I grew up at a time of optimistic socialism, when I believed, probably very innocently, that politicians had the goodness of the world at heart. Then you see the actions of the politicians over the last few years and you see that actually they don't. George Bush doesn't have the goodness of the world at heart and yet this man is rampant in the world. Or what happened in Rwanda, how can that be accommodated within a sense that there's an essential human goodness?"'Clay' is published by Hodder (£10.99) To buy a copy for £9.99 (free p&p), contact Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897. Truman Capote rejected his first attempt at a novel, Summer Crossing, judging it "thin, clever, unfelt". But in some ways the main character, Grady McNeil, prefigures Capote's most captivating creation, Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's - though 17-year-old McNeil is a privileged "Park Avenue Princess" rather than a penniless provincial.
The McNeils live in a grandiose apartment and, as the novella opens, Mr and Mrs McNeil are preparing to take their berth in a cruise ship to Europe (the "summer crossing" of the title). Their daughter Grady has refused to go along, even with the promise of a couturier fitting in Paris Left alone in the city, Grady gets up to no end of trouble.. Food, like gardening, like interior decorating, has joined football and pop music in the new world order of popular culture, packaged by corporations, disseminated by television, differentiated by celebrities It's a big business. Jamie Oliver is on our screens, geezering his way up Italy, and the associated volume, Jamie's Great Escape, will be among the bestsellers til Christmas, discounted in great piles by the supermarket checkout. There may be little proof that more than one person in 20 ever cooks a single recipe, but that's only a small part of what you get from a Jamie cook book. A copy in your kitchenidentifies you as unpretentious, fond of decent nosh, family-minded and, since the spectacular success of School Dinners (wasn't he effing brilliant?), socially responsible and politically engaged.
Sorted! Don't get me wrong: I think Jamie Oliver is an highly accomplished chef with a rare gift for communication, and his recipes are excellent But cook books are not only about food. To buy one, or to write one, can be to acquire a new image of oneself. "Cook books and the transformation of British food": the subtitle of Nicola Humble's entertaining history would be misleading if you took it to imply agency to the cookbooks. British food has indeed been transformed since Mrs Beeton's Household Management first appeared in 1861, but as this volume shows, there's little evidence of direct causation, except among the still-small group of amateur and professional enthusiasts. Greater forces than even the Naked Chef shape what the majority of the country buys and cooks: trade, for example (hard US and Canadian wheat transformed British breadmaking in the mid-19th century), technology (refrigerated ships first brought cheap New Zealand lamb and butter to the UK in 1880), war (both world wars brought food rationing, with major improvements in the population's health and disastrous effects on farming), disposable income (the economic booms of the 1950s and 1980s both fuelled new influential restaurant cultures: Italian, Indian, Thai and tapas), patterns of employment (more women with jobs relied on "convenience" foods to feed their families at speed, hence the popularity of pasta) and fear (the successive crises of salmonella, BSE and foot and mouth caused the 1990s' stampede towards organic produce). Newspapers, magazines, television and advertising are greater influences than the single cook book.But if they are more often in the wake of changes in the national diet than in the vanguard, what cook books can provide for the historian is an unconscious snapshot of social realities, aspirations and anxieties. Nicola Humble is an English academic and the skills which she brought to her last book, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s, serve her well. Its own subtitle, "Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism", also marks out the areas of interest in her current work, especially the changing roles of women, notably in her account of Mrs Beeton's great work.