A.A. Gill, Breakfast at the Wolseley

A friendly publisher mailed me just before I left for New York, asking if I'd review a couple of books here for them. Always up for a freebie (I am nothing if not venal, especially where books are involved), I said yes - and was very, very pleased when Breakfast at the Wolseleyturned out to say A.A.Gillon the cover. If you're not a consumer of English newspapers, you may not have come across him; he's an author and journalist with a liking for smoking jackets and waspish prose. These days, Gill is the restaurant critic for the Sunday Times, and his is usually the first page I turn to when reading the papers in bed. His writing is unapologetically baroque and often vicious - his description of the Welsh as "loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls" in the Times about ten years ago (he also said that "You can easily travel from Cardiff to Anglesey without ever stimulating a taste bud,") nearly caused a Celtic uprising and sparked so many complaints from outraged Welshmen (no idea why - I'm married to one of the pugnacious little trolls, and it seemed fair enough to me) that the Press Complaints Commission and Commission for Racial Equality had to weigh in. We Brits love a Commission.

The Wolseley is a café-restaurant next to the Ritz in London, set in a building which was originally a gorgeously opulent showroom for Wolseley automobiles in the 1920s. That aesthetic runs through the restaurant itself as well as the book: the hard cover reproduces the design of the marble floors (themselves copied from Brunelleschi's floors in Santo Spirito in Florence, according to Gill), while a tiny black dust-slip does double duty by carrying the title and author while acting as a slim belt to dress up the cover. I do not usually witter on like this about the outside of a book, but this one is very pretty, and the copious and beautiful photography inside keeps the loveliness factor high. They top it all off with a black satin ribbon bookmark. If this book was a person, it'd be wearing a velvet opera cape.

The book opens with an essay on the Wolseley's history, then one on breakfast; Gill then walks us through a night's preparation in the restaurant kitchens for the breakfast rush, but somehow takes us there via the Turkish siege of Vienna (croissants, pastries, espresso), Capuchin monks in Venice (cappuccino) and the beekeepers of South London (who supply the Wolseley with honey and beeswax for their cannelés de Bordeaux). My only complaint here is that because he's writing about something he really enjoys, Gill is having trouble being as poisonous as usual, and I love him for his poison. Every now and then, though, the sliver-tipped dagger slips through the silky prose, so the restaurant's customer database becomes "a benign Stazi report"; we are ticked off for moving from the "sugar-crusted, multicoloured, zoomorphically shaped processed carbs of childhood for the sombre, brown, bran-rich, blandly goodly flakes of colonic probity and adulthood".

More short essays open each of the food chapters - Vienoisserie; Eggs; English Breakfast; Fruit and Cereals; and Tea, Coffee and Hot Chocolate. Rather wonderfully, you are offered bulleted instructions on how, for example, to prepare the perfectly poached or scrambled egg; a perfect cup of coffee (a discussion of the coarseness of your grind and whether you should select an Arabica or a Robusta); tea types and terminology. The night churns on - Polish plongeurs ("slim-featured, pale-eyed, all of them with the same contrary mixture of relief and resentment: a battened-in, taciturn, steely ambition") flop about with rubber gloves and misery. I said above that Gill's prose is baroque and it can be an acquired taste, but it's a taste well worth acquiring if only so that you can read what he has to say about yoghurt.

The essays are punctuated with a good solid armful of breakfast recipes (not by Gill). These are the dishes we all secretly love and avoid eating regularly for the sake of our arteries and pancreas - eggs Benedict, pain au chocolat, omelette Arnold Bennett, lamb's kidneys with Madeira, crèpes, haggis and duck egg. My heart throbs with the writing, my salivary glands do that squirty thing with the recipes. No recipe for the darned cannelés de Bordeaux, which saddens me, because I love the things.

I am torn between keeping this book in the kitchen so I can practise poaching eggs (a trick I have never quite got the hang of) or on the bedside table so I can read about the English breakfast's "cacophony of meat" before bedtime. I suspect I'm just going to be running up and down the stairs a lot. Just as well, given all the black pudding.

A Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy

No pictures yet today - the USB cable for my camera has gone walkies. You'll have to make do with the magic of the written word.

