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Frontières by Alex Jackson. Pavilion. 286pp.

Every so often the wheel is reinvented by people too young to recall its last reinvention. To them it’s invention, tout court, no prefix. Its discovery is a source of pride and self-congratulation: we are the generation that came up with this device that previous generations were incapable of summoning because they were too dull or torpid or were still marvelling at their ability to destroy the huts of the bastards in the lush valley by rubbing together flints that the bastards don’t have because there is no chalk down there for the flints to hide in. 

For wheel, substitute any one of the almost 100 dishes from France’s borderlands that chef Alex Jackson – formerly of Noble Rot in Soho, and now at Leila’s Shop in Shoreditch – presents in Frontières, a book that offers no resolution to the many questions it raises. The first of these concerns that wheel and its eternal return. Jackson is not yet 40 years old, but his taste, his precursors, his enthusiasms, his repertoire – what he elects to write about and, as importantly, what he ignores – are those of chefs (and this writer) at least 30 years his senior. 

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This essay is part of our supplement Too Many Cookbooks and is best read on our website here. To read the rest of the series, please click below:

Reinventing the Hexagon, by Jonathan Meades
Machiavelli in the Kitchen, by Rosa Lyster
‘There is no recipe, take it or leave it’, by Yemisí Aríbisálà
Cookbooks in Translation, by Guan Chua, Christie Dietz, Anissa …

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Bookstores are simply groaning with the proof that there is no law against anyone waking up one day and deciding to publish a recipe book, even if that seems like a strange or inappropriate thing for them to do. Still, when I first spotted Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble (1980) the perfectly titled cookbook by Anglo-Irish writer, socialite and tormented soul Caroline Blackwood, I thought at first it was a very niche and high-effort joke. It just didn’t fit with anything else she ever wrote or did. Blackwood, a glamorously unpredictable witch who’d been married to Lucian Freud and then to Robert Lowell, appeared to have no business publishing a jaunty little book that promises ‘stylish meals in seconds’, with an introduction that specifically addressed itself to harassed working mothers. Born into an enormously wealthy family and raised mainly by scary nannies, it was difficult to imagine Blackwood standing at a stove, or even knowing how to turn it on. Also, she was drunk all the time. That was one of the main things about her. When asked about their memories of Blackwood, many people who knew her seemed quite overcome by the impossibility of conveying the sort of squalor she lived in, her unmatched ability to trash a hotel room, her contempt for the concept of hygiene. Jenny Diski called her ‘a slut’s slut’ in the LRB once. Even the friends who really loved her make a point of remarking on how horrible she smelled. People like that don’t publish books containing recipes for ‘Saturday Salad’ or salmon mousse, do they?

Blackwood wrote vivid, unpleasant, much-admired novels in which food is a curse that people put on one another. In her work, meals are often a highly effective way of messing with someone, of creating resentment or indebtedness or plain old fear. In Great Granny Webster, for instance, a useless but well-meaning husband unwittingly torments his mad wife with dinner menus. Every morning, a footman comes and knocks at the insane wife’s bedroom door, and presents her with a list of possible dishes, written in French, as well as a list of potential wines. The idea is that she will thoughtfully go through this list and choose the menu for the day; the idea, in fact, is that the fulfilment of this duty is essential to her self-esteem, sanity, composure, etc, that this is an honour that means a great deal to her. But she is well past caring about stuff like this, if she was ever that sort of person at all – when presented with the lists, she hides or screams or scribbles everything out in crayon, but the useless husband keeps trying, apparently having no better ideas. The insane wife duly becomes more and more insane.

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You might feel so bombarded by cookbooks that think you’ve seen it all, but outside of this industry, there is another world full of odd, singular and brilliant cookbooks not written for English readers: everything from expensive, state-led projects and old, illustrated tomes to janky, home-published compendiums and even digitised oral histories. Despite the many attempts to do so, most of these cookbooks have not been meaningfully improved upon – if there was a Fitzcarraldo Editions for cookbooks, they would have a field day. So, for this compilation, we asked recipe writers, authors and experts to recommend a cookbook – either untranslated or not published outside of its country of origin. The cookbook world is even vaster than we think – we hope this compilation highlights cookbooks that deserve to be better known and brings them to a new audience.

