READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

10. Dr. Cheng (1884-1970) was a lawyer, a judge on the International Court of Justice in the Hague and the last ambassador of the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) to the United Kingdom. It seems he wrote this book, first published in 1954, to pass the time when he was nearing 70. My copy is dotted with Athenaeum date due stamps up to December 1983, before being given to me as gift in 1985 by Elizabeth Wade, who writes in a covering note that she found it in a library sale. Although Dr. Cheng’s book contains recipes, its intention is to explain Chinese attitudes to food, often pointedly to Westerners uninformed about regional variations and traditional manners. In fact, the large Chinese characters on the title page and jacket mean ‘A Thesis on Living’. Sub-headings in the chapter ‘Hints on Cooking’ hint also at the Chinese approach to the kitchen: ‘Rule of Symmetry’, ‘Secrets in Steaming’, ‘The Three Stages’, ‘The Two Ways’. It could be an introduction to Confucian Philosophy. Ev...

9. Valentina Harris. Every Italian cookbook worth its salt contains risotto recipes, each adding clues to the perfection of the dish, but this is my favourite comprehensive collection. Valentina is one of the Sforzas. She went to live in London to write cookbooks. Anyway, she has brought Milan to the page. Carol gave me this book twenty years ago and we have tried most of the recipes, except where the ingredients aren’t available, like truffles or frogs’ legs, or cost is prohibitive. Risotto Barolo, for example, involves borlotti beans and stewing veal in “2 (or even 3) bottles of good Barolo”. Smiley emoji. The book joins the line of those where spine has detached from text; plastic covering was a good idea. This year we think of Lombardy, which is really where rice-growing took off on the peninsula in the Middle Ages. The grains came from China (also in our thoughts), though it’s the Arabs at the time who really brought rice cooking to the Mediterranean. Italian inventiveness w...

8. Alice B. Toklas. Student houses in the Seventies had a certain air. It was the residual scent of marijuana. Many a kitchen shelf held this book, famous for what the author calls Haschich Fudge. This is a distraction from its true value, but then many things are famous for the wrong reasons. It is astonishing today to read the instruction “A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverised. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts.” What size bunch does she have in mind? This book is packed with recipes that intimate the bohemian salon world of Alice and her companion Gertrude Stein, Americans living together in Paris between 1907 and 1946. Readers of these two women learn that they frequently turned on meals for guests of all kinds, and legendarily the ritual of Sunday evening when many of the dishes here presented were presented. Gertrude Stein’s experimental writings are a mixed blessing, some people saying unkindly that the best way to read her is w...

7. Stephanie Alexander. Until recently Stephanie lived down the street from my mother. We all used to walk past Stephanie’s place very often. Unlike other front gardens in Hawthorn, with their demonstrations of jonquils, pittosporum pile-ups, and dense lavender hedges, her garden sported splendid specimens of broccoli, cauliflower, or pumpkin in raised ornate rows. We would drool from the other side of the wrought-iron gate. Furthermore, the vegetables were picture perfect, like some graphic from a New Yorker cover. Every leaf curled with designer exactitude. This infuriating achievement stood as mockery of my own vegetable patches, with their straggles of tomatoes, unpruned plumtrees and wayward broad bean bonanzas. Inspirational though, like the sight of Stephanie’s profuse allotments behind the fences of Collingwood Secondary College as I waited for the lights to change or the buses to move in peak hour traffic down Hoddle Street, pre-pandemic. Carol and Bridie gave me this bo...

6. Madhur Jaffrey. The pages of this book are wrinkled from splatter and speckled from spice. This week I prepared Makkhani murghi (Chicken in Butter Sauce), so that page 92 now has extra wrinkle and speckle. I’ve tried most of the recipes in this book. Seb, Shannon and family gave me the book for Christmas in 2007. With Indian cooking you have to start somewhere, so why not here? Madhur Jaffrey went to England in the Fifties to study acting, but it was her experience of terrible English food and poor-quality Indian restaurants that compelled her to write home for real recipes. These she started promoting, the genuine article, and the rest is history. Freshness, simplicity, richness. She explains how Indian has no strict rules. Variation of texture and colour at the table, that’s important. Variety of flavours, wet and dry both, please. At the table we may dip into dips, use knife and fork, dunk and mop, but are advised “most Indians like to eat with their hands,” more exactly the...

5.      Leslie Forbes. Many cookbooks are artistically produced, text and illustrations working together for cohesive effect. Some cookbooks are artbooks, where illustration can sometimes overwhelm the first priority of sharing recipes. Then there are cookbooks by the Canadian Leslie Forbes (1953-2016), i.e. my standout example of a design artist who joins recipe and illustration into a book that is an entire sensual experience all its own. I think these two titles were purchased at The Terrace Bookshop in Rathdowne Street in the late eighties; neither have been in print for nearly thirty years. You can get them for a steal on Abebooks. Pencil, pen, and ink draw together word and image into one coordinated tribute to Provence and Tuscany, places famed for their food and drink, all of it within striking distance of England. Forbes describes ‘A Table in Tuscany’ (1985) as “more a sketchbook that grew than a traditional cookbook,” and that’s why I return to her c...

4.      The Moosewood Collective of Ithaca NY. Mollie Katzen’s original Moosewood Cookbooks (1974 and 1977) are classics both of vegetarian and American cuisine, with their hippie happiness, ashram commune stews, and handwritten pages. My copies are written over in my own hand with changes to ingredients and levels. Her departure from the Moosewood Restaurant brought into play the collective composition, i.e. anonymous, of all subsequent titles under that name. We have several, but ‘Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant’ (1990) is our favourite. The book is divided into ethnic and regional cuisines, the outcome of their practice of testing new vegetarian dishes each Sunday at the restaurant. It is a product of the expanding adventure of Moosewood, though signs of its heyday are everywhere, for example, the weights and measures section is titled ‘What we mean when we say, “One medium onion…”’ The answer to that is one cup of onion, diced. Recipe. To make Oden (Jap...