The title gives it away: In the Mood for Food offers a blueprint for cooking and eating according to the way you feel, be it lazy, in need of comfort, in a hurry, trying to be healthy, eager to impress, or romantic. The premise behind the book – that ‘a little bit of what you fancy does you good’ – is not particularly innovative in itself; other books have been organized in similar ways even if they have not specifically referred to mood. This book is, however, more enticingly seductive than most. The cover is unashamedly pink and girlie, and the author looks lovely, relaxed, unthreatening, the sort of person you would want to be friends with, pretty. The cover matches the contents: this book is the sort of book you feel comfortable with immediately: it has gorgeous-looking recipes but nothing particularly intimidating or esoteric, more the kind of food you would want to make every day, but with twists. I don't think it's the sort of book that would appeal to the very serious, studious foodie - there is no attempt to give a history of recipes or culinary traditions; there are no references to celebrated food writers of the past - this is a book that doesn't take itself seriously.
In the Mood for Food has a range of recipes, from extraordinarily simple (like the hot jam sandwich, which looks surprisingly tempting) to the impressive (black forest soufflés with cherry brandy); no recipe is prohibitively difficult. The book is beautifully presented and the photography is stunning.The ingredients are all easily sourced and no non-standard equipment is required - even someone with no experience or interest in cooking could easily cope. The introductions to each recipe are short and conversationally informal, more about mood and taste than about the food itself, with friendly asides that make you feel as though Jo is speaking directly to you.
The recipes don't belong to any particular culinary tradition; there are Asian-inspired dishes, Moroccan-style tagines and English afternoon tea cakes. These are twenty-first century recipes, borrowing from a range of cultures and traditions, and reflecting what thirty-somethings in the twenty-first century might want to eat, during the week and at weekends. There are healthy breakfasts (like cranberry and orange muffins and supervitality juice) and lunchbox ideas (including tuna, cannellini and lemon salad and Vietnamese chicken noodle salad), plus recipes for when you hit the kitchen running (sweetcorn and chilli pancakes, prawn and coconut satay broth); there are ideas for pushing the boat out and impressing your friends with a stylish dinner party (rack of lamb, fig, port and blue cheese salad, seafood paella) without breaking into a sweat. There are lots of quick pasta dishes, which is always a bonus for me because when I'm too tired to cook I always want pasta; there is comfort food (leek, dolcelatte and pancetta risotto, roasted balsamic onion and cherry tomato lasagnes) and romantic food (oysters, smoked duck, asparagus and fig salad, exotic chocolate cups). Finally there are plenty of sweet treats: white chocolate and Bailey's cheesecake, passionfruit and lime meringue pie, and so on.
I've tried a few recipes already and will be posting about these in the next few days. The proof of a cookbook's worth lies in the cooking it generates - or does it? Apparently on average people don't cook more than three recipes from any one cookbook; we are a nation of food porn viewers, lusting over cookbooks and television programmes about food, while speed-dialling the local takeaway or buying up the ready meal section of M and S. It follows that people buy cookbooks not to actually try out the recipes but to salivate over the images and to imagine themselves in domestic goddess-mode. Celebrity cookbooks sell mainly not for the recipes they offer but because they offer tantalising clues as to how to become - in the case of Nigella, for instance - a beautiful, intelligent domestic goddess or, in the case of Jamie, say, how to become incredibly successful while apparently tossing food together with intuition and personality. In this context, Jo Pratt, although less well-known than others, offers a very appealing package: dressed in feminine pinks and whites, she is presented in the book as an extremely pretty but friendly and unthreatening girl next door. Like Nigella's, her book seems to offer the tantalizing possibility of becoming like her or becoming her friend; like Nigella, she comes across as reassuringly human (admitting to lazy days, hangovers, and the like). We have to beware of buying into the characters that food writers adopt in their books: everyone believed that Nigel Slater, for instance, lived on creamy mashed potato and pies until we read The Kitchen Diaries, which show him to be the opposite of self-indulgent (I read that book and started to wonder if Nigel was eating enough!). I assume that Jamie isn't (always) the cheeky chappie that he appears in his books, and that Gordon isn't always mocking or angry. Jo may very well be far from the image that her book projects, but it has convinced me, anyway, that her life isn't so far from mine. She seems younger than Nigella, less life-beaten; Gordon Ramsay is quoted on the cover saying that her food is fun and lively. That is true - this is an upbeat book, that makes you want not to be a domestic goddess, but to enjoy yourself making modern and vibrant food, to indulge yourself sometimes, to show off other times, to be romantic, or lazy, or elegant, but taking pleasure in all of these different moods. The book looks very feminine; I keep thinking it is a sort of feminine version of Jamie's books. Some people would hate the pink cover, the recurring flower motif, the occasional cutesy image, but I am prepared to indulge my oft-hidden feminine side and enjoy it.
