Cookbook easy recipes

Few are as important or, frankly, as indispensable as Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World, which gently explained to a Britain for whom the memories of rationing were still fresh, that there really was a world of food beyond their shores. Carrier delivered fabulously detailed and uncompromising recipes for the likes of beef stroganoff and bouillabaisse. Before I had finished even half of Fuchsia Dunlop’s introduction to her first cookbook, I was kicking myself for knowing so little about such a diverse and clearly delicious food region that’cookbook easy recipes as big as France and more populous than Britain. Her entertaining descriptions of her time spent cooking in Chendung’s famous cooking school combined with her simple, concise translations of what she learned made me yearn to start cooking immediately.

The recipes veer from the incredibly simple, such as stir-fried potato slithers with chillies to the more elaborate, such as dry-braised fish with pork in spicy sauce. Clear chapters cover cold food, poultry, fish dishes and street food. The vegetable chapter includes a recipe for fish-fragrant aubergine that is so simple and yet so good that it would convert anyone to Sichuan food. Concise sections detail most common ingredients and different cooking methods. Marcella Hazan often gets the blame for the craze for balsamic vinegar, and she has been known to complain people use it far too much.

But in other matters, her influence has only ever been benign. Hazan, knowing that some pastas are most definitely not best made at home, has made cooks everywhere feel truly proud of their jars of dried spaghetti. The Classic Italian Cookbook was published in 1973 in America, where Hazan taught cookery in her New York apartment. Then, in 1980, it was adapted for a British audience by Anna del Conte, at which point she won herself a whole lot of new fans, plus an Andre Simon Award. It is a very good book indeed: comprehensive, straightforward, with recipes that really work. If you want to know how to make proper risotto, minestrone, or lasagne, this is where to look.