Our favourite cookery books

I love looking at cookery books although I don't often cook from them. I tend to follow recipes only from magazines or cookery cards. Funny that. Anyway, a newspaper columnist recounted yesterday how she has been having a clear out and a lot of cookery books were binned or given away. She found herself keeping the Nigella books but getting rid of Gordon Ramsay and Antonio Carlucci.

Marguerite Patten

My "keepers" would also nclude some of Nigella's books: I love Feast and Christmas with her gorgeous Ebay collected reindeer crockery. I'd also keep two really old, and food spattered (always a good sign) books that I used a lot years ago. One is "The Dairy Cookery Collection," which was a book sold by the milkman (!) and the other is Marguerite Patten's Everyday Cookbook. Marguerite is still seen on TV occasionally. I think she's marvellous. She was a home economist during the war and advised how to make recipes from food rations. Gary Rhodes has developed recipes with her help.

I have a couple of Delia Smith's and I would keep those. If in doubt, look it up in Delia.

I would get rid of my Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstalls, my one Gordon Ramsay amd my Claudia Roden. The latter looks beautiful but I'm never going to try the recipes.  I don't have any books by Julia Child or Elizabeth David, which a lot of chefs use as benchmarks.

It's ironic perhaps that the cookery books most of us love are by cooks, not chefs, who give us unpretentious recipes that deliver good results. Which books would you keep and which would you get rid of?

Thank heavens for Delia

It's five years since Delia Smith had a TV show or new cookery book out. Now she's back with her "How to Cheat at Cooking" and apparently the chattering classes are in a furore. Not only has she included tips on using pre-made items like M&S casserole mixes (the horror!) but on Radio 4 she said she wasn't part of the organic lobby and believed that cheap chicken provides a good source of protein for poor families.

Hear hear!

It's all very well for Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to get tearful over chickens, and I do agree that the chattering classes (myself included) should spend more on free-range organic birds. But only if you can afford it. The problem with free-range organic birds is that they are tiny. I often spend around £10 at Sainsburys on a bird which scarcely feeds three for lunch, let alone provide anything for meals afterwards. So I'm not surprised that people still buy the battery chickens. OK, they're fattened up with water and we know what terrible lives they lead, but people on very low incomes still need to eat.

It's a misnomer that it costs a lot to eat well. If you ate a lot of pulses and vegetables you could eat fairly cheaply and nutritiously. But most people haven't got a clue, and the TV chefs are partly to blame. When did a TV chef consciously give us cheap, nourishing and healthy meals to make? They're either exhorting us to cook above our skill level (tuille baskets / spun sugar / reductions) or they're using upmarket ingredients like venison, wild boar and so on. Fine for the chattering classes and their bijoux dinner parties, but not so good for Kerry Katona and her gang who stuff themselves with pre-packaged E numbers from Iceland.

At least Delia Smith is recognising this and encouraging busy people to cook from scratch while cutting a few corners. Hurrah for her. I wish her recipes were a little healthier, but maybe that's step two.

Nigella of course had her "Express" book and show which sold much the same premise, but Nigella's short cuts are all about buying niceties from the Italian deli. A lot of her shortcuts can be bought at the gourmet aisle in Sainsburys and some can't (Italian deli). Delia's short cuts seem to be mainly from Marks & Spencer but at least the store is accessible (if maybe over priced for many).