Cookbooks
While Ian Fleming's James Bond books were long on sex, with the
occasional good meal for sensual variation, Len Deighton's novels
tend to be the other way round. This is not really surprising since
LD was brought up with a restaurant background (his mother was once a
chef) and he writes about cooking professionally. His first
published culinary work seems to be the series of "cookstrips",
published weekly in The Observer in 1962-66. These were
subsequently collected (with other material) in two cookbooks:
- Ou est le garlic, [Penguin Books, London, 1965 / Harper &
Row, New York, 1977]. (This is the book that got me interested in cooking.)
A revised and enlarged edition was reissued as
Basic French Cooking, [Jonathan Cape, London, 1979]. A later
updated and revised version is now called
Basic French Cookery Course [HarperCollins, London, 1997].
- Action Cook Book, [Jonathan Cape, London, 1965]. Issued in
the US as Cookstrip Cookbook, [Bernard Geiss, New York, 1966].
Contains more basic information for the casual cook with less
emphasis on French cooking.
I have never seen another copy of this book except for my own
specially ordered (and now very battered) copy.
Decades later LD published a new cookbook:
- ABC of French Food, [Century Hutchinson, London, 1989 /
Bantam Books, New York, 1990]. A kind of notebook-dictionary on
French cooking. Somewhat more health-conscious than the earlier
books but robustly anti-nouvelle cuisine (thank God).
Quoting from the entry - "... cost-conscious restaurant executives
all over the world love nouvelle cuisine, and cling
tenaciously to it, for it is in effect portion control plus hype."
Perhaps that's why this book seems to be difficult to find now.
The (excellent) Creative Cuisine: Chef's Secrets from the Savoy
[Pavilion, London, 1993], by Anton Edelmann is listed under
Len Deighton by Amazon and some other
on-line sources. However, LD's contribution is limited to a
one-page foreword.
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tomlin@linus.socs.uts.edu.au / Last modified: 20 Feb 2001