Neel Mukherjee

If you think, like I do, that California is the food paradise on earth, then Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks is a site that will give you as much pleasure as the food you can get there. Forget ‘Chocolate and Zucchini’, forget ‘Les Recettes des Orangettes’. Beautifully written; gorgeously illustrated with photos but never edging towards the kind of food porn that we saw in, say, Jill Dupleix’s New Food; unpretentious recipes; clean, uncluttered thinking about food, ingredients, seasonality; a true globalised, democratic attitude towards eating that is light years away from both the provincialism haunting so much of cookery writing today and the willy-measuring curls-and-foams-and-froth-and-essence school of cooking; encapsulating an earthy, no-nonsense poetry … what more could a boy want? Look, and be conquered.