Food for thought: Deighton on Radio 4 in August

When last in London, Len Deighton recorded an interview with Radio 4, which will be broadcast at 1230h on 9 August.

The theme is food heroes. Presenter Tim Hayward examines Deighton's qualities for this heroic role by looking at the way he changed people's understanding of food and cooking in the 'sixties through his Action Cookbook, and the wider influence food has had on his life, from his time as a pastry chef in a London hotel through to the present day.

Sounds interesting.

You can access the programme online here, after the original broadcast next week.

Winding back the clock - cookstrips are back in The Observer

Readers who enjoy the feel and simplicity of Len Deighton's cookstrips - which first emerged as serialised items in The Observer between 1962 and 1966 are to appear in this Sunday's edition of The Observer magazine, and thereafter monthly in the magazine. The cookstrips of course subsequently morphed into the Action Cook Book, and famously appear in the coffee making scene in The Ipcress File!

The interview can be found here (hat-tip to Terry).

It features a great reproduction of the famous photo of Len showing Michael Caine as Harry Palmer how to make an omelette in a production still from The Ipcress File. Many of the anecdotes are familiar but there's plenty new in the article of interest to readers, such as the fact Len kept terrapins in his airing cupboard (!).

Here's an extract from the article by Robin Stummer:

'In the film, as Harry nonchalantly cracks eggs into a bowl with one hand while the woman pours out two large whiskies, you can see a cluster of newspaper cuttings pinned up near the copper pans and string of garlic. They are from the Observer’s food section. Not words, but drawings – like prison-cell treasure maps dotted with arrows, numbers and scraps of staccato text veering, slightly insanely, into bold and italic. Those cuttings are some of Deighton’s famous “cookstrips”'.

Two quick snippets - cars and food

Blog readers, a short post picking up on two things relating to Len and his work & life which I've picked up. First is a short article on the Eye magazine blog. It's a very interesting design perspective on Len Deighton's Action Cook Book, the book which, in a sense, taught men to cook in the 'sixties. The piece by Patrick Bogle has some interesting perspectives on Len's creative relationship with his friend Ray Hawkey. He describes very well the "beautifully calm drama" of the cook strips.

Worth a look.

Second, courtesy of Len's son, is a fun web page concerning the provenance of one of Len's previous motor cars. In the spirit, perhaps, of Ian Fleming and James Bond, Len once owned an Aston Martin DB6 Mark II Volante - some car! Here's a little picture of it on the Aston Martin heritage website.

If you write about spies, you've gotta drive like one, surely!

A design on food - French author evidently draws inspiration from Deighton's cook strip's - FT

The book that started it all

I came across an interesting Deighton reference on Friday in that week's FT - not in the business section but in the life pages (no subscription apparently required to access).

This article by Rowley Leigh uses cartoons to illustrate a recipe for country paté, and draws its inspiration from Len's well-known cook strips from the early sixties, produced and serialised in The Observer. As Leigh observes, of course, "his cookery-book career was small beer compared with his success as the author of thrillers such as The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin."

Len's cook strips were, and until now have always been, one of the few attempts at using design to put across consistently and succinctly the key processes of cooking. This article points to efforts by French designer Chrisophe Blain to graphically recount the story of the French chef's experience using a similar approach, but this time in more cartoon format (and in French).

Old-school cuisine ... at a pinch!

(c) Teri Pengilley

Instant whip was always a handful to whisk and you never got it completely smooth, a residue of sickly powder laying at the bottom of the dish. Such was the state of cooking in the sixties.

The Independent's Gerard Gilbert cites this out-of-a-packet pudding as one of the great milestones of cooking in the sixties. Is Instant Whip the nadir of home-spun cooking or the start of the foodie revolution which transformed Britons' eating habits and led us directly to Jamie Oliver and Ready Steady Cook? Gilbert talks to Valentine Warner, the star of a new TV series Eat the Sixties, to answer that very question.

Warner turns to one of the great cookbooks of the sixties to argue that Britain's palate was changing for the better, and Chicken Kievs and Smash instant potato were merely the culinary foothills of a long slog up Mount Cuisine:

'Valentine Warner is knocking on my front door with the ingredients for chicken kiev and prawn and avocado cocktail, as well as a copy of Len Deighton's Action Cook Book. The spy novelist who gave us Harry Palmer was also an enthusiastic chef who wrote a newspaper recipe column throughout the Sixties. "This is actually a really good little cookbook," says Warner, showing me the cover of a man ladling spaghetti from a saucepan as a girlfriend encouragingly tousles his hair from behind (this is the 2008 reprint – knowingly sexist). "There were more men left to their own devices to get on with it... the bachelor in the kitchen."'

Great nostalgic stirrings reading this article. As a child, Instant Whip was a super treat, for which a whisk a procured and much furious beating and stirring later I was eating the sickliest, treacliest .... tastiest pudding around.

Another list ....

Sometimes, if you're an editor stuck for content, there's nothing easier than slipping in a 'top twenty', a 'best of'. The Observer Food Monthly magazine has put a panel of its best cookery and food experts on the case to find the 50 best cookbooks ever published.

