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| An explosive combination The author and the illustrator explain how bonfire night banter ignited new careers for both of themIt all happened because of bonfire night. As he stood with family and friends amid the oohs and aahs of the village firework display, novelist Conn Iggulden found himself trying to explain, in answer to a curious child's question, how the fireworks made such pretty colours."So I said that they stuff a fairy inside, and that the 'whee' you can hear is the fairy screaming," he says. Before long he was telling a story about tough little fairies getting blown up which amused and horrified a small circle of his children and their friends. The illustrator Lizzy Duncan, who happened to be standing nearby, remembers "chuckling in the background, looking at all these kids' faces going 'Oh my God!'" She told Iggulden she had an image of the story in her head; he asked her if she'd draw it for him. "I really don't think I knew who he was," she says. "I hadn't put two and two together and come up with Conn Iggulden. It didn't occur to me that the drawing would lead to anything." But the collaboration sparked that evening ignited a new career in children's fiction for the historical novelist Iggulden: he teamed up with Duncan to produce Tollins, a handsomely illustrated tale about the eponymous small flying people who live unnoticed at the bottom of the garden, in which he tells the story of how, when bumbling humans start catching them to add to their fireworks, one of them fights back."I went home and was so inspired," he says, "that I wrote the first story in a stream". About 5,000 words came "ever so fast, and then I polished it, and gave it to Lizzy to see what she thought. She came back with some drawings and I said 'I think we're on to something'."Before his fortuitous encounter with Duncan, Iggulden had often wondered what it would be like to work with an illustrator, and had even tried his hand at producing his own picture book called The Magic Marigolds. "I thought, 'it can't be that hard'," he says. "My agent still talks about it as the worst idea I've ever had." But he and Duncan hit it off straight away. After spending the 1990s working in animation, Tollins was Duncan's first shot at illustrating a children's book, something she'd wanted to do "since I was very small". "Thank goodness everyone had a bit of faith," she says, "because I was coming into this with a very blank canvas." "I've always been slightly wary of those people who are precious about their art," says Iggulden. "I've always tried to be professional, and Lizzy had much the same attitude."The Tollins, says Iggulden, are definitely not fairies; they're much less fragile. He didn't want to write a saccharine book – there were plenty of those already on his daughters' shelves. With a children's bestseller – The Dangerous Book for Boys, a manual for larking about written with his brother Hal in 2006 – already to his credit, he was confident that he could find a way of writing about small winged creatures that would appeal to boys as well as girls. "I've always understood the way that boys think," he suggests, "because I grew up with three brothers. People complain about boys not reading very much, but I'm happy to write books they'll enjoy."Iggulden's writing career began with a bestselling sword-and-sandals series about Julius Caesar, which opened with The Gates of Rome in 2003. Flushed with success, he followed it up with the rip-snorting Conqueror series, in which he charts the rise of Genghis Khan (the series was unleashed with Wolf of the Plains in 2007, and the fourth book is due next year). True to his background in historical fiction, Iggulden picked a specific time and place for the discovery of his Tollins: Chorleywood, Hertfordshire in the years between the first and second world wars. "My instincts," he says, "are to set things in the past". He chose 1922 partly because of the perspective it affords, the ability to set things within a grand sweep, but also because of the "fairly simple technology. I enjoy poking around with it myself, so it was fun to write about it."Science and technology play a large part in propelling the plot. The first segment of the book tells how the hero, Sparkler, launches a research project to find chemicals which the humans can put in their fireworks instead of Tollins, with the results announced in bursts of flame: "Sodium Nitrate, Copper Chloride, Strontium Carbonate". Sparkler saves his neck in the second part with a medicine to relieve gout, while the third act features a hot air balloon and steam pumps."My father was a physics teacher," explains Iggulden, "so I grew up with someone who was able to explain how a kettle worked, or a steam train. I wanted to be a scientist myself until I discovered that there was a glass ceiling in physics which I couldn't get through." He studied English instead, and worked as a schoolteacher before turning to writing full time, but never lost his sense of wonder in technology. "It's the human spirit," he says. "We build things, we make things – we're the monkey with the wrench.""There's a kind of magic to an engine that works," he continues, quoting Arthur C Clarke's third law, that advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic. And it's a kind of magic that kids love. "For children it's the machinery for understanding the world around them. It gives a sense of control of the world – even it that is a false sense."Entering the world of chidren's fiction has brought a whole new series of experiences for Iggulden, but the hardest question he's been confronted with is about the age of his audience. "I've had the most trouble with that question, because it makes me laugh," he says. "I think of the book as universal – and I swear to you that's not just an attempt to get more sales." As a former teacher he's "very uncomfortable with the limiting effect of labels. If you put 'seven to nine' on a book and offer it to a 10-year-old who might have reading difficulties then that will put them right off – it would be an embarrassment." Despite his publisher HarperCollins's enthusiastic support for the controversial age-ranging scheme, he's managed to keep "any numbers off the back", but admits that he can't control what happens in bookshops. However, he