Len Deighton on Seasonal Food

I was very pleased the other day to unearth 'my' two Len Deighton cookbooks. Not just because they were pretty much my introduction to cooking (my dad gave them to me when I left home for University), but also because the Action Cook Book has the best cover of any cookery book. I used to call it Cooking For Spies. Front:



and back:



The books were published in 1965 and, recipes aside, they are great examples of past attitudes to food and witness to the fact that we haven't really moved on in our national food debate since the 1960s. As well as this (hopefully outdated) warning about some people's attitude towards garlic -

Controversial as a flavouring element, although I can hardly imagine life without it. [...] Don't put pieces of garlic into a dish unless you either crush them thoroughly or fry the garlic in oil and then remove it. People who don't like garlic will go out of their minds if they get pieces in their mouths

- we have a foreshadowing of our current anxieties around chickens:

Each onslaught of mechanized farming and agriculture brings us a step nearer to being battery hens ourselves. Where is the restaurant that serves a fine free-range chicken full of its own flavour, with just a background of freshly picked herbs?

But most relevant to the blog here is a short passage on seasonality (just before a really helpful list of what's in season when - the list of game birds is super!), which again shows that there's nothing new in the current generation of celebrity cooks calling for us to eat more seasonally:

Every month the seasons disappear, for more and more foods are available permanently. I have therefore listed the seasons for the cook with a certain amount of trepidation. City-dwellers - never over-conscious of the natural cycle of the seasons - will soon lose their last point of reference: the food shop.

I'll be having a proper re-read of Où est le garlic and Action Cook Book soon. And I'll always be thankful to the books which explained to a complete novice how to chop onions and garlic, how to make a roux and loads of other basics.