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Pakistan
Khush Zaiqa, by Begum Bilquis Jehan Naseeruddin Khan (in Urdu)

Several years ago, while browsing through never-returned library books and stacks of Leninist literature in a secondhand book market in Karachi, I came across a spiral-bound book I’d never heard of before. I did not pay nearly enough money for it, because in fact Khush Zaiqa is an invaluable piece of Pakistani culinary history. It won an award at the Leipzig book fair, according to Elite Publishing, who first issued it in 1970 – but predictably, as often happens in Pakistan, it appears to have been forgotten. It is also the most beautiful cookbook I’ve ever seen, thanks to intricate illustrations by Otto Rauf Pederson and Aftab Zafar: fishes with elaborate gills and scales, fowl and peacocks, kebabs on a skewer with flames, mihrabs and mosque domes, a woman’s face with a tower of fruits, vegetables and a fish atop her head. It’s almost surreal that a cookbook published in Pakistan more than 50 years ago featured colour photography and food styling, and was produced with the care of an art book.

The book consists of an expansive list of recipes, from basics such as chapatis to complex dishes drawn from Bilquis Jehan’s roots in the former princely state of Hyderabad, such as shikampur kebab – minced meat kebabs that, in this recipe, include almonds, grated coconut, pistachios and poppy seeds. There is a recipe for aik degchi main char qism ki biryani, with prawns, mutton or lamb, potatoes and eggs, and for gil-e-firdous, or green pumpkin pudding. I’ve still yet to see it in any other bookstore, though it was reprinted once in English as Mughal Cuisine by a Malaysian publisher in 1982. It’s hard to think of something as good from the western world in English. Saba Imtiaz

Malaysia
Nonya Flavours: A Complete Guide to Penang Straits Chinese Cuisine, by Julie Wong & Debbie Teoh (Photography by Bonnie Yap)

Nonya recipe books rarely make it outside of Malaysia. They’re often viewed by western publishers as overly complicated to reproduce for other markets, full of recipes with notoriously long (and imprecise) ingredient lists. An added challenge is the ‘agak agak’ cooking style of the old guard – a term that means ‘to guesstimate’. However, veterans of the cuisine (such as my own Penangite godmother) are not guessing at all. Decades of experience mean they know exactly how many chillies they need in a spice paste just by looking at their variety and size. They know how much belachan to add just by smell and colour. While most of us season and taste our dish gradually as we go, my godmother's first taste of a dish is often the only one she needs to take – it is somehow already perfect. How does one codify this art and wisdom?

Nonya Flavours, widely regarded as the definitive cookbook of northern Malaysian Nonya cuisine, manages to do just this. It was first published in 2003 (with multiple reprints since) and was a joint publication by Penang’s State Chinese Association and The Star (Malaysia’s leading English-language newspaper). It brought together contributions from an all-star line up of Nonya chefs (including Debbie Teoh and Lee Su-Pei – two of Nonya cuisine’s most revered figures), the Association’s home cook members, as well as the editorial prowess of Julie Wong, one of Malaysia’s leading food journalists and an editor at The Star. The success of Nonya Flavours is a result of this truly collaborative approach – an intersection of both hall-of-fame and home-cook contributors, plus editorial expertise and meticulous recipe-testing work. The book is comprehensive yet concise, showcasing in detail how to reproduce everything from classics such as curry kapitan and kerabu salads to rarely seen dishes including perut ikan (pickled fish stomach and wild betel leaf curry) and stuffed intestines, without dumbing down one of the world’s most complex cuisines. In a publishing world that has increasingly favoured convenience and ‘made simple’ over substance and detail, this is the standard-bearer that Nonya cuisine needs and deserves. Guan Chua

Somalia
The Academy of Science and Arts’ Recordings

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This essay is part of our supplement Too Many Cookbooks. To read the rest of the series, please click below:

Reinventing the Hexagon, by Jonathan Meades
Machiavelli in the Kitchen, by Rosa Lyster
15 Cookbooks That Changed Everything, by Ruby Tandoh
Cookbooks in Translation, by Guan Chua, Christie Dietz, Anissa Helou, Ibrahim Hirsi, Saba Imtiaz, TW Lim, Lutivini Majanja, Meher Mirza, Marie Mitchell & Rachel Roddy.

