Books, Arts & Manners: British Days, Bulgarian Nights

As I lay on my couch in a vacant mood after having dreamt up the new Delectations contest [see next page], what danced before my eyes were not the daffodils envisioned by Wordsworth, but the writings of Mr. Digby Anderson of the London Spectator. Mr. Anderson, whose Book of Imperative Cooking (Harrap, £9.95)— an expanded collection of his Spectator columns—I received on no fewer than three separate occasions, is as well known for his prose as for his subject, which amounts to a return to old-fashioned cooking methods and meticulously careful shopping. This is “conservative cooking” in two senses —cooking that is traditional (although tradition alone is not enough, as in the case of some of those horrid puddings handed down by generations of cooks in public-school kitchens), and cooking by a political conservative:

Following a bleating piece in one newspaper about students starving because they only had twenty-odd pounds a week to spend on food, I listed, in detail, menus showing how one could have three meals a day, including a five-course dinner, for under £13 a week. I was deluged with angry letters from students. My recipes demanded cooking skills and effort. Did I seriously expect university students to learn how to cook and make an effort to do so? Why, they had better things to do. They were studying.

NH

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Nika Hazelton

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As I lay on my couch in a vacant mood after having dreamt up the new Delectations contest [see next page], what danced before my eyes were not the daffodils envisioned by Wordsworth, but the writings of Mr. Digby Anderson of the London Spectator. Mr. Anderson, whose Book of Imperative Cooking (Harrap, £9.95)— an expanded collection of his Spectator columns—I received on no fewer than three separate occasions, is as well known for his prose as for his subject, which amounts to a return to old-fashioned cooking methods and meticulously careful shopping. This is “conservative cooking” in two senses —cooking that is traditional (although tradition alone is not enough, as in the case of some of those horrid puddings handed down by generations of cooks in public-school kitchens), and cooking by a political conservative:

Following a bleating piece in one newspaper about students starving because they only had twenty-odd pounds a week to spend on food, I listed, in detail, menus showing how one could have three meals a day, including a five-course dinner, for under £13 a week. I was deluged with angry letters from students. My recipes demanded cooking skills and effort. Did I seriously expect university students to learn how to cook and make an effort to do so? Why, they had better things to do. They were studying.