What's all this fuss about cooks and chefs? The how-to-cook sections of bookshops are as big as the how-to-be-successful-in-life sections; it's no longer clear where one ends and the other begins. Many of the books sell themselves not so much as sources of practical information - how to make a wild mushroom risotto - but as windows onto both the skills and the emotional life of a celebrity cook. Not just how to cook a mushroom risotto like Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson or Gordon Ramsay or Anthony Bourdain, but what it's like to be Jamie or Nigella or Gordon or Tony: Happy Days with the Naked Chef, How to be a Domestic Goddess, In the Heat of the Kitchen, Kitchen Confidential. And then - as if we need to know still more - there are the biographies: first, of past celebrity chefs (Escoffier and Carême), then of recent martyrs to perfectionism (Bernard Loiseau: two biographies), and now of domestic cooks or commercial chefs who've been on television or written a bestseller: Jamie (two), Gordon, Nigella, the clownish American TV chef Emeril Lagasse, Julia Child, Elizabeth David, Irma Rombauer (compiler of the American suburban kitchen bible, The Joy of Cooking), and even Delia.

LRB 17 August 2006 | PDF Download