says, "If there is a range then it's a wide one – six to 13."He had no qualms about some of the darker moments in the stories, such as when Sparkler faces beheading, or is imprisoned in a jam jar, believing that "without a bit of threat and peril, you don't have a story." Look at Grimm's fairy tales, he adds. "There are some absolutely awful things in there. If you make sure you don't get too graphic then you can put in all sorts." And Iggulden's love of black humour keeps the jokes coming as the danger mounts. "I've never had the chance to write straight humour," he says. "There aren't that many laughs in Genghis Khan, so it's been great fun."With a second volume already in the pipeline, Iggulden's looking ahead. "If you carry on with the story, there'll always be the second world war up there in the shadows. It'll be interesting to see how that works, especially in the comic mode."Children and teenagersRichard Leaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Film trailer: Bright Star The story of the romance between 19th century poet John Keats and his muse Fanny Brawne feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'There's rarely any occasion to be savage' Frank Kermode interviewed by Christopher TaylerIn 1995, Sir Frank Kermode published a memoir, Not Entitled, which ended with an evocation of his "commonplace house" in Cambridge. He would, he wrote, belong there, "or be as close to belonging as I am entitled to be, for as long as I am entitled to be". True to the book's self-deprecations, he sold the house not long afterwards (it started seeming too large after his second divorce), losing in the process most of his book collection, which was accidentally fed into a waste-disposal truck instead of a movers' lorry. He now lives in an apartment building a couple of miles to the north-west that offers a first-time visitor, emerging from the lift, a choice of looking left or right. I choose left. "People always look left," Sir Frank says welcomingly from the right.Kermode, who's widely viewed as the country's pre-eminent scholar-critic, has just turned 90. "It's pure chance," he says, "that one isn't either dead or useless; I don't think either of those things is true, yet, of me." He has, for example, two books coming out, each of which could serve as a shorthand for a complementary aspect of his career. One of them, Concerning EM Forster, grew out of his 2007 Clark lectures, and might therefore be said to represent Kermode the top-flight professor: the man who's had "virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles", as his former colleague John Sutherland puts it, culminating in the King Edward VII professorship of English literature at Cambridge and, in 1991, a knighthood. The first high-ranking British scholar to attend seriously to the French theorists of the 60s, he's also formidably learned in fields ranging from Biblical hermeneutics to Renaissance poetry, and was for many years a renowned departmental reformer and shaker-upper.At the same time, he has turned out numerous books, and vast quantities of literary journalism, aimed at general readers rather than "horrid profs", as he once termed them. He used to write regularly for several papers, the Guardian included, but at his age, he says, "you slow down a lot", which means he's mostly to be found these days in either the New York or the London Review of Books; the second of these is where the essays in Bury Place Papers, his other offering this winter, first appeared. Kermode fills a role at the LRB that was once filled at the New Statesman by VS Pritchett (who was "a sort of model" when he started doing journalism): that of sage-like star contributor. The journal also "owes the fact of its existence to Frank", according to its editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers: as she tells it, an Observer piece he wrote in 1979 that called for a new literary magazine more or less brought the LRB into being."Frank is an amazing reviewer," Wilmers says, "because you never quite know what he's going to say, while also knowing that whatever he writes will say more than it may appear to." His critical writing is unusual, too, in attracting the admiration of potential reviewees. John Updike, who thought of him as "a hero", once wrote that his conclusions seem "inarguable – indeed just what we would have argued, had we troubled to know all that, or goaded ourselves to read this closely". Last year, Philip Roth told Robert McCrum that he finds reading reviews unrewarding, though "If Frank Kermode reviewed my book I would read the review."Kermode isn't a soft touch. "One mistake people make about him," Sutherland says, "is imagining that the extraordinary courtesy of his manner goes with any kind of easiness. It doesn't; he's very tough." Not Entitled is reticent to the point of brusqueness about his marriages to Maureen Eccles and Anita van Vactor ("I cannot say much more on this point about the 40 years in which I shared my bed with one woman or the other"), and words such as "cool" and "aloof" occasionally crop up in people's recollections. Stephen Fender, a close friend, was "scared shitless of him" when doing his PhD under Kermode's supervision; James Wood, who was taught by him as an undergraduate, says that he was "warm without being especially kind, which was a perfectly acceptable combination". There have also been some sharp exchanges with academic challengers, such as Helen Gardner, who launched a surprise attack on him in her 1979-80 Norton lectures.On the page, and in person, though, his preferred style is mild, attentive, understated; it's easy to miss the subtly teasing edge here and there. And even when he's felt obliged to dismantle something – TS Eliot's doctrine of the "dissociation of sensibility", for instance – it's generally been to non-destructive ends. "I suppose it would be better," he says enigmatically when asked about the even temper of his review-essays, "if one were aggressive, contentious and so on. There are one or two writers like that; Christopher Hitchens – he gets mileage out of being angry with people. I suppose if the occasion ever arose one could be. But there's rarely any occasion to be savage."He also has a reputation for personal humility. One of the many anecdotes in circulation has him going meekly on his way, instead of pointing