Sally Vincent

My old, browned, broken paperback copy of French provincial Cooking is, without doubt, my favourite cookbook of all; my introduction to a new world of cooking and eating. Elisabeth David books were a breath of fresh air after the austerity of rationing and the depressing food of the post war years. In the mid ‘60’s the teenage me cooked at Nick’s Diner in Fulham under the expert eye of Kem Bennet, late of George Perry Smith’s famous Hole in the Wall in Bath. When I wasn’t learning to cook I was reading Elisabeth David. How perfect an introduction to the world of food!

Rosemary Hume taught a very reluctant teenage student at Winkfield Place that cooking was a pleasure, an adventure, fun and not a chore. I still find myself returning to the pages of this old friend.

I find Jane Grigson’s knowledge and style captivating. I have learnt not only about cooking fruit from this book but also a huge amount of history in general. For this reason I love all her books; so much more than just recipe books, they are a pleasure simply to sit and read with a glass of wine!

In her introduction Paula Wolfert sums up for me why I love this practical , hands-on book and find myself returning to it time and time again: “The idea is that you too can possess the South-West not merely in words, but in that most tangible and sensuous necessity of people’s lives: the wonderful food they eat” : a truly delicious book!

A classic, of course! Anthony Bourdain’s Introduction sums it up. I particularly like the notion that “ it would be disingenuous to the animal not to make the most of it” For several years I kept pigs and, with Fergus Henderson’s help, I have been lucky enough to learn from this wonderful book how to use absolutely all the deliciousness from nose to tail of the pork we produced!

This is a book as much about the growing of food as the cooking of it. It is about the French countryside, delicious straight forward food and Amanda Hesser’s amusing relationship with the gardener, Monsieur Milbert. She must travel a long journey to persuade him to trust his beloved produce to the hands of a young cook from a foreign land.

A gift from a friend, this book has become a textbook for me. Living in South Devon on a small farm over the years we have been producing not only our own fruit and vegetables but also our own meat: turkeys , free range chickens, Whiteface Dartmoor lamb and rare breed pork. Here is a book that talks about the provenance of food, of the livestock, the food producers as well as a wealth of in depth cookery information and terrific recipes.

At last, a beautiful, informative exciting book about Japanese food in English! Nancy Singleton Hachisu left her native California twenty five years ago to travel to Japan to learn about the food. She never returned, instead she married a Japanese farmer, a man as passionate about food as herself. Here is the story of their life on a farm in northern Japan, a book about the wonder and demystification of Japanese food . Beautifully written and full of wonderful photographs this book has a special place in my heart: I have Japanese family and have been lucky enough to travel extensively in Japan and now, at last, Nancy Singleton Hachisu has made the food accessible to me as well!

A list of my favourite cookbooks would not be complete without Alice Waters. Her influence on good food from Berkely, California right across the USA and her support for the Slow Food Movement across the world is legendary. I count myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity to eat at Chez Panisse where they “ try to interfere as little as possible with the transition of good and pure ingredients from their origins to the table…” a notion reflected so well in this book.

All the books I have chosen live on my kitchen shelves and are well thumbed and oft used so I cannot imagine the list complete without Nigel Slater, one of my favourite food writers. I frequently find myself reaching for his Diaries, too tired to think after a particularly busy farming day. He never lets me down!