At the risk of sounding like a terrible journalist, late last year culinary icon Nigella Lawson shared her favourite cookbook with me, and I’ve been – as the Gen Zs say – gatekeeping the information ever since.
Sat in a cosy corner of an east London home (not Nigella’s), where we were about to have lunch in celebration of her collaboration with online supermarket Ocado, I asked the clumsy question: “What’s your most treasured cookbook, if you had to choose one? I know that’s a difficult question – but which is your most battered?”
The answer was an out-of-print tome I’d never come across, and now that I have my hands on a copy, I feel I can share what Lawson told me.
“It is difficult to say, but there’s a book I read very early on – before I even thought I’d become a food writer – which is Anna Del Conte’s Entertaining All’Italiana, which is no longer in print.
“A lot of it’s compiled, all the recipes. She’s erudite and has a wonderful mind and a rather dry, almost acerbic wit. But at the same time she’s so practical.
“She was the first person I read who always said how far you could cook things ahead of time and wrote about leftovers – and I learnt from that. Part of writing a recipe is saying what the leftovers can be like.
“There’re so many books I really treasure, but that one goes way back and I adore her.”
After scouring the internet for a good copy for some time, I can report that eBay and Amazon currently have some second-hand versions of the esteemed 98-year-old food writer Del Conte’s book for upwards of £21.18, or Abe Books has copies from between £23.27 and £258.55. Good luck.
