Tag: Meera Sodha

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate: Six Degrees of Separation

I read Anthony Bourdain‘s Kitchen Confidential quite a long time ago, and seem to remember not liking it – or indeed him – very much. But it’s given me my chain for the month. You’re not getting a single novel from me this time, not one. Simply a run-down of a few cookery books.

To ease you in gently, I will start with a book that – though full of recipes – is also meant to be read from cover to cover; the 1950s classic by Patience Gray: Honey from a Weed. I’ve only just got it out of the library, so I can’t really comment on it. The inside cover says that it’s a ‘passionate autobiographical cookery book; Mediterranean through and through, and as compelling as a first class novel.‘

Which leads me to one of the first cookery books I owned, one which was my cookery bible when I was a student in the late 60s and early 70s: Elizabeth David‘s A book of Mediterranean food. She wrote very readably and enticingly about ingredients which I was able to source on a student budget in multi-cultural Manchester, and cemented the love of cooking fostered by my mother when I was growing up. All the same, my only memory from that time of using one of her recipes was when I cooked an indifferent moussaka for a lecturer whom my then boyfriend and I were trying to impress. I’ve never really liked moussaka since.

Now I have different cooking bibles. Unsurprisingly, some are written by the cooks who contribute to the Guardian’s food supplement on Saturdays. I went through a phase of perpetually using Meera Sodha‘s East: ‘vegan and vegetarian recipes from Bangalore to Beijing‘. Try this one: Leek and Chard Martabak.

I like to keep cooking straightfoward these days. So Yotam Ottolenghi‘s Simple hits the spot. Recipes like his Puy lentils with aubergine tomatoes and yoghourt.

Yotam Ottolenghi came my way via the Guardian: Rick Stein via his television series. I recently found his India in a charity shop, and it seduced me because of its glorious pictures of food and street life . The recipes are pretty good too. How about Aloo dum: potato and pea curry with tomato and coriander?

But for my last book, I’ll choose another cookery book which can be read from cover to cover. And I’ll make it seasonal: Nigel Slater‘s The Christmas Chronicles. Nigel Slater is my sort of cook, in that he doesn’t go in for careful measuring. If you haven’t got this, use that. He’s keen to tell you what he doesn’t bother with. And licking the bowl out is part of the joy. Recipes here are interspersed with stories of his Christmases, and his greedily-anticipated preparations for them. I hope you made your Christmas cake at the end of October. But if you didn’t, here’s his.

So that’s my chain. one in which most of the books I’ve chosen are capable of being linked with each other. It’ll be business as usual next month, with books where you can start at the beginning, and read until the end. Our starter book will be Gabrielle Zevin‘s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I happen to know our daughter’s read this, and I shall be able to snaffle it from her bookshelves when we go to visit the Spanish branch of the family early next month. Not in time for the next Six Degrees, but still …