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Good Reading : February 2004
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wordofmouth - food & wine reviewed by Ali Cocksedge Apparently, if your father is a member of INXS, your school projects get published. Fortunately, 16-year-old Jake Farriss’ Teenager’s Survival Cookbook is better than that sounds − it’s a useful collection of recipes to fill the bottom- less pits that teenagers call stomachs. I was reminded, as I flipped through it, how grate- ful I am that I no longer need to consider 2-minute noodles as food. And that I don’t need to mix ginger ale and apple juice and call it ‘Mock Champagne’. And I honestly can’t see how making bacon and egg tarts is a timesaver for a cooked breakfast when they take 20 minutes to cook, even though they do look pretty tasty. But for the teenager (or adult for that matter) who thinks that making dinner is opening the pizza box, this is ideal. From something as easy as Mars Bar Slice to a grandmother-pleasing Glazed Apple Tart, this book is a great place to start cooking. The recipes are short, requir- ing few ingredients and are clearly explained, and Farriss sounds like a genuine teenager, enthusiastic about food, not like a wannabee Jamie Oliver. And his potato salad recipe is fantastic. When you call your book The Perfect Cookbook, you are asking for trouble. It’s a very big call. These recipes, drawn from David Herbert’s Weekend Australian column, are classics which purport to work every single time. It’s alphabetical, from Anzac bis- cuits to Yorkshire pudding, so baked eggs are separated from boiled eggs by banana bread, and mashed potatoes are a long way from roast potatoes. This is another good book for the beginning cook as well as the more experienced, as it contains most of the family favourites: how to do a roast leg of lamb, bolognaise sauce and cinnamon toast.There are also more complex and ‘newer’ dishes: eggplant dip and salt and pepper squid, for example. And are the recipes perfect? Well, Jake Farriss’ version of potato salad is much more to my taste, but the chocolate biscuits are absurdly simple, lusciously chocolatey, seriously decadent and quite addictive. In a word, perfect. Terence Conran is a bit of a legend. As a designer, restaurateur and style guru he has been responsible for the UK homewares chain Habitat, and a raft of hip UK restaurants. Impressive creden- tials. Classic Conran assem- bles the recipes that Conran and his family cook and eat at home every day, apparently. They obviously eat quite a lot better than I do, and I suspect that Jake Farriss’ 2-minute noodle concoctions would be banished from the Conran home with a shudder.As you’d expect from an Englishman of Conran’s vintage, the recipes lean toward classic French cooking. It’s another example ofhowI’mnotassmartasI thought I was − as I stirred my first hollandaise sauce, I realised that the technique is exactly the same as making lemon butter or zabaglione. So I don’t know why I’d been scared of making it before. It’s a fantastic recipe, though.As is the Peppers Piedmontese − although the Conran’s can’t really take the credit for that one, I have the same recipe in Elizabeth David and Delia Smith books – but even so, it verges on the perfect. The photographs, taken at the family home in Berkshire, are gorgeous.And all the more impressive since they point out that they didn’t use a food stylist, the food is just as they cooked and served it.They may call this plain and simple food, but it’s anything but dull. As a source of weird trivia to help you ace the local pub trivia quiz, Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany is hard to beat. In no particular order, but with a pretty good index, it’s packed with fascinating (and not so fascinating) facts. I like to think I’m a reasonably intelligent woman, but I admit I’d always thought that my South African friend saying ‘gesundheit’ when we drank was a personal idio- syncrasy. Now, thanks to Schott, I know that gesundheit is what the Afrikaners say for ‘cheers’. Schott appears to have written with his tongue pretty firmly in his cheek: when translating English to American food terms he says faggot is synonymous with meatball, but a real English faggot contains much more offal than most Americans would be happy to find in a meatball. But he also provides a useful warn- ing.Apparently pasties are what American strippers wear on their nipples.This book provides hours of fun for the person who you gave The Guinness Book of Records to for Christmas. The Teenager’s Survival Cookbook Jake Farriss | Pan Macmillan $14.95 The Perfect Cookbook David Herbert | Viking $24.95 Classic Conran Terence & Vicki Conran | Conran Octopus $65.00 Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany Ben Schott | Bloomsbury $29.95 ��� ���� � ��� ���� � ��� ������� ��� ������� �� ������� ���������
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