Why I threw out my Ottolenghi cookbooks

Nothing beats a spot of decluttering - throwing things out of your wardrobe that you don’t use or need to see what you have and make space for things you do need. I am useless at it when it comes to clothes and other clutter, but cookbooks are another matter. I review cookbooks; I probably had about 150 of them, some of which have been used for just one recipe. When it came to the point when they were falling off the shelves – and they’re hefty, being mostly hardback – I had to let some go.

So, which ones justified the shelf space? Most of my cookbooks don’t get used in their entirety. I make for two or three familiar and reliable recipes, and use them again and again. Some I keep out of regard for the author-cook, Elizabeth David chiefly, but also the venerable Edouard de Pomiane (Cooking in Ten Minutes).

The first thing I did was throw out all the Ottolenghis – you know, the man who made za’atara staple ingredient and caused a run on yuzu. His first eponymous cookbook, written with Sami Tamimi was terrific, with all the over-the-top drama in the mouth you get from a punchy Middle-Eastern flavour palette. One recipe for lentils with sour cherry, Gorgonzola, baby spinach and bacon sums up the flavour pile up. But the subsequent books, excepting one on Jerusalem, were just too recherche, wilfully obscure in the ingredients, often just too effortful. Out they all went, and what a relief it was.

Then there were the review copies of the formerly well known telly cooks – Rick Stein and Mary Berry chiefly. They’re good, with useful recipes, perfectly reliable…but a bit bland. As for Delia, I’ve only kept her Christmas cookbook, which is very good. Nigella, Jamie et al…history now. Then there are the cake books. I didn’t care much for the cupcake fad – too sweet, too too much - so out they went, though I kept Peggy Porschen’s very good books of cupcakes and layer cakes. Then there were the on trend books like Ollie Dabbous’ Essentials - the cookbook equivalent of rewilding and terrifically sound, but admired rather than used. Out went Nigel Slater too, I’m afraid; much from his diaries were simply assemblies rather than recipes; nothing to compare with his early, excellent Real Fast Food.

Which leaves the books I love and use; the books I admire and may yet use; and the forgotten friends. Among the cookbooks I use often – you can tell, because the pages are stuck together – there are some unexpected authors. Gennaro Contaldo, the Italian TV chef, is terrific; I use his Italian Bakery and Italian Family Favourites all the time. The old Eighties vegetarian staple , The Greens Cookbook, which now seems quaint on account of not being vegan, is packed with good and interesting recipes. Diana Henry I’ve come to late, but she’s terrific…plainly a greedy eater as well as an excellent cook. Sarah Raven’s Food for Friends and Family is a model of how a cookbook should be ordered; by season, then by courses, and is genuinely useful. The Moro cookbook is my Hispanic-Arabic staple, supplemented by Penelope Casas for Spain. Phaidon’s blockbuster national cookbooks are variable, but the Turkish Cookbook by Musa Dagdeviren is wonderful….an account of a nation and a culture through its food. I have a soft spot for JP McMahon’s Irish Cookbook. But the most useful of all is by that Viking of Norse cooks, Magnus Nilsson. The Nordic Baking Book, is funny and opinionated as well as comprehensive.

The cookbooks I really love are mostly by chefs. The Roux Brothers, alas, no longer with us, were terrific; the earliest, New Classic Cuisine, remains indispensable if challenging, but so too is Michel Roux’s simple book of cheese recipes. One of my most used cookbooks is Joel Robuchon’s (again, recently deceased) fabulous Cuisine Actuelle, sensitively interpreted by his admirer, Patricia Wells, which you could eat from happily for the rest of your life. Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories was once voted the most useful cookbook of all time, to which I say, yes indeed, but don’t forget his fabulous The Prawn Cocktail Years (the staples of the Sixties and Seventies, revisited) and his Week In, Week Out: the best kind of English cooking. Pierre Koffman’s Memories of Gascony is an autobiography wrapped around recipes, and a powerful evocation of a lost way of peasant life.

But the most useful cookbook of all, ever? It’s not the Constance Spry Cookery Book, terrific though it is. It’s that old staple The Reader’s Digest The Cookery Year, a treasure of the Seventies, which is divided by season and ordered by courses with an invaluable introduction to meat, fish, fruit and veg at the start and an equally invaluable supplement at the end for basic cooking techniques and recipes and a guide to home freezing. The contributors include remarkable cooks like Margaret Costa, Jane Grigson, Theodora Fitzgibbon and Ken Hom. And if you should want to cater for your own wedding – for ten or fifty – (these were the days before weddings cost more than the deposit on a house) or explore breakfasts and High Teas or do a children’s party, it has that too. It’s no longer in print, alas, but if you can track down a copy online, you don’t really need anything else.