out that he's a senior professor, after being told by a Cambridge librarian that they won't let just anyone inspect their Chaucer manuscripts. His memoir is filled with elaborate self-effacements – a book of Shaw's on socialism is said to be among those that shaped him, "insofar as I can claim shape" – and details his early training in "motiveless civility". This took place in Douglas on the Isle of Man, where he was born in 1919, and was "partly a consequence of having been born poor". His father, Jack, worked in a store at the docks, and Kermode spent his school holidays doing jobs in the shipping business; he once sold two ferry tickets to the music hall star Florrie Forde.Being Manx in England, he's written, can result in "a permanent condition of mild alienation". But he now thinks that "a lot of that came from the war", which broke out as he was finishing his undergraduate career at Liverpool University, where he'd gone on a scholarship. Kermode spent six years in the navy, described in a very funny chapter in his memoir, though that account is, he says, "a bit heightened. Two years in Iceland can never be strictly comic". He remembers, at the end of his service, "getting out of the plane at Lyneham, on a December morning, and walking through falling snow into England, which I hadn't been in for many years. I was 26, with no job, having more or less shed any qualifications I'd acquired before the war, and there was altogether a feeling of disablement, you might say. I think that first postwar year was probably the worst year of my life, though there's a certain amount of self-pity about this."There were false starts. He tried his hand at writing plays, and also produced "a terribly bad story, based on the Odyssey for some reason, and written in a rather grand manner". Through a scheme for ex-servicemen, this ended up on the desk of the science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, who "very patiently explained to me why it was hopeless". Kermode started to find his feet at King's College, Newcastle. "The utterly different thing about being a university teacher then," he says, "was that your students had just come out of the army. They were the same age as you, more or less; within a year or so they were married, they wanted jobs, and they wouldn't put up with any nonsense from their teachers." Material conditions were also demanding: "There was no heating, and it was awfully hard to find enough to eat. I remember my boss, John Butt, sitting at his desk with a candle, because the electricity had been turned off, editing the Review of English Studies, as he might have done in the Middle Ages."Intellectually, too, the times were very different. Old-time philologists still stalked English departments, dismissing interpretation as so much chatter about Shelley. William Empson and IA Richards had made criticism more rigorous, and Empson "was greatly valued for his intelligence and perceptiveness. But as time went by, he got sillier and sillier, so it was easier for people to take against that kind of attitude." Meanwhile, Kermode learned his trade on the job, chiefly under the direction of DJ Gordon, a Renaissance specialist of somewhat theatrical temperament. Gordon was influenced by the demanding scholarship being done at the Warburg Institute, which became, Kermode says, "the sort of work I wanted to do. I drifted away from it in the 60s but some of the things I liked best about my work came from that tradition. My book Forms of Attention is very much a Warburgian thing; I think it's my best book."Equally at home with Shakespeare, Donne, Wallace Stevens and the nouveau roman, Kermode was, by the 60s, established as "a jetset egghead", as Philip Larkin sourly put it. A long stint in Gordon's department at Reading was followed by professorships in Manchester and Bristol, and he was active in broadcasting, publishing and journalism. His reading of the 60s mood later led to the much-loved Fontana Modern Masters paperbacks ("I told them, this is the age of the guru, we should do a series of gurus"). Less happily, the years 1966-7 saw his brief co-editorship of Encounter, which he resigned when it became clear that the magazine was CIA-funded. "I still feel badly about that," he says, "partly because people whom I trusted told me lies, and partly because I opened myself to being cheated. I should have been more critical, more perceptive." Some American intellectuals "were perfectly well aware of the truth of the matter, but they were totally cynical; mostly they were in it for the money."The final Encounter showdown coincided with his ascension to the Lord Northcliffe chair of modern English literature at University College London. Not Entitled characteristically reports FW Bateson's line on this professorship ("like being Mammon Professor of God" – Northcliffe founded the Daily Mail), but the UCL years were the happiest of Kermode's working life. He had a free hand to hire and fire, and the syllabus he drew up is still spoken of with reverence. Having recently published The Sense of an Ending (1967), he also set up a by-invitation seminar which became famous as the British launchpad for what was soon known as "Theory". Meetings would spill out into a Bloomsbury pub, where such visiting luminaries as Roland Barthes would continue the discussion ("He was such a gentle person, it's hard to imagine him with a pint in his hand"). Jacqueline Rose, one of the many future academic eminences involved, recalls the seminar as "a unique space for discussion in the face of a xenophobic rejection of European critical and political ideas."English insularity exacted its revenge when Kermode took up the Cambridge chair in 1974, against friends' advice. "I was almost ashamed to admit it," he's written, "but some miniature version of the log-cabin-to-White-House myth was working in me." He was appalled by the teaching practices he found in Cambridge, but the English faculty had no desire to be reformed. Things came to a head in the early 80s, when Colin MacCabe, a young lecturer, was effectively sacked because of his theoretical interests. Kermode took MacCabe's part in the ensuing factional hurly-burly, which was breathlessly reported in the national press, and which he remembers as "a horrible time. It wasn't so much the particular occasion for disagreement, it was