Yotam ottolenghi

Lockdown creations: the best of the year’s cookery books reviewed

‘I may, one day, stop making notes and writing down recipes,’ Nigel Slater says in A Cook’s Book (Fourth Estate, £30). Please don’t. This is his 16th book and his writing feels as fresh as it ever did. I remember cutting out his recipes from Elle Magazine three decades ago, and I do not believe he has ever put pen to paper without wanting his ideas to work for others. Mountains of good food must have been set on tables and shared by people as a result, because Slater is a master of his trade. ‘A recipe must work. Otherwise, what’s the point?’ he says. Quite; though a cynic would add that the genre is full of recipes that either don’t work or never quite resemble the glories of a book’s images.

Let’s eat: Israeli cuisine is coming of age

From our US edition

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Being a Zionist is a complex business, not least because, like supermarket hummus, there are so many varieties. There are settlement-hungry messianists and utopian socialists, hard-right annexationists and soppy liberals who still dream of exchanging land for peace. It’s an identity that can confuse even its devotees. I’ve tended to belong in the last camp, but in recent years I’ve drifted from political Zionism altogether. It’s so draining, so deadlocked, so knotty and angst-ridden. I made a decision a few years ago to dial back my engagement with Israel, and life was a little lighter as a result. But it left an absence.

israeli cuisine