Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many

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To make the pastry, put the cold butter, the flour, sugar and a pinch of salt into the bowl of a food processor and render to a fine crumb. But has traveled and cooked widely, citing influences from cooks in many places and generously, happily folding them into his repertoire. I have often thought about a copper mould for making this lovely dish, as pleasing to look at as it is to eat. At the restaurant, we like to spread marmalade on a tart case, dot with frangipane, then strew with chocolate and bake. A chapter on blood oranges sits between Biscuits and Breadcrumbs, while Impromptu Dinners provides meals (such as a perfect pork chop and pan juices) that can be made for one or scaled up; and there are simple, joyous meals to feed a crowd (little meatballs, or fennel and lemon spaghetti).

He is a chef in the same lineage as Alistair Little, Rowley Leigh, Fergus Henderson etc; interested in ingredients first and foremost and not swayed by food trends.As anyone who has seen him laugh and charm his way through the room at Quo Vadis would expect, Lee is as generous in prose as he is when talking about the book, heaping praise on the close team who helped bring it all together. The book is arranged with a chef’s eye for ingredients, and favourite things to eat throughout the seasons, rather than in courses or meals. Echoes of Richard Bawden’s work for Fortnum and Masons and certainly a spine that you can easily pick out on a bookshelf. The pressures of writing daily menus and working in a busy kitchen meant that structuring a whole book seemed overwhelming. In 2012 Jeremy and Quo Vadis won the Catey for Best Restaurant Menu of the Year and in 2013 they won the Tatler Award for Best Kitchen.

Those spoilt types, like me, who are fortunate enough to eat occasionally at Quo Vadis will turn immediately to pies (“even the planet must have a crust”), knowing that no one on Earth makes a better one, before checking the index (I’ll save you the bother: it’s pages 144-5) for Lee’s smoked eel sandwich, for my money the greatest thing to appear on any menu (or cookbook page) since, yup, sliced bread. Remove the cake from the oven, press down lightly with a frying pan one last time, then let sit for 5 minutes. While the pork chop is cooking, grind the garlic, lemon zest, thyme and rosemary with the fennel and celery seeds in a pestle and mortar and set aside. This is British mostly hearty and comforting food and will definitely go on my ‘to cook from’ shelf rather than the reading shelf or worse the re-gifting shelf!

Anybody who has seen Jeremy Lee judge on the Great British Menu, or on one of his other rare TV appearances will know him to be a great raconteur, in addition to being a great cook. The book, Cooking: Simply And Well, For One or Many, was the result of many years of work, on and off, and he wasn’t quite ready to face its reality.

I'm giving it 5 stars because it's not the book that I'm complaining about, but the packaging material. A wider, shallower cake shaped and cooked in a cast-iron skillet or frying pan is as delicious as those cooked in hatted moulds. An inspiring collection of recipes and musings that have me wanting to cook every recipe and hang off every word! Repeat with another layer of potato, continuing thus, adding butter, salt and black pepper as you go. I had several such soup spoons, heavy EPNS jobs, knocking around at home - relics of long lost cutlery sets I imagine - so I use them when I am cooking one of these recipes.

Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). Place the tart on a wire rack over a tray to catch any butter that may fall from the tart while baking. Not only is Cooking the most beautiful cookery book in living memory (with illustrations by the great John Broadley), but it is also that very rare thing: a book, both magisterial and friendly, that immediately feels like it has always been a part of your life, even though it’s brand-new.