What Makes a Good Cookery Book?

Mentioning yesterday Anna del Conte's book The Classic Food of Northern Italy got me thinking about what actually makes a good cookery book. 

I have a bad feeling that photography is for many a decisive factor. The bookshops are full of glossy tomes illustrated with images that make the mouth water. But having once looked at the sexy pictures, do people cook from these books? Do they learn anything from them other than how a finished dish, well lit, oiled to glisten, on carefully chosen crockery and perched on perfect furniture, will look? Or do they go to restaurants where such ideally plated dishes can be obtained?

A few years ago I wrote a piece for Lovefood about cookbooks I wouldn't be without. It was easy to choose most of them, as I just went to the shelves and selected the most beaten up, sauce stained, fat splashed volumes. Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book, Alan Davidson's North Atlantic Seafood, Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cookery and HFW's work on meat caught the attention first. Backs broken or even missing; dog-eared pages; forgotten bookmarks poking out; the occasional loose page. The first three of those books have at most pencil drawings; the fourth has some good images, but is text heavy. So I want text.

Food, and food writing, should also at its best and most worthwhile be an exploration of cultures. Davidson and David both do that with great learning, one focusing on a single country (but several cuisines and cultures); the other covering pretty much every country with an Atlantic coastline. As a read David's book is hard to better, full of anecdote, history and literary links, the fruit of half a lifetime's experience. I want to be entertained and educated by a good food book. I want it to be so packed with information that new discoveries are made - noticed - every time the pages are dipped into.

It may seem high falutin', but a bit of philosophical reflection doesn't go amiss either. So HFW scores highly - all his work explores morality and ethics around food, no bad thing. 

Of course, they should also make me want to cook and eat. I still return to all four of those volumes (less so the meat one, given The Dear Leader's (hail the Dear Leader) meatless diet now) for inspiration and for guidance. 

In the end, I guess, a good food book is one that endures - not a beginner's guide to some fad; not all teeth and no knickers as my late mother would have said (I am thinking of two celebrity cooks/chefs when writing those words, one male, one female). They should be destined for the bedside table and the kitchen table, not the coffee table.