The Silver Spoon
£24.95, Phaidon
The raddled, old cliché about the route to a bloke’s heart being
through his gut is so hardwired into our collective brain-banks we never think
of turning it on its head and asking if the belly leads to a lady’s love
muscle. Most of the women I know are foodie fascists who wouldn’t touch
a guy who didn’t know what to do in the kitchen because as a friend says: “They’re
not gonna be much kop in bed, are they?” Quite. So if the kitchen is
just the place where you keep the beer and Marmite then you’ll need a
decent cookbook as a jumping-off point into the unknown and you could do worse
than this hefty tome.
Fifty years ago Domus, an Italian architectural magazine, commissioned a team
of cookery experts to travel across Italy. Their mission was to harvest traditional
recipes from different regions for the ultimate comprehensive cookbook. The
result of this undertaking was Il Cucchiaio d’Argento (The Silver Spoon).
Long considered a classic in its homeland, this cookbook has never been available
in English, until now. At more than 1000 pages detailing some 2000 dishes,
this could have become an unwieldy beast of a book but navigation is made easy
because the recipes are grouped into colour-coded categories, such as, vegetables,
pasta, risotto and meat, with a fact index so you’d have to be as culinary
unclued-up as Big Brother’s Glyn not to find what you’re looking
for. For novices and seasoned cooks alike, The Silver Spoon, like a good meal,
ticks all the right boxes and leaves you pleasantly satisfied. More importantly,
it guarantees to get you laid.
Terrorist
John Updike
£17.99, Penguin
In this extraordinary and highly-charged new novel, John Updike tackles one
of our culture’s most pressing and scariest issues: the threat of Islamist
terror from within. Set in contemporary New Jersey, Terrorist traces the journey
of one young man, Ahmad, from radicalism to fundamentalism to terrorism, against
the backdrop of a fraying, unravelling urban landscape and an increasingly
fragmented community. Using beautiful prose, Updike dramatises the logic of
the fundamentalist terrorist, but also suggests ways in which we can counter
it, in our words and our actions, which sounds like a dry diatribe against
Western society but he genuinely manages to avoid simplistic us-and-them arguments
and actually conveys something new and quietly measured.
The novel’s title is literal, but the book’s aftertaste is the
profound sense that we all terrorise each other in strange, quotidian ways;
with our cynicism, infidelity, bitterness, with our bullying, the betrayal
of our ideals, our weakness, greed and licentiousness. We do so, in short,
by living. In Ahmad’s sad and warped sensibility, his muted, uncluttered
confidence, Updike confronts us with judgment day. Ahmad and his disgust with
who we are creeps into our consciences like moisture into wall cracks. Prescient
to the point of pain, this novel may not be an easy read but it’s worth
the elbow grease.
Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?
Steve Lowe & Alan McArthur
£
9.99, Time Warner
I’m a firm advocate of gun control. Not because I believe guns to be
inherently evil things that should be melted down and turned into designer
candle-holders for underprivileged children of Third World lesbian separatists.
No, it’s simply without Britain’s restrictive policies on lethal
weapon ownership, I’d be writing this from a prison cell, serving multiple
life sentences for the slaughter of several bank managers, numerous receptionists,
dozens of traffic wardens, hundreds of charity canvassers, all babies, a sprinkling
of old age pensioners, most teenagers as well as assorted celebrities. Yes,
I suffer from a condition called Life Rage, which you only have to take a cursory
scan around to realise these days is more common than a cold. If you’re
a fellow miserable curmudgeon, this is the book for you.
Its authors, Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur, met at Cardiff Uni where they bonded
over their mutual hatred of, er… well, everything really and Is It Just
Me…? is the culmination of the fruits of their disliking labour as they
run down the alphabet of their naggingly annoying pet-hates. A hilariously
caustic compilation, it lampoons everything from The Daily Mail to Kate Moss
and sleb-slag mags (‘She’s too FAT!’ ‘Wait she’s
too SKINNY!’ ‘She’s so utterly FANTASTIC it’s not true’ ‘No,
she’s a SLAPPER! With sweat-patches!’ For fuck’s sake, at
least make your minds up.) Surprisingly well-realised, this is a perfect on-the-karsie
read so you can vent your spleen on the crappiness of contemporary life as
you expel yours.
Read all the latest book reviews in the current issue of RedHanded.
Jason Jones cooks the books