Cookbooks

Everyone knows that Ian Fleming's James Bond books were long on sex, with an occasional good meal for a sensual variation. Len Deighton's novels tend to be the opposite. Throughout the suspense of the stories we are presented with all this great cooking! This isn't surprising considering Len Deighton was brought up in a restaurant environment (his mother was 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].
A revised and enlarged edition was reissued as Basic French Cooking

-- 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.

More recently LD has 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. 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" This book seems to be difficult to find now.