The Cornucopia restaurant's book is a firm favourite, writes Hugo Arnold
YOU CAN FEAST on Christmas with help from a pouting Nigella Lawson, learn to rustle up a quick supper with cheeky commentary from Jamie Oliver or be shown the easy, and quick, way to cook Indian or Chinese food (two of the great, and most ancient cuisines in the world) with Anjum Anand or Ching-He Huang. These are the authors of just a few of the best-selling cookery books on sale this Christmas.
We buy cookbooks by the bucket-load. Many are full of the same recipes. Nigella Lawson goes as far as to admit this in Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities.
So what are we doing buying so many? The junkies among us - I admit to being one - will tell you that no two recipes are ever the same. The tweaks, nuances (some call them embellishments) are all worth it. Others live in hope of finding a dish that is so brilliantly new that it is worth having the book just for that one recipe. Still others never cook from them, admitting to both viewing and enjoying them vicariously.
The 21st century phenomena that sees both vast cookery book sales and groaning supermarket shelves of convenience food would suggest something is going on. Quite what, is hard to fathom.
To start with, while sales of cookery books have undoubtedly increased, it is hard to compare like with like. The books we used to buy had no pictures, for a start. Now we get not just the food but beautiful people in their beautiful homes and often with their beautiful children. We look at these books to tell us both who we are and who we want to be.
Cookbooks used to be manuals; packed full of instruction and information. Go back far enough and recipes were mere lists, quantities being decided by the cook based on experience learned at the elbows of others. Now we scurry about, being very busy, and so cookery books need to give us context as well as instruction. Hence the full-colour photographs of everything to do with the supposed lifestyle of the author. Not only that, but we can now buy kitchen equipment with the name of our favourite author emblazoned on it.
And it is no longer just cookery books that our modern-day champions create. Jamie Oliver, not content with fixing UK school dinners, creating his own ministry of food and helping disadvantaged young people start careers in the catering industry, has this month launched his own magazine, Jamie Magazine.
To be fair to Jamie (and I am a fan - who else has managed to get so many turned on to the joys of the kitchen?), he is only following in the footsteps of Donna Hay and Martha Stewart. But is this really what food is about? The voyeuristic obsession with following cookbook authors' lives in so detailed a way seems too close to reality television for comfort.
Cookbooks should be manuals to be used. The best quickly become food-stained, annotated encyclopedias of knowledge, memory and record.
Top of my list this year are Anthony Demetre's Today's Special: A New Take on Bistro Foodand, for a cracking celebration of vegetables, Cornucopia At Home, authored by the team from the Dublin restaurant of the same name. Both come with pictures, but only of the food. Both are manuals of the best kind.
harnold@irishtimes.com