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.

My "keepers" would also include 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?

A few bright jewels in formulaeic "Oliver!"

I am a little puzzled. Analysing all the different elements of the lavish new production of Oliver! at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, it would seem to be a tour de force: wonderful comic performance by Rowan Atkinson; superb sets and lighting which really create an atmosphere of old London; very strong singing voices across the cast, and of course the delightful Lionel Bart songs.

And indeed on the second night the cast did get another standing ovation.

But somehow it all felt a bit flat to me. There were isolated nuggets of warmth and sparkle, but overall I felt it had been honed to such precision over its long preview season that the cast is already going through the motions. It didn't feel like a new show. There was no sense of the horror of the poverty and deprivation suffered by Oliver, or the brutality of Nancy's murder. It was a saccharine sweet Oliver performed at breakneck speed.

The first half was marred by a cringeworthy interchange between Mr Bumble and the Widow Corney, and the clumsily staged escape of Oliver from the funeral director. The big routines in London and in Fagin's Den were executed with precision, although it was hard to recapture the exuberance of "Consider Yourself" on stage with a small cast (albeit a cast of 80, the largest in a London show).

The highlight of the second half was the rendition of "who will buy" which was colourful and exuberant. It seemed as if the cast had relaxed after the interval and were starting to enjoy themselves.

Rowan Atkinson succeeds in bringing a new dimension to Fagin - very difficult when you consider who's played this character in the past. He applies a wonderfully delicate comic touch, particularly in exchanges with one tiny child.

Bill Sikes is underplayed by Burn Gorman (Guppy from Bleak House) and it's a good decision based on all the over playing that is going on. His demise is hugely disappointing.

When Nancy first appeared, I immediately thought that Jodie Prenger had managed to shift some more weight, but then I realised that it wasn't Prenger. Big disappointment after reading about her wonderful first night. Tamsin Carroll, not in the first flush of youth, was a very workmanlike Nancy, lacking charm but possessing a huge voice.

Oliver, one of three, was played by Laurence Jeffcoate, a winsom child with a superb voice, pure and true. His rendition of "Where is love" was far superior to Mark Lester's in the eponymous film version.

Finally a word on Mr Brownlow's costume. It looks as if the wardrobes of Phantom and Toad of Toad Hall were raided for his curious brightly coloured frock coats and capes. Most bizarre.

So overall, a well executed show following a familiar formula. Very bland and adding nothing new.

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).

The biggest problem in Britain today

The biggest problem in Britain today is one that everyone seems to be avoiding.

Obesity.

Gillian McKeith's programme You Are What You Eat neatly illustrated the scale of the problem this week. Two sisters, both with teenage children, and all of them overweight. The sisters seemed to have normal intelligence. Yet they had no idea about nutrition or what they should be eating. Their habits were appalling, and obviously their children were just going along with it. The kids were being bullied and were miserable about being fat. Yet to start with, they rejected all the healthy foods, and it was ONLY through their fat parents role modelling what to eat, and getting them involved in food preparation, that they started to change their habits.

It's a huge uphill battle because the majority of overweight adults don't want to change their habits. They don't see the connection between the poor health they suffer (arthritic knees, diabetes, heart conditions, high blood pressure, constipation) and the food they consume. Let's face it, it's much harder, and more expensive, to eat healthily. Busy parents who work will find it tough to cook meals from scratch when they get home and have hungry kids to feed. You have to get organised, prepare menus, cook at the weekend and make sufficient quantities to freeze.

The resistance to healthy eating was illustrated by the Rotherham mothers, who, rather than have their children eat the healthy lunches their school was providing, decided to push burgers and chips through the railings. Jamie Oliver's campaign to force the government and schools to provide healthy, freshly cooked meals in place of pre-cooked rubbish like turkey twizzlers and chips, was laudable in that for some children it's the only healthy meal of the day. But it avoids the biggest issue: somehow Britain's parents need to understand the problem, get the message and change their habits.

The repercussions if they don't are already known. Children will die before their parents. The NHS will drown under the weight of obesity-induced illnesses.

Yet I don't see much action. The government introduced some namby pamby traffic lights system to indicate what's in our food, but not all the retailers adopted it, leading to confusion. There's been more investment in school meals: good, but not good enough (we're still below all the other EU countries in terms of amount spent per child). Vending machines in schools are banned from selling chocolate, crisps and sweets. What else?

My immediate suggestions would be to make PE mandatory on the curriculum at all schools (and not just for 30 mins a week) and to reinstate domestic science at all state schools, to try to re-educate on nutrition.

Then we have to tackle the parents. I'm giving this serious thought and would welcome your ideas and support.