Len Deighton's Action Cook Book makes it into the top 50 at 44, sandwiched in between The Art of Mexican Cooking and Indian Vegetable Cookery. There's a culinary joke in there somewhere ... can't think for the life of me what it is!

Thriller writers love to cook...

In today's Independent newspaper, thriller writer John Walsh waxes lyrical about the republication of Len Deighton's Action Cook Book. It looks like John's been able to use his status as a fellow thriller writer to coax some more details from Len via the medium of a telephone interview with Len from his home in California, and he gets some new details from the author about his early life and motivations which led to the creation of the cook strips, and then this book.

For example, Deighton says: of his early kitchen education: "I was an art student on vacation, and got a job at the new Festival Hall's restaurant as a temporary kitchen porter. One day I was mopping the floor when the fish chef asked me if I would do some jobs for him, as his assistant hadn't arrived. My first task was skinning Dover soles. I must have been a good student because he then showed me how to fillet them. From then onwards, my days were spent as unofficial assistant to the fish chef, though I was still paid only porter's wages. I once asked my chef why he'd chosen me for this sudden elevation. He said everyone had noticed the way I 'hung around watching the cooks'. He was right. During my student vacations, I continued to work in kitchens in England and abroad, and I not only hung around watching the cooks, I became one of them."

Well worth checking out.

Len Deighton news round-up

Jeremy Duns - whose debut novel Free Agent I'm reading at the moment - has an article in The Sunday Times today in which he recounts how spy fiction and the harsh reality of espionage and the Cold War have often been more closely connected that you might think. He highlights for example that Somerset Maugham had previously worked for British Intelligence. He makes a brief reference to writers like Deighton, Fleming and Le Carré.

In other news, the re-issuing of the Action Cook Book has received a lot of good write-ups...particularly from food writers, many of whom recall just what a phenomenon this book was when it came out in the sixties. In Saturday's Daily Mail there is a story by Tom Parker-Bowles in which he looks back at how Deighton combined changing the course of spy fiction with being a trained chef and a renowned gourmand in sixties SoHo. He provides comments from fellow food critics:

"'I love the book because of its brilliant design and because of all those classic recipes that I still adore,’ says Simon Hopkinson, author of another classic, Roast Chicken And Other Stories.
‘They’ll never go out of fashion.’

Food writer and broadcaster Matthew Fort agrees. ‘It arrived like a breath of fresh air, full of wit and humour and decent recipes. And it demystified cookery, too, with those wonderful strips, and transformed the life of the Sixties bachelor. The book was decades ahead of its time.’"

For most people, Len Deighton is still associated just with the spy novels, and 'Harry Palmer' in particular. The masterstroke of re-issuing first the Action Cook Book before the subsequent re-issuing of his best spy novels is that it reminds the book-buying public of how Deighton, in the sixties certainly, was justifiably renowned in two separate spheres of achievement.

Action Cook Book Reissued

Just dropped through my letter box is my copy of the newly re-issued Action Cook Book by Len Deighton, arguably one of the most influential cook books of the second half of the twentieth century. Flicking through it again, you realise just how cutting edge and influential the design was, with the line drawings, simple text and grid layout helping even the most inexperienced cook create something tasty and fresh. You can tell, just by examining the index, this was the first cook book that really understood that most men of the time needed to start right from the beginning: there are chapters on:

• Making rice
• Measuring
• Utensils
• Who needs a refrigerator?

even before he starts thinking about any recipes. It was very much a primer for the 'chap' who had never ventured into what was then seen as often the woman's domain - Deighton's book made a significant dent in that perception. Above all, the recipes in here stand the test of time, and reflect Deighton's status as a first-class cook and gourmand and lover of French cooking, recipes like Caneton a l'orange, cassoulet, coquille St Jaques.

The book includes a new foreword by Deighton, in which he writes: "of all the books I have written none of them is dearer to me or more personal than this one." He recalls how his cookstrips were influential in encouraging consumers to source better ingredients and to revisit old favourites which had gone out of fashion. The many different recipes reflect Deighton's status as a traveller and researcher, always picking up new ideas wherever he goes: he leanred to cook squid from a Portuguese fisherman (he also lived in Portgual for many years); he watched a Viennese grandmother produce a superb cheesecake using a childhood recipe; while working as a waiter in Piccadilly, he learned strudel dough from a Hungarian chef.

This is a fascinating book which both harks back to swinging sixties London and the genesis of international cuisine culture in the capital, but remains totally relevant today.

Can Deighton help the microwave generation?

Interesting new article here in The Guardian by its new columnist Rachel Cooke, reminiscing about Len Deighton's Action Cook Book. This, his most well-remembered of cook books from the sixties, is being reissued later this spring by Harper Collins in a new edition. Back in the sixties it made as much impact as The Ipcress File in its innovative approach, its direct marketing at the bachelor male, and its characteristic cook strip approach which was far in advance of anything that had gone before in a world more used to Mrs Beeton than Harry Palmer.

Cooke writes enthusiastically about her copy of the book, adding: "I hope the new Action Cook Book is a huge hit, and that a whole new generation of bachelors learn how to do truites à la meunière and sole bercy, thus making the lives of their future partners a lot more lovely." An entertaining little article, and we can expect to hear more about Len's impact on the world of cooking when the book comes out.