hearing, the Italians are still the supreme producers of dried and smoked sausages. They use beef, as well as pork, but not usually donkey as some Frenchmen firmly believe.”

Good Things

A cornucopia of delectable dishes and joyful writing selected from the early years of Jane Grigson’s regular columns in The Observer newspaper with a welcome emphasis on the seasonality of good food.

“Anyone who likes to eat, can soon learn to cook well…. So why don’t we? After all, in the eighteenth century our food was the envy of Europe. Why isn’t it now?
….This is not a manual of cookery, but a book about enjoying food. Few of the recipes in it will contribute much to the repertoire of those who like to produce dinner for 6 in 30 minutes flat. I think food, its quality, its origins, its preparation, is something to be studied and thought about in the same way as any other aspect of human existence.”