I grew up in house where cooking was not a fun thing to do. Ma worked full time, Dad didn’t really cook, didn’t have working taste buds (40 a day smoker!) and everything had to come with a side of potatoes. We didn’t eat junk, Ma cooked but cooking every day for two children and a husband (on Tuesdays it was two children, a husband and a father – ’cause that was the night Grandad came for dinner), isn’t fun. I remember Ma seemed worn down by the sheer drudgery of it, she would pick us up from either the childminders or afterschool club and as soon as we got home she’d start peeling potatoes…
There was one cookbook in my house when I was a child, it was a Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook, I don’t know where it came from but I’m pretty sure that Ma never cooked a recipe from it. Ma can cook but doesn’t, she reheats things from M&S! I don’t remember recipes, I remember food – boiled chicken, mince, chips from stratch, pies (although Dad’s preferred addition of boiled egg to a steak and kidney pie went with him to the grave!), the sausage stew thing that we called roly poly, sometimes there proper cake, that never, ever on pain of death came from a box.
When I left home, my cooking style developed and much of my cooking style has it’s roots in watching Ma cook. My intolerance of faff in the kitchen, that I can bake and that I don’t really have recipes for the basics of my cooking life.
Learning that I enjoyed cooking and was pretty good at it was a revelation. As with pretty much everything I love, eventually it required books.
The cookbooks live in the shelves in the hall and as you can see, I either have too many books or too small bookshelves! Some of these books I’ve cooked from lots, some I’ve used for ideas and inspiration and some are just reading books, some were presents, some I bought.
Probably the one I use most often is Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, it taught me the basics of choux pastry, yorkshire puddings, jam, pancakes, mincemeat and the list goes on..
I use all of them for inspiration but I have read How to Eat and Dinner, A Love Story straight through and found them fantastic to kick of ideas that are floating around my head.
My cookbook collection is (like everybody else’s) a journey through how I learned to cook, the style I developed and sometimes that of my friends, Good Things in England, Roast Chicken and Other Stories , The Claire Macdonald Cookbook, and a couple of the Nigel Slaters and Jamie Oliver books were gifts from people who loved them and thought I would too. Mostly they were right.
Nic Dempsey 