Bibliocook: All About Food

With the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony taking place today, enigmatic China is at the center of attention. Fuchsia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper uses food and cooking to successfully delve beneath the surface.

Chef and cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop's memoir of her time cooking and eating in China is an enthralling read. In 1994, at a time when China was still very closed off from the outside world, this young Englishwoman moved to Chengdu, in the Sichuan province. Ostensibly, Fuchsia was there to study the Chinese policy on ethnic minorities but food was a strong motivating factor – as she filled out her application form, it was with the Chinese sugarplums of chilli bean sauce, Sichuan pepper and frilly pig's kidneys dancing in her head. Despite Fuchsia's early disorientation, she plunged into life in Chengdu, learning the language and finding her way through the bold and interesting flavours of Sichuan food. Before long, she was taking lessons at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine and was subsequently invited to join a three-month professional chef's training course – an unprecedented invitation for a Westerner.

Shark's Fin... traces Fuchsia's passionate love affair with Chinese food, in all its tastes and textures, colours and complexity. As she recounts the details of her training, after which she wrote her award-winning Sichuan Cookery book, she also travels the country, experiencing different foods and cultures. For many in the West, China – and Chinese food – is often just an amorphous mass, all of one piece, but Fuchsia brings the different regions of China into sharp relief, although this reader could have done with a slightly more detailed map. She eats absolutely everything (poisonous snake and hairy crab, two of the “three headed” feast of Yangzhou and pig's brains), discusses the Chinese love of MSG (“the cook's cocaine”), investigates the region where Sichuan pepper comes from and also notes that Ferran Adrià gave credit to Chinese gastronomy for forging a path that is now being exploited in his El Bulli restaurant in Spain, as he plays – in a very Chinese way – with “form and mouthfeel.”

To write her second book, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, Fuchsia lived in Hunan during the fear and paranoia of the SARS virus, a long way from her relaxed days in Sichuan. From this point onwards, the tone of Shark's Fin... becomes similarly dark, as she struggles with her own identity – Chinese or British? – and starts to lose her omnivorous appetite, wondering if she should become vegetarian. Happily, an encounter with a stray caterpillar on a plate of vegetables at home in Oxford helped her to clarify her thinking.

With interest in China at an all-time high for the Olympics, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper is an insight into the country and the people, as well as its food. And it certainly has inspired me – with the Husband's Sister and Brother-in-Law currently studying in Xinjiang province, a trip over there may be on the cards at some stage in the not-so-distant future.

Not long after food blogging first cropped up on my radar, I discovered Julie Powell's blog, the Julie/Julia Project. I thought the idea was great - to document her attempts to cook the recipes in Julia Child's classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just one year - but I didn't much like Julie's blog persona and I never went back. How times change. A couple of years later, I couldn't put down the book that she wrote, much of which was taken directly from her the same blog entries that had annoyed me.

While the episodic nature of her adventures in cooking and the concomitant tears and tantrums was - to me, at least, if not to many of her numerous 'bleeders' (Julie's name for her blog readers) - more exasperating than not, her book is far more entertaining than just the sum of its parts. Through her blog, Julie developed her own, very distinctive, voice and her account of the 365 days she spent cooking 524 recipes in her small apartment kitchen has also changed her life.

When Julie started the project she was miserable, an anonymous temp in a New York government office. Twelve months later, having, along the way, learned how to split marrow bones, kill lobsters without a second thought and cooked for New York Times restaurant critic Amanda Hesser, she was an online celebrity with a book deal. It's an online Cinderella story of the kind dreamed about by anyone who has ever wanted to turn their passion into a job and, for that alone, Julie has to be applauded. She's also deserving of acclaim for writing such a funny, exasperating and enjoyable book. Julie & Julia is well worth investing both money and time in.

Julie & Julia by Julie Powell is published by Fig Tree.