just the general ill-will. I don't know much about Oxford but I don't think it would have been quite the same there; the fens get into the discussion round here somehow. Though it's very peaceful at the moment, as far as I'm aware."MacCabe eventually found employment elsewhere, and Kermode resigned in 1982, though he continued to be a forceful, reasonable presence in the discipline's internal squabbles. One beneficial side-effect of his isolation when he first went to Cambridge was his deepening interest in the Bible: with no students to lecture, he read the New Testament in Greek, and "a whole subject opened up". His discussions of the Gospels in The Genesis of Secrecy (1979) were thought for a while to put him in the high-theory camp. Yet his known openness to new ideas gave him increased authority to reprehend lazy or dogmatic new-style critics. What survives of the 80s theory boom, he thinks, "is bits and pieces rather than any whole approach. There are some very able theorists around, and I don't think they should be discouraged. What's wrong, or annoying, is the way that a quite small lexicon of jargon can be acquired, and as long as you can write decently you can get away with anything, no matter how bizarre your ideas."Although he's stayed in Cambridge, and has moved easily around some fairly grand figures in his time, he has also held on to a distaste for donnish complacency. Expanding his Clark lectures, for example, he came to feel that Forster "is seriously blighted by a total failure to understand the idea of class . . . Galsworthy, who's such an uninteresting writer in lots of ways, at least tried to understand what it was like to be poor. There's nothing like that in Forster; he's always snug somewhere, in Abinger or in King's College, cut off from everything except the sort of person he chooses." He mentions Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2002), "which has a whole chapter on Leonard Bast in Howards End, and says, all right, he's a rather pathetic figure. But – Rose says – London was full of quite well educated clerks, and they weren't all like Leonard Bast. Some of them turned out to be people like VS Pritchett, who was actually of that class . . . There's something willed about the contempt for workers, something unnecessary about it."What does he read for pleasure? "I hardly have time for such things! The other day I picked up a copy of Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley's first novel, which I had loved when I was 17. So I bought it, and I thought, it's the most awful tripe. Either I'd matured or it had gone off. The novels I've read recently, I read out of pure masochism. I just read The Small House at Allington, one of the several Trollopes I'd never read. It's about 800 pages long; you read 500 and they're still squaring up as to whether so-and-so should marry somebody; it rambles on; it's intolerable really. . . No, the things I really like to read, but haven't got time to read either, are things like this" – he gestures towards a multi-volume proof copy of Diarmaid MacCulloch's 1,216-page A History of Christianity – "which the LRB fobbed off on me. That's going to take a solid week to read, at least, and then more time writing something about it. So it'll sort of take me through to Easter."BiographyPhilosophyChristopher Taylerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The best food books of the decade The best books of the noughties, as chosen by Fuchsia Dunlop, Jay Rayner, Rosie Boycott, Tom Parker Bowles, Allegra McEvedy, Matthew Fort and other leading food writersPutting together the picks of the decade in food and drink books has been rather a painful process, not least due to the number of outstanding volumes published in the last gasp of the old century. The trickiest example was Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating, which was first published in 1999, so in a nearly-cheating move, we allowed our contributors to pick it in its later various guises, all referring back to the influence of the original. Thomas Keller's French Laundry Cookbook and Gary Rhodes' New British Classics, a book on British cooking that many feel hasn't been rivalled since, also first saw the light of day in 1999. It was also in the same year that the Naked Chef was published, the first title released by the then fresh-faced Jamie Oliver who has since become something of an icon and dominated the bestselling food and drink books list ever since. It's an oft-noted fact that sales of celebrity chef cookbooks and autobiographies have taken off as the publishing industry has slumped, as both slot neatly into the 'book as gift' phenomenon. We have included a few notable examples in the list as they have had undeniable influence, but for the most part we've averted our gaze from the bestsellers and focused more on the books that our contributors - a well read and thoughtful bunch of food lovers - have cherished, and we hope you'll find some titles you were unaware of.We've ummed and aahhed, mulled and moaned, and in the end compiled the list of the top 40 you see here. Interestingly, every single one of our panel plumped for McGee as a pick of the noughties (and many for Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food) until I asked them to stop in the interests of variety (and even then, they persisted!). We had an interesting nomination that I think is worthy of mention, David Foster Wallace's essay Consider the Lobster, written originally for the now defunct Gourmet magazine, which, argued the contributor, "set the bar for food writing for a generation". If you haven't already read it, do.But back to the books. Of course, no list is definitive so you will, of course, let us know what you think we got wrong, but hopefully there will be some titles here that you might be inspired to seek out or that move you to add your voice to the chorus of praise. Our top 10 are those that were most consistently nominated by our panel, the next six were picked by more than one person and the rest were the choice of a single panel member. We also asked you to contribute thoughts, via the blog and Twitter, and we've weaved some of these in too. Finally, our panel, in no particular order, includes: the award-winning food writer and cook Fuchsia Dunlop, Rosie Boycott, the former newspaper editor who now advises