Hidden London: Books for Cooks
Books for Cooks. Sharper readers may already have cottoned onto what this shop sells. It’s found in the perfect part of Notting Hill, Blenheim Crescent, just above the hucksters of lower Portobello Road but below the butchers and rag shops of the upper reaches.
It opened here in 1983, across the road from where it is now, smaller but equally implausible: Britain in the early Eighties was not a golden age for home cooks. Which is why, really, Heidi Lascelles got going in the first place. On the hunt for German recipes, she discovered cookery books of any kind were hard to find. They existed — beautifully written but hit-and-miss ideas from Elizabeth David, more reliable pages from Jane Grigson — but many offered only instructions; no cultural context, no nutritional information.
A nurse by training, Lascelles thought something might be done. So she did it. Cookbooks from across the globe were collected and put on display; when chefs and curious home cooks came and requested something, Lascelles would buy it in. The improbable idea became probable enough that new premises were required, and soon she moved over the road here, to number four.
It looked then much as it does now: red-painted frontage, sweet awning. In good weather, a table and chairs are put out. By the door, a handwritten note reads “No food or drink, please”. Of course not, they have enough of that bound between covers on the shelves. On that sweet awning it reads “The shop for all cooks”. They are not crowing; is every currently published book on eating and drinking in here? Perhaps. The shop is divvied into halves, one side for subject, the other for country. They allege 8,000 or so titles on the shelves, but it seems a modest count. There are guides to the big things — steak, fish, pies; Italian and French — and those for the more esoterically minded. Do you require 75 recipes promising to get “the most out of oil and vinegar in your kitchen”? For £20, Ursula Ferrigno may change your life.
TV chefs are mostly sidestepped, on the grounds that their books are on sale everywhere else. But food, it turns out, is a subject that can be approached from almost angle. Thirty-odd years after Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes were first published, now arrives Castle Rock Kitchen: “Wicked good recipes from the world of Stephen King.” Disappointingly, the cover shows a lobster that’s got on the wrong side of a meat mallet, rather than, say, a paté en croute that looks like Pennywise, or a chef wielding a cleaver and gurning “Here’s Johnny!” Elsewhere is an entire tome dedicated solely to einkorn, “the World’s Purest and Most Ancient Form of Wheat”. And thank God. Who hasn’t sat in the pub pining for an einkorn bible? We don’t want any of that spelt rubbish.
It’s not all new stuff. Hiding among the hoards are classics and oddities, things for the collector. There is, for instance, a copy of Marika Hanbury’s Magimix Cookery, published the year before this place opened. Four hundred new recipes, no less. That’s a lot of smoothies. In this way, Books for Cooks is not just a catalogue of recipes, but of different tastes and fashions. Of different times.
Recipes sometimes have a way of lying that we recognise; we know instinctively that half an hour isn’t long enough, or that 100g is too little, no matter what a publisher insists. And so, in 1988, Lascelles put in a small kitchen with café seating at the back of the shop. The idea was neat: chefs would cook recipes from the books on the shelf, giving shoppers the very essence of try-before-you-buy. This allows the owners to know the books to suggest, push, to trust in. It allows buyers to see what suits their taste. It also means the place is one of salivating smells. Service is from midday; queues begin to collect around half 11.
Food of love
Lascelles left the business in 2001, but had been involved only from a distance for some time. In 1992, Rosie Kindersley wandered in as a customer but soon was working under newly sober Clarissa Dickson-Wright, not yet one of the Two Fat Ladies. Then, in 1993, a stylish Frenchman came in, Eric Treuille. He kept coming back, mostly just to see Rosie, and the pair married. They still run the place, and now own it too.
Food is offered four days a week, and always in three courses. Everyone pays just £8. These are undoubtedly the best value meals in London
Treuille picks the recipe each morning, and buys his ingredients from market nearby. That small kitchen is his domain, fitted out with a domestic oven, stove and fridge, so his meals give an accurate idea of what one might actually achieve at home (his dishwasher, he jokes, is rather bigger than is usual). Food is offered four days a week, and always in three courses: Tuesdays are vegetarian, Fridays are for fish, and in between anything is fair game. There are no bookings, no menu substitutions, no bending to dietaries. Tables are shared. Forty people come, and everyone pays just £8. These are undoubtedly the best value meals in London. Conveniently, if this is your bag, there is a cigar cabinet to buy from on the way out; lunch can be concluded with a smoke and a walk elsewhere.
Treuille’s life of recipes means he knows what to do with almost anything; ask and he will have a solution somewhere on the shelves. And if not, he or Kindersley will search until they find one, and then order it in. The pair work in words; conversation is part of the gig. They like to talk, to share. To break bread, as it were. They do books for cooks here. But they also do inspiration.
4 Blenheim Crescent, W11 1NN, booksforcooks.com
