Great Food, a series of attractively packaged, short books celebrating four hundred years of food writing and consisting of edited highlights from 20 authors. By creating this series Penguin are bringing these writers’ voices to a new audience and are to be applauded for this.

Looking through the menu of titles, one is offered a mouth-watering selection of food writing fare from which to choose, with authors ranging from the classic – Victorian ‘domestic goddess’ Isabella Beeton and that wonderfully intelligent food writer Elizabeth David – to the less familiar – eighteenth century innkeeper William Verrall, Pellegrino Artusi, a household name in Italy but less well-known outside his native land, and the seventeenth-century poet Gervase Markham.

Having sampled four of the titles, my overall impression is how strikingly characterful each individual food writer featured in this series was. I came away from each book with a real sense of having encountered a distinctive personality; a welcome antidote to the all-too-often anodyne cookbooks which are churned out today on the publishing equivalent of a production line, with all vitality and individuality drained from them in the process.

From my reading of the Great Food series so far, my favourite personal discovery is Colonel Wyvern (aka Colonel Arthur Robert Kenny-Herbert), whose elegant food writing is the subject of Notes From Madras, edited from his Culinary Jottings for Madras (1878), a cookbook aimed at enlightening the English memsahib on how to eat well in India. A short-sighted, ex-pat, over-reliance on imported tinned foods comes in for a characteristically stylish attack: ‘I have long come to the conclusion that the fewer accessories you use in the way of hermetically sealed provisions in the cooking of a dinner the better.’ With excellent fresh ingredients at hand why use tinned foods he asks, going on to deplore the snobbism which leads English memsahibs to give their Indian cooks money for tinned foods, yet grumble at money spent on ‘extra cream, butter, eggs and gravy-meat – the true essentials of cookery’. One can see why his writing appealed to Elizabeth David – who herself was motivated to write her first food book A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) as a ‘furious revolt against that terrible, cheerless, heartless food’ which she found in post-war Britain.

David would also have appreciated Colonel Wyvern’s keen eye for the salient points of how to cook dishes well. His lovingly detailed description of how to cook a curry, from making the curry powder to preparing the sauce, made me want to head to my stove, open my spice collection and start to cook. ‘The actual cooking of a curry presents no special difficulty,’ he declares, continuing, ‘The knotty points are these – First the powder or paste, next the accessories, and lastly the order in which the various component parts should be added.’ Wyvern’s advice is delivered with an insouciant wit – ‘ The nautical curry is not, as a rule, a plat to dream of’ he muses – making him a delightful read.

One of the most vivid of the personalities in the Great Food series is Hannah Glasse, author of the bestselling The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), whose writings are here presented in Everlasting Syllabub and the Art of Carving. Glasse begins her book in typically forthright form, asking sardonically to be ‘pardoned’ for writing clearly enough to be understood by ‘the lower sort’ at whom her book is aimed and delivering a well-aimed gibe at the pretensions of ‘great cooks’.

For example, when I bid them lard a fowl, if I should bid them with large lardoons, they would not know what I meant; but when I say they must lard with little pieces of bacon, they know what I mean. So in many other things in Cookery, the great cooks have such a high way of expressing themselves, that the poor girls are at a loss to know what they mean

She goes on to deplore the extravagance of French chefs using six pounds of butter to fry 12 eggs, when half a pound of butter would do – observing sardonically ‘but then it would not be French’.

While the range of foodstuffs that Glasse writes about includes birds and creatures that we no longer consume – turtles, leverets, herons, shufflers, godwits, knots, ruffs and wheat-ears – her advice on cooking remains very relevant. Writing on how to cook vegetables she declares ‘All things that are green should have a little crispness, for if they are over-boiled, they neither have any sweetness not beauty’ and, on choosing fish, advises looking ‘at the standing out or sinking of their eyes, their fins being stiff or limber, and by sniffing to their gills’.

What, one wonders, would Glasse have made of Alexandre Dumas, the nineteenth-century French novelist and gourmand whose Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine is the base of Great Food’s From Absinthe to Zest? Dumas’ definitions combine science, history, legend and personal anecdotes with an airy confidence, characteristic of his age. On the subject of French food he is unashamedly chauvinistic, declaring ‘France marches at the head of pastry-making,’ and ‘Stews, above all, were responsible for the brilliance of old French cookery; yet it is stews which bring disgrace on contemporary cuisines, especially that of England.’ While his knowledge of other cuisines is often sketchy, Dumas goes into lovingly precise descriptions of French ingredients, detailing which varieties are best and from which area they come from. As befits a French gourmand, he offers an impeccable recipe for an Omelette aux fines herbes, followed – such is the range of his writing – by an extraordinary ‘Arab’ omelette recipe using ostrich or flamingo eggs, now ‘to be found everywhere, thanks to the zoological societies which have been founded even in towns of secondary importance’.

In contrast to Dumas’s wordy eloquence, the nineteenth-century American travelling physician, salesman and self-publisher of collected recipes Dr A.W. Chase is positively laconic. Buffalo Cake and Indian Pudding has a distinctly homely feel to it, consisting as it does of recipes for dishes such as ‘Meat Loaf, from Beef, Veal, Mutton, or Ham, Left Over’ or ‘Grandmother’s Apple Pie’. Although many of the recipes are ones he collected rather than wrote himself, there is a rooted knowledge of cooking to his ‘remarks’ . Chase is at his most heartfelt when it comes to the subject of bread, declaring ‘To make and to be able to teach others to make bread of this high character is an accomplishment worth at least as much practice as a sonata’. ‘Good flour’ for bread is in his view essential. ‘If the very best seems too expensive, make up the difference in cost by eating less cake’ he advises.

Reading these books – which range in date of origin from the eighteenth-century to the nineteenth-century – I was struck both by the amount of hard work which went into cooking and also by the physicality of food shopping and preparation. Writing on how to choose ingredients, Glasse exhorts her readers to ‘take some of the flesh between your fingers and pinch it’, test ham by piecing it with a knife and sniffing the knife, taste the butter yourself and, when buying eggs, ‘put the great end to your tongue; if it feels warm, it is new.’ Chase points out that raisins need to be looked over to free them from ‘small gravel-stones, which are often found among them, then washed, drained, dried and floured’ and advises ‘To know when a cake is done, pierce it with a clean broom splint’.

As a food writer myself – and someone who loves good food writing – I felt inspired by these books – the depth of knowledge of food and cookery contained in their pages, generously shared with the reader, the glimpse into other worlds and past times, the sense of voices talking directly to you across the centuries. That is one of the wonderful things about good writing – it lives on.

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