Keep it Simple: Fresh Look at Classic Cooking

Product Information

Simply printing recipes different in tone to those that had characterised food for a generation however would not, in all likelihood, have garnered Alastair Little the critical acclaim that he received though. He is the rare mixture of a supreme gastrotechnologist who understands the twitch and flex of every muscle, and a cook who is rococo in his imaginings. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Organized by season, the book captures the spirit of Modern British cooking, which Alastair Little pioneered in the 80s and 90s at his eponymous restaurant in Soho, and presents recipes which avoid fuss and complication, but deliver great results.

The recipes are organised seasonally and reflect Little's interest in Italian, Japanese, Chinese and French cookery.

During the mid-1980s in London the chef Alastair Little, the original university-graduate cook in England, changed the way restaurant menus looked.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I think I gave it five, and two subsequent reheatings of 45 minutes each only enhanced the tail's fork-meltingness. Alastair Little two hours (you're joking), Fay Maschler three, Frances Bissell four (getting warmer).

The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. This book won the Glenfiddich Award in 1994 and I still sometimes hear it referred to reverentially as the godfather of modern British cooking. Thus everything from peasant cooking to classic haute cuisine may, by this definition, be accounted simple. Before him in the UK, food was heavily cooked and sauced, year-round comfort food with barely a fresh vegetable in sight.

Discover the joy of reading with us, your trusted source for affordable books that do not compromise on quality. But in practice, most domestic cooks feel that failure is indeed a disgrace, and that it would take some years of therapy to convince them otherwise. This much loved cookbook (and the eponymous restaurant) was part of my life for far too short a time, but it was a joy to revisit the book after almost thirty many years! Alastair Little is one of the unsung heroes of British cuisine One of the great classic cookbooks, the start of the British food revolution. Overleaf, where Olney mentions this item, I see I have underlined his words and written, "Why not explain what this is somewhere in the bloody book, matey?I had read several of his recipes for slow cooking, in which he gave oven temperatures in centigrade. Honestly, unless you are an enthusiastic and well-practiced cook, you simply wouldn’t believe how many puffed-up, information-light (some downright misleading) cookery books there are out there, or at least you wouldn’t realise that until you read and consciously applied your learning from Little’s “Keep It Simple”. I revere Elizabeth David, yet don't cook from her as often as I know I should, or even as often as I want to. Because she seems to have her admonishing eye on me; because I feel that if I get something wrong I will have offended her shade. What some people might have forgotten is that British cuisine, as it is today, did not emerge miraculously in its present form from under the tyranny of heavy sauces - there was the rebellious phase of fusion food marking the journey.