Cookbooks: my golden list

Like many cookery lovers, I have a terrible cookbook habit. Not only do I savour that first flick through a just-published by a much-loved food writer, pre-ordered months in advance and eagerly awaited, but I also indulge myself by impulse-ordering long out-of-print or specialist books on a particular cuisine or subject, when I come across a recommendation on a blog, in an article, or (indeed) in another cookbook. My collection now numbers 75, which is frankly alarming, given how tiny my flat is (and I should add that my book addiction doesn't stop at cookbooks - my flat is coming down with books).

That said, my cookbooks are a source of joy to me: I read, re-read, consult, cook from and learn from them. Some were presents; others bought in the midst of a particular cooking passion (not to say frenzy); others have taught me new ideas, flavours and techniques.

I always find it fascinating to read other people's lists of their favourite books, and in particular, their favourite cookery books - it tells you so much about someone's tastes and personality. I've tried several times to whittle down my own 'golden five' - the most precious of them all. I've outlined the current golden five below, but there are a few emergency additions at the end. I should also add that they are in no particular order (it's hard to choose amongst one's babies as it is).

How to Eat - Nigella Lawson

I have two copies of this: a 'good' one, which I don't cook with, and a 'messy' one, for bashing around in the kitchen. My parents had this - along with How to be a Domestic Goddess - in their kitchen in my teenage years, when I first started to make tentative connections between my enthusiastic appetite and an impulse to learn to cook.

Lawson's book is, on one hand, a fabulous reference tome, with recipes for all the basics and seasonal need-to-knows - how to roast a chicken, make mayonnaise, bake a Christmas cake - without the dry bossiness of other encyclopaedic cookery titles. On the other, it's a collection of gorgeous menus, most of which sound as exciting to me now as they probably did to everyone else when the book was first published in 1998. I mean, doesn't 'cold roast fillet of beef with rosemary and anchovy mayonnaise', served with a tomato salad and followed by 'Yorkshire pudding with syrup and cream', still sound so beguiling?

Ballymaloe Cookery Course - Darina Allen

Next, one of the encyclopaedic tomes I mentioned so disparagingly above - but this one is an exception to the bossy rule. My dad bought me this as a gift, which gives it additional sentimental value, and it includes a number of traditional Irish recipes that are fundamentals in my cooking life, but are overlooked by UK-published books of this type. I think what makes this book so special is its ambition: it really is a cookery course, covering not only the basics, but also some very complicated techniques and exciting flavours. It has a section on drinks that runs the gamut from rosehip syrup and rosemary lemonade, through to Campari and pink grapefruit juice, salty lassi and Gaelic coffee. This is definitely my desert-island cookery book - its sheer breadth means I would never be bored.

Short and Sweet - Dan Lepard

This is absolutely my number one baking book (and I own a fair few). It covers everything - bread, cakes, biscuits, 'small things', desserts, savoury things - and includes recipes for every baking basic you can think of (for example, marzipan, various thicknesses of custard/creme patissiere, numerous pastry recipes, etc), but it's also very modern, includes lots of recipes using flours such as rye and spelt, and interesting twists on the classics, without veering into the realm of novelty. I adore it.

Every Grain of Rice - Fuchsia Dunlop

This book is single-handedly responsible for an enormous transformation in the way I eat, which has taken place over the past two years. After reading the odd article by Fuchsia Dunlop in the Guardian, and an intriguing meal at Yipin China in Islington (which serves Sichuan and Hunanese food), I took Every Grain of Rice out of the library. A rice cooker, a steamer, a wok, and several trips to the Chinese supermarket later, I have made over 30 recipes from this book, and we eat from it one or two nights a week (at least).

Tender volume I - Nigel Slater

Well, one would have to have something by Mr. Slater, at very least in recognition of the fact that his book, Appetite, was probably the very volume responsible for prodding me to take action and learn to cook in the first place. Although I really, truly love The Kitchen Diaries, which is both inspiring and realistic for home cooking, Tender volume I has a special place in my heart. My boyfriend bought it for me as a gift when I first moved to London; I didn't have a lot of money, and for economic as well as health and ethical reasons, I was trying to focus my diet around vegetables, with meat as an infrequent treat (a philosophy I still try to live by, incidentally). Tender showed me that this would be exciting, rather than a challenge; it kept me company when I was lonely and new in the city; and, like my Ballymaloe book, it was a gift given at just the right moment, by someone I love dearly.

Following very close behind:

The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan
I've mentioned this above, but it was my bible when I was learning to cook at university. These days, its spine is sellotaped up, a result of much love and use.
Food from Plenty - Diana Henry
This is a book with heart - it's about eating sustainably, frugally and thoughtfully, and not in a dry, eco-warrior way. The recipes are exciting, drawing together flavours and ideas from all over the world, as well as perking up classics (such as fish pie, or roast chicken) with imaginative ideas. Every time I open this book, I find something I want to make.
How to be a Domestic Goddess - Nigella Lawson
My mum had this in its original gorgeous hardback edition - the black one with a white cupcake - and it's the book my family baked from when I was a teenager. Particular favourites were the fairy cakes - it was the early dawn of the cupcake trend - and the butter cut-out biscuits, which my sister still makes. For this reason, it has real sentimental value for me, and as with How to Eat, I have two copies - one paperback (for daily use) and one hardback (to keep FOREVER).
The Kitchen Diaries - Nigel Slater
This is pretty much a modern cookery classic - seasonal and interesting recipes, and two truly fabulous cake recipes - one for ginger cake, and the other for lemon demerara cake.