My very dear friend Lorna got married on Saturday. (I am still recovering from the stupid decision I made to try to keep up with her new husband's Irish friends once the drinking began in earnest. Congratulations to Lorna and Stephen, who are currently eating things in bikini and trunks on their honeymoon in Sicily.) Lorna, clearly having got this being a bride thing back to front, gave me a present the week before the wedding.

We were sitting in a café when she handed over the book she'd bought me, and on opening it I proceeded to get so excited that an old gentleman at an adjacent table got up and said how delightful it was to see young people still able to get excited over books. I immediately stopped being delightful and instead became very self-conscious for about ten seconds before going all twittery again, for this is a seriously, seriously fabulous book. André Simon's Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy is a real treasure trove of esoteric and quirky information for the obsessional foodie. It was started in 1938 by Simon, a champagne dealer, wine writer and all-round bon-viveur, and was planned for release in three sections a year to be lined up attractively on your bookshelves. Sauces, the first section, was published in 1939. With the breakout of the Second World War, paper shortages and conscription at his English publishers slowed the publication of the next eight sections, but by 1946 the work was finished, and a couple of years later a single-volume edition (the one I was chirruping about in the cafe) was published.

André Simon's exhaustive treatment of what he calls 'Gaster-the-belly . . . that temperamental furnace . . . the seat of the soul' is by turns fascinating and hilarious, and remains useful for the modern cook, with its concise recipes, its instructions on handling different ingredients and its exploration of some truly unusual foods. (I am pretty sure that readers in 1945 had never eaten an agouti, much less enjoyed its 'best part, the grizzled fur'. I certainly haven't.) We learn that the flesh of the squirrel is seldom eaten in England . . . and we're given two recipes for a casserole and a pie. We discover that the fat of the Bastard Antelope 'quickly becomes cold and clogs in the mouth'. Here is a consomme of swifts, there a roast swan. There's a recipe for The Bishop, a Cambridge University wintertime concoction of oranges and port. There are pages upon pages of short descriptions of cheeses, some now extinct. And, wonder of wonders, a few hundred early cocktail recipes. (I like the sound of the Jack Rose - the juice of half a lime, a teaspoon of grenadine and a jigger of apple-jack, shaken over ice.) There are edible birds I've never heard of (the Tufted Pochard? The Godwit?) There's a recipe for rabbit in brandy which I'm determined to cook. There's a detailed history of the Bath Oliver biscuit. A garnish for sweetbreads involving truffles cooked whole in Madeira, hollowed and refilled with quenelles of chicken forcemeat and the chopped centres of the truffles. And there's a thoughtful instruction to make sure that the only aardvark that I allow to pass my lips should be smoked.

It's worth looking at some second-hand websites for a copy of this magical book. Simon laments that: 'Gastronomy in England and in the United States of America has a very limited appeal; it certainly has none of the fascination which Nutrition has for a vast number of people. And yet Gastronomy is to Nutrition what health is to sickness. All who enjoy good health, which means, happily, the great majority of the population, could and should enjoy good food and drink, the fuller and happier life which is the gift of Gastronomy for all normal people: that is to say people who are blessed with all their senses and a sufficient measure of common sense to make good use of them.' I hope he'd find the food landscape in Britain a bit more congenial these days.

What the World Eats

I loved this photoessay from Time. A few years ago, photographer Peter Menzel and journalist Faith D'Alusio visited thirty families across the world, and documented what they ate in a week in the book Hungry Planet. (The picture here is the British family's weekly shop. I can thankfully say that my own weekly shop looks a lot more like the Chinese family's haul, but rather more vegetabley.)

There are some shocks and surprises here, where weekly food rations are broken down by budget as well as by content. Well worth a look.

Badger stew

A recipe book review today - it is too gorgeously hot to think about cooking, so supper is some barbecued sausages in a bun.

My brother, Ben, whose comments you'll occasionally see on this blog, lives in Bordeaux, where he is a lecteur at the university. Ben hopelessly outcools me. He's in a band called Beautiful Lunar Landscape - check out their official site and their MySpace page, where you can listen to some rather good music. You'll enjoy it, especially if you like things like Jeff Buckley and the Velvet Underground. He appears above, the handsome devil, in an uncharacteristic suit (it was my wedding - I insisted), blowing uncharacteristic bubbles, accompanied by his extremely splendid girlfriend Katie.

Ben's a foodie too. He asserts that his current aim in life is to consume every part of the pig. Ben - you are in for a shock. I have found a Chinese supermarket which sells the sex organs of the pig. Both varieties.

