What a summer. I had no idea, when I wrote the last post about Dylan’s in Criccieth, that I would be working flat out until the end of September. Not a clue. If I had done, I think I’d have drunk rather more wine…

The rate and extent of work hasn’t just meant that I’ve been a bad blogger. It means I’ve not been quite as committed in the kitchen either – no, I haven’t been forced down the ready-meal route (read the ingredients on 99.9% of supermarket ready meals and you’ll understand why not), but I have been falling back on standards that don’t require much thought any more. Potato salad with sausage? Tick. Pasta with fresh tomato sauce? Tick. Courgette risotto? Tick. And I’ve managed to keep up with breadmaking, though the Flour Quest I planned this time last year didn’t happen. Fell back on reliables there too, and that means using Bacheldre’s Strong White Unbleached Stoneground. Now the work is lessening and it’s soup time again – in the words of Jon Snow and just about any member of House Stark, possibly including the dire wolves, ‘winter is coming’.

Over the summer there was one food-related debate which did make me stop and think quite a bit. It was sparked off by Prue Leith, who asked ‘Whatever happened to serious cookbooks?’ in an article prompted by the imminent-then return of Bake Off. Her theme – essentially and crudely summed up – was that the ‘look of the book dictates the sale’. Someone else divided cookery books into ‘pretty books which you look at, food porn’ and ‘ones you actually use which are covered in gunk’. Personally, I don’t think I’d go so far as to suggest such a deep chasm – I’ve used Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem quite a bit, and that’s surely one of the most beautiful of the relatively recent crop.

On the other hand, and if you can go by the sheer amount of graffiti (‘THIS DOES NOT WORK!‘, ‘don’t use purple cauli, goes vile colour’, ‘not good, weird taste, threw out‘, ‘GO EASY ON THE ****** YOGHURT’, ‘Brilliant, VG!!!!!!’) and food staining, my most used books do seem to be unillustrated, practical, apparently as dry as dust or too specialist to a non-foodie eye, and not that recent.

This, for instance, is the somewhat sticky recipe for pasta tubes with chicken, cream, mushrooms, mustard and Gruyere from Pastability by Lizzie Spender, published in 1987. It got me through a relatively impoverished period when I none the less needed to entertain, and I’m very grateful to it.

Or take Lindsey Bareham’s brilliant 1993 book, A Celebration of Soup, which I’m actually using right now to help me riff on a beetroot recipe. That’s a bit cleaner (I’d moved out of a studio and into somewhere with a bigger kitchen at just that time) but equally annotated. And I’ve used it so much that I’ve split the binding. The beetroot soup, by the way, is delicious. Delicous with knobs on.

Sometimes parts of recipes are underlined with ‘eh??’ written by them where there’s been a bit of an editing shortfall (‘whaddya mean “bring back to the boil”? Never said boil it in the first place!!!) and sometimes there’s been nothing to underline, which is emphasised by the comment ‘WHAT COURGETTE? How much courgette? Where’s the fecking courgette?’ to quote one of my entries in another book by an eminent (and anonymous here) authority.

Prue Leith seemed to be stressing that the rise of the telly chef was almost killing off the serious cook book, but I would argue against that – or I would some of the time, ahem. One of my most used books is an early illustrated TV tie-in, Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean Cookery, published in the same year as Pastability. My graffiti habit continues here, sometimes with big circles round parts of the text such as ‘the mixture should be very moist’ which I have annotated with ‘not too moist; it doesn’t thicken that much’, and sometimes with general comments like ‘yum!!!’. And I still annotate / deface / scrawl on books: Jerusalem, for instance, tells me that I really liked the hummus recipe and its addition of ice-cold water (‘WORKS!’) but that I prefer it with ‘more lemon/less tahini’. And it also tells me that there are editorial whoopsies (‘what “remaining herbs”???’) and notes how I adapted recipes (‘too long for fresh broad beans from the garden; add at the end of cooking’). These pages are much less sticky, but that’s just because I’ve grown into a bigger kitchen and no longer have to prop my recipe book against the wall by the stove.

Hmm.

So, basically, Prue, I don’t think I am using one type of book more than the other. Maybe it’s a generational thing? I grew up as a cook with brightly illustrated books; though I did buy Elisabeth David in Penguin paperbacks, I don’t remember cooking anything from them, though I loved reading her evocative text. In my case I think the heaviest graffiti in the unillustrated books – as in Soups – are often because I’ve just been using the book for longer. Give me another couple of years and I’m sure Jerusalem will be covered in scribble. Hopefully not quite as sticky as Pastability, mind. And here’s a reminder of the earlier form of illustrated book:

AGH!

I know there are plenty of things I should be doing – wrapping the last gifts, bringing in logs, finding cranberry juice / chestnuts / the dates I bought months ago – but if there’s one constant in my life, it’s a belief in the importance of displacement activity.

To which end, I have just decanted the apricot vodka I made earlier (though to a lightly different recipe to the one at the end of that post), and I have to say it’s pretty good… well, it would have been silly not to try it, guv. I’ve returned some of the apricots to the jar and added the remains of a bottle of Stoly, so the next lot may be even more – um, tasty. Yep, tasty. And, of course, wildly alcoholic.

Oh, yes, that reminds me:

HAPPY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!
NADOLIG LLAWEN I BAWB!

Here’s what was left of my crab apples at this time four years ago, when we were in the deepest snow we’ve had for years. And fingers crossed for no repeats – despite it being incredibly picturesque. And warm, with the house buried in snow. Oh, OK then, let’s have a repeat. But only after I’ve got those logs in.