Cooking, by Jeremy Lee

Simply and Well, for One or Many

When I reviewed the late Russell Norman’s excellent Brutto cookbook last August, I gave passing reference to Jeremy Lee’s Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many, which I’d received at the same time, branding it an ‘aspirational’ cookbook:

Aspirational cookbooks are the ones that prompt you to seek out jars of spices you can’t pronounce or nervously ask your butcher for specific, obscure parts of a cow. They tend to sit on my bookshelf mostly gathering dust, but should be a true pleasure to flick through, and reward you deeply on those occasional Sundays when you can muster up the courage and energy to cook from them.

The fact that it’s taken me five further months to cook enough from Cooking to review it should give away that I think that initial assessment was correct, though I really don’t mean it as any criticism. This is a book of project suppers and great efforts, meals that require labour of one sort or another, whether that’s sourcing specific ingredients, curing cod a day in advance, or hand-crafting each condiment for Lee’s famous smoked eel sandwich.

That sandwich is straight from the menu at Soho’s Quo Vadis, where Lee has been head chef since 2012. This isn’t the Quo Vadis cookbook, to be clear, though the eel and a few other dishes have featured on the menu there. There are also dishes cribbed from Lee’s stints at other kitchens, including Blueprint Café and Boodle’s, alongside plenty that are simply Lee’s own. The only clear uniting element is the chef’s specific style, a modern British approach that sits somewhere near St. John’s Fergus Henderson, though with a little less austerity to it.

That means recipes are often complex, in part because Lee encourages making most elements from scratch. Take that smoked eel sandwich — you’ll find instructions for pickling your own onions and making both mustard cream and horseradish cream, though he does at least stop short of suggesting that you smoke your own eels.