My birthday present from Ben and Katie (and I'm sorry it's taken me such a long time to get round to writing this) was an odd little hardback book from France. Les cuisines oubliees, by Annie and Jean-Claude Molinier, is a glorious peculiarity; a book of recipes so old-fashioned or rustic that they've fallen out of fashion. I'm afraid it's only available in French; fortunately, my French unaccountably turned out quite good, so when I read the recipe for Blaireau au sang, I had just enough vocabulary to work out that what I was reading was a recipe for badger in blood, and not a new and exciting plot to overthrow the UK Government.

The book's full of this stuff. Beaver stew, coypu casserole, something rather dodgy-sounding with a cormorant, roast hedgehog, and a bear's foot recipe which, say the Moliniers, can be adjusted slightly and applied to any baby elephant's feet you happen to have hanging around in the fridge. There's squirrel in a pot (peel and empty your squirrel); fox, which you are meant to leave, skinned, in a river for 72 hours before cooking because, frankly, fox doesn't taste too great; and a magpie baked in clay.

This is a fantastic book. Sorry, Ben, but I'm unlikely to end up cooking anything from it; that said, it makes great bedtime reading, and is a marvellous tool with which to terrify impressionable French children. I'll leave you with a translation of the recipe for badger in blood, which almost makes me wish I had a mantrap. (Clicking on the badgers will make them do exactly what you think they're going to do. Turn the sound up. Today's post is a multimedia extravaganza.)

To cook one badger you'll need:

1 badger
1 glass of pig's blood
1 small glass of armagnac
1 ginger root
1 bottle of dry, sparkling white wine
2 eggs
1 pot of crème fraîche
salt and pepper
500g forest mushrooms OR chestnuts to accompany
100g butter
oil

Eviscerate and skin your badger, and soak it in a fast-flowing river for at least 48 hours. This will help you to de-grease it more easily.

Once the badger is de-greased, cut it into pieces and brown it in a frying pan with butter. When the pieces are golden and stiff, flambée with the armanac, season and add a grated soup-spoon of ginger, fresh if possible.

Pour over the wine, and simmer gently for at least two hours.

At the end of the cooking time, mix the chopped badger liver (cooked beforehand in a little oil), the glass of blood, two egg yolks, a coffee-spoon of ginger and the crème fraîche, and pour into the cooking dish. Serve immediately.

This dish goes well with wild mushrooms or chestnuts.

Thirtieth birthday

I'm 30 today. Mr Weasel assures me that I am still a very large kid with a bank account, which is an interpretation I like. My brother, similarly encouraging, has suggested that you are only as old as you act, and that as long as I don't clean the kitchen properly and continue to leave my pants on the floor, he will keep not writing my age in my birthday card.

Among my presents was (thank you Mummy and Daddy - thank you also for the fantastic framed set of 1934 cigarette cards featuring Hollywood starlets) a copy of Rosemary Brissenden's South East Asian Food, which is a positive bible of authentic South East Asian cuisine. It has chapters on Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and I'm poring through it, delighted to find recipes for things which I never, ever thought I'd be able to cook at home. These are recipes which are seldom written down, but passed through families orally. I finally have a recipe for that Laotian paper beef which I had in a restaurant in Paris a few years ago; a proper recipe for the sambal for Nasi Lemak, a way to make Banh Xeo at home and detailed instructions on exactly what I should be doing with a green papaya. I'm not cooking today (I am being taken out secretly by Mr Weasel this evening and am writing this in a hasty lunch hour) - watch this space for Banh Xeo from my new book.

I read a copy of Rosemary Brissenden's original version of this book (a slim volume which I think was published in the '70s; I seem to remember that the collection of recipes and study of the cuisine of the region formed her PhD thesis) some years ago, and was smitten with it. This new version is completely updated, about four times thicker - this begins to feel like a life's work - and packed with recipes (no pictures, which I rather like; I feel I'm getting good recipe value per page. The only photographs are spread across four pages of 'identify your ingredient' keys.) I'd encourage you to buy this if you're even slightly interested in proper South East Asian food. As the introduction says:

"With the world now full of same-tasting 'instant' approaches to South East Asian food through packets and jars, this book aims to serve as a guide to cooks who wish to enjoy its true freshness and variety by cooking it for themselves."

It's brilliant. A great present - thanks again.