London's mayor on matters of food, columnist and author Tom Parker Bowles, Jay Rayner, Allegra McEvedy, Matthew Fort, Alex Renton, Joanna Blythman, Richard Ehrlich, and Tim Hayward who need no introduction here. We're also very grateful to restaurant critic Marina O'Loughlin, Tom Jaine of Prospect books, Bob Granleese, editor of Weekend magazine's food section, and Will Skidelsky, the Observer's books editor and author for their invaluable contributions. The past decade has produced some real gems, and that lot are likely to have read most of them, so here are the books we think no serious food lover should have missed in the last 10 years.The top 10 McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture by Harold McGee (Hodder & Stoughton, 2004, £30)A greatly expanded edition of his earlier On Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Fuchsia Dunlop picked On Food and Cooking out as "one of the essential books in any cook's library. Useful as a reference book, and fascinating to dip into." Tom Jaine points out that "though molecular gastronomy may never have much impact on home cooking, this book has permanently affected how we look at food and cookery," and Richard Ehrlich says the book "secures McGee's position as one of the pre-eminent writers on food. It helps to have some scientific knowledge, but even without that On Food and Cooking illuminates and stimulates on every single page. A great book, and not just for reference but for casual or sustained reading." Matthew Fort has it that it is "science as it should be written - practical, clear, elegantly presented, with an astounding range of non-scientific reference." Bob Granleese agreed it explains in full "what really happens when you chill, freeze or apply heat to food. All the answers are in here."Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part II, by Fergus Henderson and Justin Piers Gellatly (Bloomsbury, 2007, £17.99) Bob Granleese, like many others, chose Part II "because Part I, which is even better, came out in 1999, so doesn't count for this round-up. Most influential British cook of his generation. Nuff said." Several other panel members tried to shoehorn a reference to Henderson's first book in too, such as Will Skidelsky: "It feels like a cookbook of the last decade, so great has its influence been during that time. Henderson's superb and charmingly written recipes made the whole idea of British cooking exciting again." Fuchsia Dunlop loved Henderson's "precise, minimalist and witty writing, and I love his recipes. More than that, he's the man who led the revival of British cooking, and for that I am very thankful. For years I was embarrassed talking to Chinese friends about contemporary British food - now there's so much to be proud about, and he planted the seed from which it all grew." Alex Renton plumped for The Whole Beast (Ecco, 2004) "Henderson of St John is the foremost apostle of noses, trotters and every lump and gland in between. A carnivore's bible, a call to arms against the food waste culture." Tom Jaine agreed it was "the best chef's cookbook of recent years. He brings a new meaning to the word laconic and his choice of words is as accurate as his spicing. And the food is mostly British which is a true relief." Nose to Tail eating, thinks Tim Hayward, "is a beautiful book which, quite aside from its vast influence on British cooking, speaks in the same endearingly queer cadences of its brilliant author. It makes me smile whenever I read it." Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsbury, 2000, £8.99 in paperback) This was a favourite with the restaurant critics on our panel. "Rarely has a single book been seized upon by a profession as the true gospel in such a manner. Kitchen Confidential, with its shameless, no-bodily-fluid-spared approach to the slippery business of kitchen life, managed exactly that," said Jay Rayner, while Marina O'Loughlin wrote: "Like a bodice-ripper heroine, I don't know whether I love 'Tony' or want to smack him in the chops. Especially since this snake-blood drinking, pig-killing memoir [A Cook's Tour] launched a whole host of inferior, extreme-eating imitators. Drenched in testosterone, it may be, but it was the original and the best." For Fuchsia Dunlop, "this exposé of life in the 'culinary underbelly' of the restaurant industry is gruesome and hilarious." Alex Renton was amazed "to think this sweltering account of life and death beyond the swing doors is only 9 years old - Bourdain put the rock (and the speed and the coke and the smack) into chefs' memoirs, and started a legend of knife-fighting, hard-drinking, Ramones-loving psycho-cooks that Gordon, Marco and co continue feebly to exploit. Brand me with a red-hot skillet, I still love this book." "Reading Kitchen Confidential for the first time was an unalloyed joy," says Tim Hayward. "Bourdain spoke honestly about the kind of kitchens I'd grown up in - the visceral thrill, the camaraderie, the sheer rock and roll excitement, the fire and the knives. Nothing could have been further from the Elizabeth David books I was stuck with at the time and nothing could have been more appropriate. For me, Bourdain rescued food from the writing of women's magazines and made it muscular, tattooed and ripped to the gills on cheap speed." In Defence of Food, and The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan(Penguin, 2009, £9.99 (new paperback edition) and Bloomsbury, 2006, £7.99 respectively) Another hugely popular author who was picked several times for both titles. Rosie Boycott proclaims that "Pollan is the best writer about food in the world! In this book [The Omnivore's Dilemma] he follows how various foodstuffs have come to dominate what we eat. Anything by him is worth reading." For Joanna Blythman, "the urbane US writer tackles contemporary nutritional orthodoxy like a hot knife slicing through butter. Although apparently rooted in a scientific approach, he says it is just ideology, sometimes well-intentioned, but often driven by a hunger for corporate profit. '30 years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished,' he concludes. How true."Alex Renton has it that "putting together all our fears and worries about the modern food system in one immensely readable narrative, Pollan is the James Lovelock of the better food movement."Fuchsia Dunlop