I have always been a terrible recipe writer. When my book Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds was published in 2016, for months afterwards people wrote to me extensively about how the recipes in it had failed. In my defence, I wasn’t writing a cookbook, but a book about food in Nigeria, one of the most lucid windows into its culture, to talk about what is sacrosanct, taboo, vital – what we eat and why we eat. I concluded that although I had a good understanding of how food was woven into Nigerian life, I couldn’t translate recipes on to paper because I lacked some key skill (neither can I spell very well). But then again, I come from an environment where reticence – when it comes to recipes, and indeed  other topics – was part of the landscape hundreds of years before I arrived on the scene.

For five significant years when I was thinking about and writing my book, I lived in Calabar on the south-eastern coast of Nigeria – a lush city where there is cooking going on 24/7, a city full of lovers of pleasures but pretending not to be. Calabar, the capital city of Cross River State, is an excellent-enough example of non-stop cooking, but I suspect that to really meet the full-fat, interminable, slow-cooked meals that glorify that whole region – dishes like afang soup, ekpang nkukwo, and egome – you would have to travel inwards. Going north by road through small, Potemkin-towns like Akamkpa, Ogoja, Ugep, Yala, Okhanga-Mkpansi … on and on, just short of falling into neighbouring Cameroon. 

In Calabar, food is high calling plus seduction plus enterprise plus social mobility. There, you could never put anyone down for living in the kitchen – whether they were the hired help, the village Cinderella cooking as payment for being put up by a relative, or a long-suffering mistress competing with a Calabar man’s wife. The women of Calabar wear their gastronomic epaulettes with great arrogance, accumulating legendhood by cooking pots of palm oil-infused soups and pottages. One can imagine the kind of commitment to cooking that necessitates making your own palm oil in your backyard. These women become remarkably powerful in their communities in a way that reminds me of the celebrity cooks in London. It doesn’t directly translate, but it doesn’t have to. 

One such woman is Thelma Bello. Auntie Thelma is a powerhouse – the quintessential matriarch who catered every room of influence, fed every governor of the state since at least the early 90s. She walks with a stick, from a car accident in her twenties, not an old-age accessory. In all the years I knew her, I never heard Auntie Thelma raise her voice, something one would expect often from a personality who ‘womaned’ large kitchens. Hers was a great confidence, worn by a woman seemingly always holding her cards to her chest.

One of the first unforgettable dishes of Auntie Thelma’s cooking I tasted was her fisherman’s stew at Ths Le Chateau Thelpim Hotels in the early 2000s. You would place your order, then wait to collect it in a small, plain room containing a few tables and chairs, and gyrating ceiling fans, on one side of the hotel compound. The stew looked simple enough – different kinds of whatever white fish was available, and prawns sourced from the Atlantic a few miles out from the Calabar river, cooked in a red stew with palm oil and a sprinkling of ntong leaf and iko leaf. But there was something especially delicious about the stew’s mouthfeel. I felt it skate on the tongue, with an unusual, beautiful smoothness and velvety texture, like an intimate handshake. 

After months of spending a small fortune on containers of fisherman’s stew from her at lunchtime, I decided to ask Auntie Thelma for her recipe. I knew I needed to approach this tactically, having already experienced disdain from other elderly women from Calabar when asking for recipes. In Calabar, there would be a clear withdrawal when a request for methodology was made. For the record, I had already tried my hand at Auntie Thelma’s stew and failed to reproduce it. I had tried ‘everything’ – different ways of blending the peppers and tomatoes, different cooking times, different textures of fish, different points of adding the oil. The only time I came close to the original’s mouthfeel was when I added a rogue ingredient. With it, the stew was not exactly like Auntie Thelma’s own, not quite there, but close enough. 

How do I know it was a rogue ingredient without having a confirmed recipe? Because once before, I had slipped in the question to Auntie Thelma. 

‘Auntie Thelma, what is the recipe for your fisherman’s stew?’

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