A Tale of 12 Kitchens: Cookbook Thumbnail #1

Here’s the first in a series of mini-reviews of books about food and cooking that have greatly inspired me. #1 is Jake Tilson’s A Tale of 12 Kitchens: Family Cooking in Four Countries. Graced with a gently lovely introduction by Nancy Harmon Jenkins and endorsements from Claudia Roden and Nigel Slater, it remains one of my favourite cookbooks.

An inveterate collector, Jake Tilson’s visual feast of a book has something of the scrapbook about it, but it is not scrappy. It is rich in context, moving linearly from his youth in rural England to London where he studied art, to Italy, New York, and marriage which led him to Scotland, California, and all kinds of kitchens and cooking in far-flung places. Infused with the artistic sensibility of its author, this is a thoughtful book about living, travelling and cooking as you go.

Tilson writes about the ‘Art of Neighbourhood Eating’ when he moves to Peckham, of driving to Elephant & Castle to find epazote when a Mexican contractor tells him it is sold there and gives a recipe for Red Chicken Package (Gà gói lá chuố) after a store assistant at Wing Tai helped him translate its title. There are recipes for a Secret Garden Mulberry Sauce made with fruit collected from London trees, a version of a Dominican Spiced Goat Stew he ate in New York City, an essay on the pleasures and challenges of desert shopping, and a lesson in hotel cooking via ‘Hotel-Bathroom Burritos’. Being an opportunist is an asset for a cook, he writes in his preamble to a recipe for Blizzard Duck which, “may not be a Scottish dish, but it uses indigenous fowl, local weather and is suited to the Aga.” ‘How Marriage Refills the Kitchen Larder’ tells the story of his marriage to a Scot in possession of a similarly artistic genealogy. “To enter an alien culture at a domestic level is far more revealing and rewarding,” he writes. “My fading Scottish roots were reawakened by marriage.” There are recipes for butteries, and rock cakes, the latter a feature of my childhood.

Tilson on collecting, and Scotland

In his dedication, he tells us that “writing a family cookbook is akin to selling the family silver,” which still gives me pause when I write my own food columns.

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A Tale of Twelve Kitchens: Family Cooking in Four Countries by Jake Tilson.

Jake Tilson’s website.

His work for the Oxford Food Symposium