While the internet has undoubtedly simplified the matter of finding holiday accommodation, it's never at hand (unless, of course, you've got your portable internet device nearby) when you're on the road, looking for a decent bite to eat and somewhere to stay at short notice. Situations like these that make you thankful for having a guide book into the glove-box of your car and Georgina Campbell's guides to Ireland are useful tomes for such eventualities.

Ms Campbell's latest publication, The Best of The Best is described by her publishers as being "for the more discerning traveller and diner". Like the Bridgestone Guides, the selections in Campbell's guides are based on merit alone rather than the establishments actually paying for inclusion.

With useful maps aplenty to assist your navigation, Campbell informs readers of the finest restaurants, accommodation, pubs and cafés throughout the country. It is more comprehensive and less idiosyncratic than the Bridgestone Guides but there are still enough mouth-watering accounts of dinners and breakfasts enjoyed to keep even the most rampant foodie happy.

With places to stay and eat in every price range, you can easily avoid greasy garage shops and unwelcoming B&Bs while traveling around Ireland by keeping The Best of The Best and the Bridgestone Guides in your glove-box. You know it's worth it.

Georgina Campbell's Ireland: The Best of The Best is published by Epicure Press.

With 15 years of eating and sleeping the length and breadth of the country in a tireless quest for the best of the best, John and Sally McKenna have it down to a fine art. This year's editions of The Bridgestone 100 Best Restaurants and The Bridgestone 100 Best Places to Stay are as wonderfully opinionated and idiosyncratic as ever. And also, very importantly, they are independent. The McKennas and their travelling editors pay for their own meals and accommodation, refusing - as they note at the start of each book - any offers of discounts or gifts.

In the introduction of the Best Restaurants there's a clear declaration of intent when the McKennas talk about "facsimile food, served in grand rooms where menus read well, and then eat badly because they are trapped in pretentiousness, or some crazy idea called "fine dining", a concept, which as far as we can see, is just petit-bourgeois." There's a similar air about the introduction to Best Places To Stay, with an attack on "4-star joints that sit high on the top of a hill, without a tree in sight…lavishly tarmacadamed up to the door with a brightly lit fountain that doesn't work, inappropriate decking beside the heli-pad, and PVC windows".

The most expensive places - for eating or staying - aren't necessarily the most praised. I would have to agree with the McKennas when they say that "you discover value when you discover the work of talented people who are passionate about what they do and who do it in an original way." Sometimes it's better to have one amazing, if expensive, meal in a month than eat your lunch out five days a week in one of Dublin's rubbish cafés. There are bank-breakers in both these books - a penthouse at the Clarence is €2,500, the hotel described here merely as a "work in progress", and a night out at L'Ecrivain is never going to come cheaply. But there are other price options too. Grove House in Schull is €80 per room in low season, and Donegal's wonderfully relaxing Coxtown Manor does very reasonably priced gourmet breaks while many of the venues mentioned also have early bird menus.

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Although cursed with an uninviting cover, Last Chance to Eat, with its investigations into the history and eating of a variety of foodstuffs, is a fascinating read for anyone with even the barest interest in food. For foodies, it should be essential.

Toronto-based Gina Mallet uses her particular memories - a post-WWII childhood in egg-less Britain, life in a Connecticut fishing village, dates at a New York steakhouse - to expand on the universal food issues. The daughter of a food-loving Englishman and his free-spirited American wife, she quotes from obscure experts and modern scientists in her quest to discover where the good food came from - and where it has disappeared to.

Using her evocatively sensual descriptions of food from the past as a counterpoint, she picks her way through the nutritional minefield of the present, exploring the issues of raw milk cheese, the importance of the egg in cooking, BSE scares, the demise of vegetable and fruit varieties, and exploring the vagaries of the fishing industry.

Erudite and entertaining, Last Chance to Eat is a thought provoking read.

Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World by Gina Mallet is published by Norton

When I was a little one, with a voracious appetite for books and cooking, one of the books that I devoured was my Nana's well-used copy of Full and Plenty by Maura Laverty. The distinctive blue and yellow covers contained a treasury of old Irish recipes but the icing on the cake for me were the stories with which Laverty started each chapter. The woman whose fine soda bread was more praised by her future daughter-in-law than her smug neighbours cake, the boiled onions that effected a marriage, looking for cuppeen and platter mushrooms in the early morning - these were all well-loved and frequently read tales of old Ireland. After a long and fruitless search through second-hand bookshops and charity shops I eventually found a copy of Full and Plenty over the internet and it now sits proudly on my cookbook shelf alongside many more recent books.

But it took a New Zealand author to let me know that Laverty had actually written more than a cookbook. I had been reading my way through my copy of Christine Dann's A Cottage Garden Cook Book - Recipes from a New Zealand Garden when I came across a stray remark about Laverty's other books. That was enough to send me looking in the library which, wonder of wonders, stocks her first novel - originally published in 1942.

Set in the Ireland of the 1920s, Never No More is the story of a young girl and her relationship with her beloved Grandmother. They live in an old farmhouse outside the village of Ballyderrig in County Kildare and the book is full of tales of and from the Irish countryside - the cutting of the turf, weddings and wakes, the solemn ritual of pig slaughter, family nicknames and stories of possession. Laverty has a wonderful grasp of the texture of country life and great powers of description. As with Full and Plenty, food plays a great part in Never No More and the book is packed full of mouth-watering images.

"White bread, brown bread, Indian meal bread and bran loaves. Short cakes, butter cakes and scones of all kinds. She made seedy cakes and Sunday cakes and prune cakes. And an enormous rich fruit cake with a whole glass of brandy in it. My arms ached from beating the dozen eggs that went into the cake, and from cleaning and preparing the pounds of currants and raisins and candied peel and nuts. She made apple cakes and Carrigeen shapes and flummery and jellies, and Mike Brophy carried over to Nolans' a big basket of Grandmother's famous preserves - haw-and-apple jelly, sloe jelly, blackberry jam and damson jam and a half-dozen bottles of spicy mushroom ketchup to add piquancy to the cold meats. "

With an original glowing introduction by Sean O'Faolain, a later one by Maeve Binchy as well as a quote from an imprisoned Brendan Behan, Never No More is an unexpected treasure. Binchy is also kind enough to fill in the biographical gaps between my much-loved Full and Plenty and Laverty's other work. As well as writing a handful of cookbooks, another three novels and a pair of children's books, she worked as a newspaper journalist, a radio agony aunt and wrote the scripts of a legendary Irish television series from the 1960s called Tolka Row.

Despite all her achievements, in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland Maura Laverty seems to have been all but forgotten. We're too busy celebrating new imported cultures and foodstuffs to appreciate the native bounty that still surrounds us. It might be difficult to get your hands on a copy of Full and Plenty but her novels are still in print, courtesy of Virago Modern Classics, and they're well worth searching for.

Unlike many foodie memoirs that add recipes on to the end of each chapter, Amanda Hesser - a New York Times writer - actually understands the many meanings of food. Cooking for Mr Latte, subtitled A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes, incorporates food as seduction and comfort, a means of binding together families at difficult times and celebrating the good occasions.

Ostensibly a diary of her relationship with a certain Mr Latte - aka New Yorker journalist Tad Friend - from first date through courtship, meeting each other's families and friends, to engagement and marriage, Hesse weaves food into the warp and weft of this book in a most intelligent way. The recipes that you end up with are not so much a collection of dishes as a journey through her life. While the story of the romance is flimsy enough, what enlivens the book and gives it substance are the recipes. It's the opposite of Nigella Lawson's Feast, not least that Cooking for Mr Latte only contains a handful of recipes while Feast is choc-full of them. While Hesser's interest in food makes this book interesting, the story of Lawson's life - and the reader's awareness of it - infuses the recipes in Feast with meanings far beyond that of a normal cookery book.

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