adds: "In a world full of faddish diets and cleverly-marketed junk comestibles, Michael Pollan's is a voice of reason. The solution to the dietary ills of the modern western world, he argues persuasively, is simple: forget about 'nutrition' and just eat real food, not too much, and mostly plants. It all makes sense." Richard Ehrlich points out that "Pollan emerged in the '00s as one of the most thoughtful and original commentators on the modern food world, from farm to feedlot to dinner table. This [In Defence of Food] is my favourite of his books, a bracing jeremiad against what's bad (industrial food, inane nutritional ideas, dumb-ass politicians and journalists) and a plea for sensibly hedonistic eating."The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (Hodder & Stoughton, 2004, £30)Jay Rayner echoed a number of online voices with this choice: "Quite simply the most comprehensive and therefore influential volume on the business of cooking animals so far published. I know any number of chefs who swear by this title." For Tom Parker Bowles, the book is "a mighty, comprehensive tome, but hardly a word is wasted and the perfect introduction to every form of British meat. Barely a week passes without me hauling it down from the shelf, and I use it as much for reference as I do for recipe inspiration." Will Skidelsky points out that "Fearnley-Whittingstall has been at the forefront of the meat renaissance of the last decade; this encyclopedic volume is his grand statement on the subject." For Tim Hayward this book "was the point for me where Fearnley-Whittingstall stopped being a hairy, posh TV eccentric and damn near attained sainthood. He was always a good writer but the passion and knowledge in Meat really shine through. It deserves its 'bible' status. Even today, it's rare I'll tackle a new cut or type of joint without thumbing through Hugh."Thai Food by David Thompson (Pavillion, 2002, £25)Bob Granleese opted for this slightly lesser known collection: "One of the world's great cuisines finally gets the epic treatment usually reserved for classic western food cultures. Terrifyingly well informed, unashamedly authentic; shame it didn't sell." Tom Parker Bowles called it "the greatest book on Thai cookery in the English language. Filled with history, anecdote and an astonishing range of recipes, this is the cook book at its very finest." Matthew Fort (and some of our readers) also loved it: "this changed the rules of engagement for the ethnic cookery book: more encyclopaedic, more genuine, harder work. Brilliant."Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop(Penguin, 2003, £14.99) Tom Parker Bowles picked Sichuan Cookery because "Dunlop mixes scholarship with elegant prose and real experience of the Sichuan kitchen and in doing so created the seminal English language tome on this vibrant regional Chinese cusine." For Marina O'Loughlin it is "not simply a recipe book, but a real adventure round a cuisine and region that, at the time of publication, was as untravelled as the moon. Who in 2001 had heard of ma-la, or fish-fragranced food? Ms Dunlop's writing involves and enthuses – and makes you really, really hungry." Will Skidelsky thought the book "opened a window onto a totally different style of Chinese cooking from what one gets in most British Chinese restaurants (although, thanks in part to its influence, that is now changing). The spicy, lip-tingling recipes are easier than they look, and are all delicious." There were also votes for her second title, the Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen by Nigel Slater (Fourth Estate, 2007, £16.99 in paperback) Matthew Fort described Slater's book as: "My friend in the kitchen. The book I wish I had written. Except that I don't have Nigel Slater's industry, ingenuity or warm, affectionate, kindly way with words. No wonder the man's a national treasure." For Joanna Blythman, it was "the first mainstream cookbook to make seasonal eating look delicious and credible. Ever since I got it, 95% of my cookbooks have become redundant". Slater's Kitchen Diaries, Toast, and Appetite were probably the books most mentioned by online readers.The Moro Cookbook by Sam and Sam Clark(Ebury, 2003, £17.50)Jay Rayner admitted that: "like thousands of others I own this rather lovely book but ... I've never cooked from it. No particular reason. It just never offered what I wanted at any particular moment. However, so many of my friends have cooked from it for me at dinner parties, that the influence of its clever riffs on Iberian and Moorish cuisine cannot be denied." Tom Parker Bowles has it that this book "wafted onto an adoring public upon a cloud of woodsmoke and good paprika, moving away from familiar tapas and paella and instead exploring the Moorish influence on Spanish food. The restaurant is still as good as ever, and my copy of the book battered from constant use." Will Skidelsky says: "the Clarks' no-nonsense approach to Spanish and north African cooking translated wonderfully well into the domestic kitchen, making this one of the must-have cookbooks of the last 10 years."The Big Fat Duck Cook Book by Heston Blumenthal (Bloomsbury, 2008, £125)Matthew Fort recognised that "of course, none but the most bonkers will attempt the recipes, but as an all-singing, all-dancing, once-and-for-all history of one of the most extraordinary restaurants ever, this is a monster, and worth every penny." Jay Rayner felt similarly: "It's gargantuan, unwieldy and the recipes are all but uncookable. None of that is important. It stands as a wonderful document of the work of a chef who is about as important as anybody in his profession can ever be." We received other nominations for this, and its smaller, cheaper incarnation The Fat Duck Cookbook online.So that's the top 10. The next six were independently nominated by more than one of the panel.British Regional Food: In Search of the Best British Food Today by Mark Hix(Quadrille, 2008, £14.99) Matthew Fort opted for Hix's book because "few people have done more to raise the profile and appreciation of our native foods than Mark Hix. He writes with unobtrusive balance and clarity that lets the subjects speak for themselves. And the recipes aren't bad, either."Tom Parker Bowles described it as "the comprehensive guide to British food from one of the godfathers of modern