Book Commentary
February 14, 2010
By Michael
I became fascinated with Anglo-Saxon England after reading Stenton's volume in The Oxford History of England (I got as far as The Whig Supremacy and gave up). There's a good chapter on it in Davies' The Isles: A History, where I found out that Anglo-Saxon studies were unfashionable in England, until quite recently. How odd. A recent arrival is Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England, which details the convoluted history of its last sixty years or so.
If it wasn't for sausage, I could probably be vegetarian. No, seriously: I'm no great cook, but I find fooling around in the kitchen with raw meat rather revolting. A good standard text for vegetarian cooking can be Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which has a rather lackluster title, but covers all the basics in style, and then some. There's 1400 recipes, but its more in the way it's set up and presented that caught my attention. And she doesn't overdo it with the glossy colour photos of the food prepared in a way that you and I will never match.
Also a cookbook, but miles apart from Madison's approach, is Home Bistro, by a former food writer for the Toronto Star. David Kingsmill lets you in on the cookery secrets of some great chefs, in a wide variety of cuisine, stressing purity of ingredients. He insists, for example, that proper beef stock is simmered a minimum of twelve hours. There's all kinds of neat stories in between the recipes, and a fine opening chapter on how to buy food like a chef.
Incidently, my favorite cookbook is A Tuscan in the Kitchen, by Pino Luongo, which has no ingredient proportions. Pino says, hey, its your kitchen, you decide how many mushrooms go in that pasta sauce!
Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England by Richard Fletcher. Penguin Press, London, 2002. Hardcover, $19.
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. Broadway Books, New York, 1998. Trade paperback, $20.
Home Bistro by David Kingsmill. Key Porter, 1996, Toronto. Trade paperback, $11.