London - Today's best-selling cookbooks are essentially coffee table fodder inviting readers to “drool over Tuscan landscapes”, while most of us turn to Google if we actually want a recipe, the restaurateur and cookery school pioneer Prue Leith has claimed.
The BBC's Great British Menu judge criticised the “food porn” trend, epitomised by glossy cookbooks by celebrity chefs which deliver sumptuous visuals at the expense of substantive recipe information.
South African-born Leith, 75, who ran the Michelin-starred restaurant Leith's and founded her own School of Food and Wine to train chefs, praised Mary Berry, the Great British Bake Off judge, because she has a “lifetime of food writing behind her. Unlike many best-selling foodies, she is the real thing, a serious writer, not just a telly star.”
Writing in the Radio Times, Leith contrasted the cookery books of Elizabeth David in the 1950s and 1960s with those of her celebrity successors. “She didn't bother with precise measurements: she expected the reader to have some experience of wielding a wooden spoon. Pictures were commissioned from an artist and were atmospheric, rather than instructional.
“Now the look of the book dictates the sale. In my day you could still buy a good cookbook in paperback with no pictures at all. I doubt if that would sell today.
“Today, if we cook, we Google it. New cookbooks lie on the coffee table and we drool over Tuscan landscapes and rustic bread ovens. Before ordering in a pizza.”
Most best-selling cookbooks are now spin-offs from television series, with “cooking as entertainment” replacing the more educational, instructional approach once demonstrated by Delia Smith.i
Jamie Oliver attracted a “whole new audience who saw him as a kind of rock star rather than a cook. Cooking became fun, and deeply cool, something boys could do, because Jamie O did it,” Leith wrote.
“Since then the surest way to getting published as a cookery writer has been to be first famous as a chef (Gordon Ramsay, Tom Kerridge, Marcus Wareing, Rick Stein, Yotam Ottolenghi et al) and then to have a successful telly series.
“Amateurs can do it by winning MasterChef (like Thomasina Miers), but few journalists and home cooks, however good their writing, get books published before they're on television. And getting on television is even harder than getting published.”
Daily Mail