British cooking. Well-written and stuffed full with decent recipes and fascinating tales, this is an instant classic." The Taste of Britain by Laura Mason and Catherine Brown (HarperCollins, 2006, £25)Allegra McEvedy says: "With the revival in the belief that Britain had a culinary history worth shouting about, this is a book that quite simply had to be written. But where it could have fallen foul of being a dull encyclopedia, its regional entries are kept short and to the point, with no space given to waffle. The illustrations suit perfectly, and I never leave London now without chucking it into the back of the car (along with the good pub guide) to make sure I eat exactly what I need to as I traverse this great country of ours." Matthew Fort chose this book too: "A buffed and polished, reordered and re-edited version of Traditional Foods of Britain originally published by the irrepressible Prospect Books. A magnificent and absolutely essential reference tome for anyone remotely interested in British food. Drole and drily witty, too."Shopped: the shocking power of Britain's supermarkets by Joanna Blythman (Harper Perennial, 2005, £7.99 in paperback)Bob Granleese described Joanna Blythman's The Food We Eat, reprinted by Penguin on the first day of the decade, as a "wonderfully irate and persuasive polemic on Britain's so-called food culture" while Alex Renton chose Shopped for being "gripping and shocking. Amazing we still haven't got [the supermarkets] under control."European Festival Food and Classic Spanish Cooking by Elisabeth Luard (Grub Street, 2009, £20 and MQ Publications, 2006, £14.99 respectively)Richard Ehrlich says: "Once upon a time in the noughties, loads of publishing houses let the best books on their cookery lists go out of print. Grub Street, a small independent publisher, grabbed the rights to (among others) E David, J Grigson, C Roden, and Elisabeth Luard. The bone-headed publishers did us all a favour: Grub Street's editions are lovely. Ms Luard is a great cookery writer and this book, originally published in 1990, is one of her best." Matthew Fort and Catherine Phipps both recently recommended this as a book of the year too. Allegra McEvedy opted for Luard's Classic Spanish Cooking: "I find this cute little volume very attractive physically - not in a flash way, but it's a sturdy hold, and beautifully illustrated in watercolours by this most-respected author. The chapters are divided sensibly, so though it is regional the divisions are chicken to eggs to tapas to beans and so on. Recipe-wise it's an intriguing stretch from great versions of the standards (tortilla Catalan; clams in sherry) to those a bit more special (potatoes with almonds and saffron; goose with turnips and pears), all with interesting notes from Luard, and all in all, it's the authenticity that sings out from the pages that makes this a fave of mine."Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence (Penguin, 2004, £8.99) Rosie Boycott said "this book lifted the lid on the dubious ways in which our food gets to our tables. The stories make for grim reading, but Lawrence is a brilliant writer and investigator and she handles the complex material effortlessly." Alex Renton says this book lifts the lid on "what really goes into the food on your plate - brave, fascinating, diet-altering investigations from a great journalist." Culinary Pleaures by Nicola Humble(Faber & Faber, 2006, £9.99)Will Skidelsky puts it thus: "A history of Britain's culinary development as told through its cookbooks, this scholarly volume offers a feast of diverting information." And, pointed out Tim Hayward, it's "an immensely readable history of the cookery book which puts our obsession with the outpourings of Jamie, Gordo and Nigella firmly into perspective."Lastly, we have some titles given very honourable mentions by single members of the panel.Made In Italy, Giorgio Locatelli (Fourth Estate, 2008, £22.50) Jay Rayner: "Yes, the book is beautiful to look at, and the recipes detailed and enticing. But what really separated this volume out was the prose. With the help of his ghost writer, Sheila Keating, Giorgio proved himself to be a wonderful story teller." Falling Cloudberries by Tessa Kiros (Murdoch Books, 2009, £17.99)Allegra McEvedy: "This is a beauty of a book with stunning photography - the antidote to all those samey celebrity chef potboilers that seem to dominate the bookshops. One woman's culinary heritage, unapologetic in its diversity from Cyprus to Finland to South Africa via a couple of other countires that have influenced her. Told from the heart, with recipes that feel and look so special ... because they are to her - thanks for sharing, Tessa."The Return of the Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver (first published Michael Joseph, 2000, new Penguin edition due January 2010, £15.99)Fuchsia Dunlop: "I gave this book to several male friends who were inspired by it to make their first culinary experiments, and I've chosen it in tribute to Jamie's work over the last decade. He could simply have sat back and enjoyed his wealth and fame - instead he's worked like a maniac to try to improve the way people eat." The Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson(revised 2006 edition edited by Tom Jaine, OUP, £40)Bob Granleese: "The book that has (almost) everything. Every home should have one. Who needs Larousse?" How to be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson (Chatto & Windus, 2003, £17.99) Marina O'Loughlin: "Even I bought briefly into the gushing, breathy gorgeousness that is Nigella. Somewhere at the bottom of a kitchen drawer are cupcake cases and Cath Kidston pinny. Responsible for a rash of smug yummy mummies whose raison d'etre was the new domestic perfection. Now I can't bear the book and all it stands for, but undeniably hugely influential."Trifle by Helen Sabiri and Alan Davidson (Prospect, 2009, £9.99)Matthew Fort: "Someone once said that the enduring fascination of the trifle lies in that fact that it is all the best British puddings rolled into one. This tells you how and why with wit and learning masking cheery greed. Actually a reprint, but re-issued this year."Fork to Fork by Monty and Sarah Don(Conran Octopus Ltd, 2009, £25) Rosie Boycott: "Monty and Sarah Don's cook book / growing guide is a wonderful treat. Monty understands