The Cookbook That Taught Me Life Is Worth Celebrating

Some cookbooks send you straight to the kitchen, others to the sofa, and a select few encourage you to hop between both. Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories is one of those books.

Think about it. Those Rene Redzepi tomes you ordered off Amazon after a particularly intense afternoon spent gulping down a whole season of Chef’s Table like warming ramen on a rainy day have never left the coffee table. And while you might have made its harissa chicken tray bake more times than you’d care to admit, you’ve never read Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients: Quick & Easy Food purely for pleasure.

The books that do both—and my own oil-spattered cannon includes Giorgio Locatelli’s Made in Italy: Food and Stories, A Year of Good Eating by Nigel Slater, Felicity Cloake’s Completely Perfect, Kay and James Salters’ cookbook-cum-miscellany Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days, and the ever-entertaining Elizabeth David’s stupendous collection of journalistic endeavours, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine—position cooking and eating somewhere between the domestic drudgery brought to mind after an enervating minute or two spent browsing in The Works (does the world really need 15 variations on The Keto Diet Made Easy, churned out for £2 a pop?) and the high art that the likes of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat want you to believe it is.

They make the act of cooking—and before that, the act of going out in search of the best ingredients you can afford to find—feel as accessible as it is enjoyable.

Twenty-five years ago, Simon Hopkinson swapped standing by the salamander grill at West London's Michelin-starred Bibendum for hunching over the hob at home, notebook in hand. Fifteen years ago, at the beginning of my culinary education, I pinched Hopkinson’s book from my dad’s bookshelves—shelves that erred more toward catching fish than cooking them.

I’ve written before about my youthful admiration for and adoration of the cookery world’s premiere pisshead, Keith Floyd, and while the squiffy old soak certainly did stir something within me, it was Hopkinson who made me want to actually get hands on in the kitchen.

An alphabetically ordered anthology that stretches from anchovies to veal via brains, grouse, and smoked haddock, Roast Chicken and Other Stories—which, it should be noted, was co-authored by the magisterial Lindsey Bareham who has published numerous other must-read/must-cook-froms since—is engaged, enthusiastic, and educational. In fact, when readers of Waitrose’s in-store magazine were asked to vote for “Most Useful Cookbook of All Time” in 2005, it was Simon, not Delia, Nigella, or Fanny who came out on top.

Useful it certainly is. The recipes in Roast Chicken are clear, concise, and enticing. In Hopkinson’s capable hands, dishes like braised rabbit with white wine shallots, rosemary, and cream, or callos a la madrilena (a traditional Spanish tripe recipe hailing from Madrid and featuring pigs trotters) seem just as achievable as a bread and butter pudding or gazpacho.

But it is more than just a useful cookbook. It is a globe-spanning romp through most of the major cuisines. It is a celebration of the food writers and long-forgotten chefs who fed a young Simon’s imagination, and in turn are proffered to us as paragons of how a life dedicated to food is a life worth not just living, but celebrating.

Roast Chicken is also a love letter to cooking and eating and the pleasure both things provide. Hopkinson writes about ingredients in the sort of hushed tones most of us save for private reminisces about past lovers. “There is nothing more luscious, more satisfying, more indulgent than a bowl of Jersey cream that has been untouched by pasteurisation,” he writes of, well, cream. The mere mention of kidney sends him into a reverie about lambs at spring and he notes with some relish and a hint of a smirk that it is at this time of year the kidneys are “at their sweetest and most tender…an infinitely finer thing than the lamb itself.”

He even makes spinach—spinach, for goodness sake—sound like the sort of thing that you feed on with gay abandon in heaven. To wit:

Spinach for dinner it is, then.

“The moment it came out, I was already a massive fan of Simon, and remember very fondly being taken to Bibendum," remembers Rochelle Canteen’s Margot Henderson. "Oh my god, the excitement was intense. He came out to our table carrying a beautiful rabbit pie, it was thrilling. Roast Chicken and Other Stories came out a regular fixture at all our menu meetings at The French House Dining Room. The menu was made up of many of Simon's recipes, everything just sang out at us.”

Henderson describes the impact Roast Chicken had on both professional and domestic kitchens as “massive,” noting that “any decent chef must have read it and that then filters down to punters.” For her, and many of the books numerous devotees, the joy of Roast Chicken lies in its simplicity—not every recipe is the sort of thing you’d want to knock up after a demanding day in the office, but they never seem beyond your grasp.

“He teaches us to be gentle, to leave things alone,” Henderson says. “To have confidence in the simpler dishes.”

Her husband, St. John’s nose-to-tail pioneer Fergus, nominated it as his favourite cookbook of all time as part of a series of features that ran in the Observer Food Monthly magazine in 2010, describing it as “a companion, a friend, a helper,” which to this writer’s mind, is what a good—no, great, cookbook should aspire to be.

Not everyone shares the Henderson household’s enthusiasm for Roast Chicken, however. One high profile food writer and cookbook author who prefers to remain anonymous told me that they think the sustained high profile of the book is down to the aforementioned Waitrose campaign. “Other books have had a much bigger impact on cooking in this country as a whole,” they say. “Jamie Oliver is the true game changer of the last 20 years.”

There is more than a grain of truth to that remark, but until Jamie Oliver manages to write anything half as compelling as any page, recipe, remark, anecdote, or memory in Roast Chicken and Other Stories, I’ll always side with Simon Hopkinson.