Dolsot bibimbap

For many years, my cooking and eating was firmly rooted in Europe - Italy, to be precise, with a few English, Irish and French smatterings. The gorgeous, fragrant simplicity of Italian food won me over when I was learning to cook, and I slept with Marcella Hazan's The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by my bed.

About a year ago, however, the balance was set a-jangling by a sudden, ravenous need for various Asian cuisines - a need set in motion by the great Fuchsia Dunlop and her book Every Grain of Rice, which I'll discuss more fully another time. Chinese was at the forefront - but closely followed by Japanese and, particularly, Korean food.

Not long ago, I wouldn't have had the faintest idea what to say if you'd asked me to name a single Korean dish. But Busan, a lovely little Korean restaurant in Islington (Highbury Corner, to be exact), changed all that. I went on my friend A's recommendation, in her company, and tried their yukae dolsot bibimbap, which is the raw-beef-hot-stone-bowl variation of what is apparently Korea's signature dish, a bowl of rice topped with various vegetables and Korean gochujang (chilli paste).

The dish comes, quite literally, in a phenomenonally hot stone bowl; you stir the raw beef, raw egg yolk and vegetables into the rice and chilli paste beneath them, and the heat of the bowl cooks the beef and egg as you eat, leaving you with what I can only describe as a creamy, spicy, savoury, beefy sort of rice pudding. Fragrant with sesame oil, the hot bowl ensures that the rice develops a crunchy, golden and truly addictive crust on the bottom - the ultimate prize of the whole dolsot experience.

I've had dolsot bibimbap many times since, mostly at Busan but also in New York on a recent visit to my boyfriend's family there. I wished I could recreate it at home - it really is wonderful winter-warmer stuff - but without a stone dolsot bowl and a great deal of courage, I wasn't sure where to begin. Some googling (as ever) gave me the solution, as outlined in this article over at the Kitchn. I gave it a go in my enamelled cast-iron sauté dish the other day, and I'll never look back. Busan need not fear losing my custom - but dolsot bibimbap is now firmly on the home-cooking menu, too.

Dolsot bibimbap - informed by helpful guidance from The Kitchn

• Cooked rice - I am going to be supremely unhelpful and adopt US-style measurements here, which I usually find INFURIATING AND NONSENSICAL. In this case, I do talk in cups, because I own a rice-cooker (and I don't exaggerate when I say that this appliance has transformed my cooking life), and I just load it up with ratios of rice and water. I made about 2 cups of (uncooked) rice - I think this is about 200-250g.
• An egg yolk, raw
• Korean gochujang - at least 2 tbsps, but you may well wish to add more
• 1 tbsp pure sesame oil
• 1 tbsp cooking oil

The next ingredients are basically just a medley of whatever vegetables you fancy. I used:

• 300g of chestnut mushrooms, sliced and briefly stir-fried with a drop of light soy and half a clove of sliced garlic
• 2 carrots, grated and stir fried with the mushroom mixture
• 2 scallions, sliced
• Half a sheet of nori seaweed, cut into strips (this is by no means necessary, so skip if you don't have any)
• half a bag of baby spinach from the supermarket, washed and shredded (although you can tell from the photos that I didn't shred it with great efficacy)

To assemble your dolsot bibimbap:

1. Take your pan - really, it needs to be an enamelled-cast iron sauté dish or casserole, or a cast-iron frying pan. You COULD, however, try it in a stainless steel pan (I wouldn't recommend non-stick as you will need to heat it to a very high temperature, and non-stick isn't suitable for this). Add the two oils - sesame and cooking - and heat the pan over a medium heat until the oils are hot, smell fragrant and coat the base of the pan evenly.

2. Add the cooked rice and smoosh it out over the base of the pan to cover the whole thing, as in the photo below:

3. The rice should sizzle and sound like it is frying nicely in the oil. Next, arrange your vegetables on top in nice little separate quarters:

 4. Cook for 5-7 minutes over the heat, so the vegetables warm through a bit and the rice has a chance to develop that gorgeous, golden crust. Take a peek at the end of this time under the rice to see if this is underway - if not, give it another couple of minutes.

5. Once you are pretty sure the rice is ready, bring to the table (make sure to use a heat mat below the dish - it will be HOT! So keep little fingers etc away) and top with the egg yolk and gochujang.

 6. Stir it all together, ensuring the egg is in contact with the heat from the pan to cook, and that you distribute the gochujang evenly. Spoon individual portions into rice bowls and gobble.