the importance and wonder of growing your own and Sarah understands how good it is to eat food straight from your garden."Forgotten Skills of Cooking by Darina Allen (Kyle Cathie, 2009, £30)Joanna Blythman: "Chatelaine of the impeccable Ballymaloe Cookery School, Darina reacquaints us with time-honoured cooking skills that might otherwise be lost: making your own buttermilk, smoking meat and fish in an old biscuit tin, curing ham. An inspiring and empowering book that helps keep traditional food culture and knowledge alive and kicking."Essence by David Everitt-Matthias (Absolute, 2006, £25) Jay Rayner: Everitt-Matthias is the quiet superstar, a chef with a unique gutsy palatte and approach to food, which is realised through immense technique at his Michelin 2 star restaurant Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham. This book documents those recipes in a clear, clean and approachable manner. A gem.50 Great Curries of India by Camellia Panjabi (Kyle Cathie, 2004, £9.99) Marina O'Loughlin: "The most dog-eared, stained and generally abused cookbook in my kitchen. Every one of the 50 curries is a fragrant joy and the no-nonsense Ms Panjabi is responsible for not only demystifying their creation, but also presenting them to the world in her terrific restaurants." Riverford Farm Cook Book by Guy Watson and Jane Baxter (Fourth Estate, 2008, £16.99) Joanna Blythman: "I'm a fan of this veteran Devon-based organic veggie box outfit, and especially Jane Baxter's cooking. Organised by fruit or vegetable ingredient, it has the appeal of Jane Grigson's perennially useful Fruit Book and Vegetable Book, all rolled into one but updated for the climate-challenged, more environmentally-aware 21st century."The Book of Eels by Tom Fort (HarperCollins, 2003, £7.99)Tim Hayward: "An example of how following something simple to the point of obsession can make a rivetting read. Absolutely fascinating and a must read for the completist food geek."Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (new edition, Scholastic Educational, 2009, £4.10)Rosie Boycott: "This is a classic of investigative reporting. Schlosser burrows deep into the heart of MacDonald's and reveals the multinational's secrets"The Man Who Ate the World by Jay Rayner(Headline Review, 2009, £8.99)Tim Hayward: "Jay Rayner's Man Who Ate the World is one of the quirkiest and bravest bits of food writing of the decade. It's easy to boff on about foams and airs but Rayner asks uncomfortable questions about why and how we engage with the huge industry of high-end dining. Thinking more as a writer than a critic, he digs into his own motivations and forces us to do the same. I can't think of anyone else who's addressed this and it's something we really ought to be thinking about as we go into the next decade."Neris and India's Idiot-Proof Diet Cookbook by Bee Rawlinson, India Knight and Neris Thomas (Penguin, 2009, £7.99)Marina O'Loughlin: "Well, eating out for a living does take its toll. And these two are gals who love both food and looking good and have found a way of having their cake and eating it. They took Atkins and made it sane. Plus they're very relaxed about booze intake." It must Have Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten(Headline Review, 2003, £6.99) Tim Hayward: "By 2000 Jeffrey Steingarten was already established as a food writer on American Vogue. I most certainly was not. To realise that one could write intelligently and amusingly about food without recycling recipes or obsessing about celebrity chefs was an epiphany for me. He's witty, erudite, waspish and as you'd expect from an ex-lawyer, forensically accurate. Without Steingarten I'd be writing about deodorant in an ad agency."The Pedant In The Kitchen by Julian Barnes (Atlantic, 2004, £9.99) Joanna Blythman: "I love to giggle at Barnes' witty road testing of cookbook authors. Self-mockingly literal, his pedantic unpicking of recipes - "How big exactly, is a lump?" - has me in stitches. It reminds me of quite a few male cooks I know."End of the Line by Charles Clover (Ebury, 2005, £7.99)Matthew Fort: "One of my favourite 'end of the world' books, which brought home to us the real peril of overfishing and underlined that our resources are finite."A New Way to Cook by Sally Schneider(Artisan Division of Workman Publishing, 2003, £18.99)Richard Ehrlich: "This is the intelligent person's guide to healthy cooking. The New York based Schneider has rethought the culinary use of fats, sugar etc from the ground up, and this vast book is all about how to go on using them but using a bit less by deploying techniques that maximise their impact. One of the few truly original cookbooks of the last decade; I wish it had made more of a splash on this side of the pond." Food in Early Modern England by Joan Thirsk(Hambledon Continuum, 2007, £50)Tom Jaine: "The beauty of Joan Thirsk's book is that she emphasises change at a time when we all dream that everything is stable. Cavaliers and roundheads had fads and fashions too. Illuminating."Essential Winetasting by Michael Schuster (Mitchell Beazley, 2009, £16.99)Richard Ehrlich: "Several books provide a guided tour of this subject, but I think Schuster's is easily the best. He earns his living as a wine educator, and he is a precise, focused, and oenologically erudite teacher. And the book is beautifully designed and illustrated. If you know someone who has recently become interested in wine (or if you fit that description yourself), this is the first book to buy."Salt - A World History by Mark Kurlansky (Vintage, 2003, £9.99)Tim Hayward: "The most impressive of an entire genre of books that looked at social and political history through a single foodstuff. Kurlansky combined scholarship with a terrifically accessible style. Salt is so interesting. Who knew?"The Road to Vindaloo: Curry Cooks and Curry Books by David Burnett and Helen Saberi (Prospect, 2008, £9.99)Richard Ehrlich: "Part of the consistently diverting and informative 'English Kitchen' series from Prospect Books, the distinguished publisher of scholarly food books. This one gives the deep background on Britain's love of Indian cooking, with historical (but usable recipes) from the 18th century onwards."Food & drinkSusan Smillieguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
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