NOTES: yeah, you can probably tell that I over-cooked my rice crust and burnt it a bit. Just keep a close eye! Also, obviously, don't feed this to the elderly, children, pregnant women or anyone who has a compromised immune system as it includes raw eggs (and if you are going for the yukae version, also raw meat). I made a vegetarian version as I couldn't be bothered faffing around with meat and it was *almost* as gorgeous as Busan's meaty one (though not quite).

Leon’s ‘More-fruit-than-cake’ fig and red wine cake

I never used to see the point of dried fruit – it all tasted the same; it had a weird, leathery texture; and (in essence) if it didn’t come in a tiny, red cardboard box in my packed lunch, I wasn’t interested.

I’m not sure how, or even when, that changed, but suffice to say, these days I eat buckets of the stuff. I started with dried apricots (dusty-skinned, sometimes spotted with brown, an occasional acidic back-note) and graduated to the big guns: treacly, jammy-gutted prunes and brown figs with their crunchy caviar insides. My weekly basics shopping list reads thus: milk; eggs; scallions; ginger; prunes.

My worship at the altar of fruitcake has much deeper roots, which reach their way down to the annual Christmas cake, baked and iced by my Great-Aunt Claire and housed in a big, square tin in my Granda’s kitchen, just above the cutlery drawer. Every time I put my nose round his kitchen door, I would nip down the steps into the room and cut myself a little wodge of the cake with one of his ivory-handled knives, the blade worn down into a ‘c’-shape, a sort of cake-scythe.

So it was an auspicious moment when I came across the ‘More-fruit-than-cake Cake’ in Leon’s third book, which deals with cakes and baking, in my local library. I’m not usually that keen on the Leon books (all jumpy, jittery graphics and jolly-hockey-sticks), but this sounded and looked fantastic: a cake with a damp, dense centre, flecked with yellow fig-pips and sludgy with red wine. I had dried figs at home (bien sûr) and red wine (ditto); I had spelt flour, I had eggs (see: weekly basics). I didn’t have butter, but I did have vegetable oil. It’s no big deal to sub one for t’other, is it? Well, it would have to do.

The recipe instructs the reader to simmer the dried figs in the red wine with sugar and some spices. This was the most glorious moment of the whole process – inhaling that spicy, sweet concoction, I could have easily gobbled it as was. But no! I would restrain myself, chop it up, and make a PROPER cake batter.

The batter was mixed, poured into a loaf tin, and set in the oven to bake. It baked. It may have over-baked a tiny bit (I was nervous of its wobbly nature upon my first check, but realise now that it would have continued to cook in the tin when removed – such a schoolboy error). I removed it from the tin and restrained myself for a whole fifteen minutes, to let it cool before trying.

The first cut, if not the deepest, was certainly the most eager; and, to be honest, it resulted in a bit of disappointment. The cake was okay – there was the occasional pleasing crunch from the figs – but it was very, very crumbly, and felt oddly dry on the palate, whilst moist to the touch.

I tried to swallow my disappointment (and the rest of my slice), and boxed the cake up neatly for later. Of course, later on, and fully cold, its fudgy glory was revealed, and my next slice was glorious – sticky and dense, just as I’d hoped. The rest of the cake didn’t last long.

The lesson here? Well, actually, there are a few. Firstly: don’t overbake. Secondly: don’t sub oil in for butter, or at least, not all of the butter – it makes the cake very crumbly and hard to cut. Thirdly: let cakes cool completely and utterly before cutting and eating, especially cakes made with dried fruit.

…I should point out that I’ve made the same mistake with a date and almond loaf before – cutting a soggy, warm, crumbly slice and dismissing it as disgusting, before my inherent greediness drew me back for a second, cold slice. I should have known better, this time round.

Leon’s more-fruit-than-cake Cake, almost

I halved the quantities of the recipe to make it fit my loaf tin, and replaced the butter with oil, which actually worked fine, but I suspect the cake’s fudginess would be enhanced by using butter. The recipe below includes my tweaks

• 188ml red wine
• 188g dried figs, diced into smallish pieces
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (the original recipe also called for ¼ teaspoon of ground cloves, but I didn’t have any, so I left this out)
•  60g flavourless oil (the original recipe called for butter and I would stick with that if I were to do this again…to get a denser, fudgier result)
• 125g light brown sugar (the original recipe called for honey, which I rarely have in the cupboard)
•  Half an egg, beaten gently
• 100g spelt flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1. Preheat your oven - 160°C or 150°C if, like me, you have a fan oven that nukes everything. Get your tin ready – I used a 2lb (approx.) loaf tin
2. Combine the red wine, chopped figs and cinnamon in a saucepan and heat on the hob until simmering. Give it a few minutes at a gentle simmer so the fruit absorbs the syrup, then take off the heat, stir in the oil and sugar and set aside to cool (so your egg doesn’t scramble when you combine the ingredients for your batter in a bit)
3. Sift the flour, baking powder and bicarb together, then pour over the fig/syrup mixture and mix gently until just combined
4. Pour into your tin and bake for 30-40 mins – test with a skewer and keep baking for five minutes more at a time until the skewer comes out clean.
5. DON’T CUT AND EAT UNTIL IT HAS COOLED, or you will be disappointed.