Is This a Cookbook? by Heston Blumenthal
Ok, first up, I have to say that the font used for Heston Blumenthal’s ruminations on food and eating in Is This a Cookbook? is extremely annoying. I don’t know what it is, maybe Informal Roman, but it’s a version of Italic which as we all know is tiresome to read if there’s a lot of it. So, if your eyesight is not great, you are not the designer’s demographic… Rightio, that’s got that out of the way… Heston Blumenthal is well-known to viewers of Masterchef where he is venerated like a god and subject to fangirl/boy ecstasy whenever he makes a grand entrance. Whether this is because these apparently everyday contestants have actually eaten in his astronomically-priced restaurant, or because they aspire to his molecular gastronomy (or just the fame), I do not know. However, I find him entertaining, because unlike Marco Pierre-White and his pompous posturing, though Heston is A Serious Chef in his restaurants, he does not take himself too seriously on the show. I enjoyed the challenge when I attempted one of his recipes from Historic Heston (2014, see my review), but I do not take him seriously as a guide in the domestic kitchen. I’m an experienced cook and I like to be adventurous with recipes, but I’m not a chef and I don’t aspire to be. Is This a Cookbook? brings Heston back down to earth. A bit. Opening his book at random I find his ‘Gut-Friendly Beetroot Soup’ involves nearly a whole page of ingredients and two pages of instructions for the pickled beetroot, the stock, the beetroot barley, the pan-roasted root vegetables, the kefir horseradish and the garnish. Plus there’s nearly a page (in the annoying Italics) about digestion and the microbiome, and next to each page of the actual recipe, there’s another page of tips and explanations (in the annoying Italics.) So, including the full colour page photo of the soup, this one recipe takes six pages. ‘Exhilarating Geen Gazpacho’ soup takes four. So does the ‘Kimcheese Toastie’ and the ‘Bacon Buttie’ preceded by five pages about sandwiches (yes, Italics for all of it) and photos of Heston eating ‘A Mindful Sandwich’. You do the maths, not counting the index there are 340 pages, give or take 23 pages of the yada-yada at the beginning of the book, so there’s not a lot of recipes… And most of them are for really ordinary food. Roasts, hamburgers, toasties, Italian dishes that everyone makes but jazzed up à la Heston. The exception is the Breakfast section which offers ‘Parsnip Granola’; ‘Tomato and Coffee Muffins’; ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ (Noooooooooooo!); and the ‘Bacon and Egg Porridge’ (which looks as if someone’s been sick in the bowl). In the chapter ‘Where do you want to eat tonight?’ there’s a Popcorn Popcorn (sic) chicken, which is unfortunately made with popcorn, the stink of which in cinemas, I loathe. Kids might possibly love it, but be warned, Heston’s idea of a ‘simple recipe’ is not the same as mine. As you can see from the cover design, the sub-title of the book is Adventures in the Kitchen’ and in the introductory pages Heston explains his newish philosophy. This is (mercifully not in Italics) the most interesting part of the book. He explains how he’s become more interested in sustainability (and in among the recipes there are little tips on not wasting things), and he calls for a ‘learning revolution’ to enhance human creativity in everything not just cooking. He’s also on about ‘feeding the spirit’ and being mindful. (Which is why there’s the five-page intro to the sandwich. We should be mindful while we’re eating them, just as he was, on a plane, eating an airline sandwich. I kid you not. This is culinary satire, surely…) He goes on to explain how quantum mechanics (a branch of physics) made him realise that dual possibilities exist and they are part of how we experience the world: we’re constantly changing between different perspectives. In the kitchen this translates into a split between human being and human doing. Human doing is the culinary task with all its strictures and structures. Human being, on the other hand, is all that stuff that makes us, er, human beings. Our ability to respond to cooking in an imaginative way — noticing things, finding connections, responding emotionally, taking everything in and turning it into experiences, consciousness and our own personalised version of reality. (p.12) I suspect that every weary parent who has cooked something nutritious that’s within the budget, knows about this difference in perspective when the offspring refuse to eat it and nobody helps with the washing up. Ok, enough. Am I going to try any of the recipes? Well, I am a bit of a masochist when it comes to experimenting in the kitchen… but there are limits. I’m not doing anything from the section on fermentation, or mealworms or cricket powder, and if I knew where to get some hemp seeds I’d be growing them in the garden, not making a satay or a panna cotta with them. And that’s the problem with this cookbook (if tha
ChinaGoSmart CGS 
Ok, first up, I have to say that the font used for Heston Blumenthal’s ruminations on food and eating in Is This a Cookbook? is extremely annoying. I don’t know what it is, maybe Informal Roman, but it’s a version of Italic which as we all know is tiresome to read if there’s a lot of it. So, if your eyesight is not great, you are not the designer’s demographic…
Rightio, that’s got that out of the way…
Heston Blumenthal is well-known to viewers of Masterchef where he is venerated like a god and subject to fangirl/boy ecstasy whenever he makes a grand entrance. Whether this is because these apparently everyday contestants have actually eaten in his astronomically-priced restaurant, or because they aspire to his molecular gastronomy (or just the fame), I do not know. However, I find him entertaining, because unlike Marco Pierre-White and his pompous posturing, though Heston is A Serious Chef in his restaurants, he does not take himself too seriously on the show. I enjoyed the challenge when I attempted one of his recipes from Historic Heston (2014, see my review), but I do not take him seriously as a guide in the domestic kitchen. I’m an experienced cook and I like to be adventurous with recipes, but I’m not a chef and I don’t aspire to be.
Is This a Cookbook? brings Heston back down to earth. A bit. Opening his book at random I find his ‘Gut-Friendly Beetroot Soup’ involves nearly a whole page of ingredients and two pages of instructions for the pickled beetroot, the stock, the beetroot barley, the pan-roasted root vegetables, the kefir horseradish and the garnish. Plus there’s nearly a page (in the annoying Italics) about digestion and the microbiome, and next to each page of the actual recipe, there’s another page of tips and explanations (in the annoying Italics.) So, including the full colour page photo of the soup, this one recipe takes six pages. ‘Exhilarating Geen Gazpacho’ soup takes four. So does the ‘Kimcheese Toastie’ and the ‘Bacon Buttie’ preceded by five pages about sandwiches (yes, Italics for all of it) and photos of Heston eating ‘A Mindful Sandwich’. You do the maths, not counting the index there are 340 pages, give or take 23 pages of the yada-yada at the beginning of the book, so there’s not a lot of recipes…
And most of them are for really ordinary food. Roasts, hamburgers, toasties, Italian dishes that everyone makes but jazzed up à la Heston. The exception is the Breakfast section which offers ‘Parsnip Granola’; ‘Tomato and Coffee Muffins’; ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ (Noooooooooooo!); and the ‘Bacon and Egg Porridge’ (which looks as if someone’s been sick in the bowl). In the chapter ‘Where do you want to eat tonight?’ there’s a Popcorn Popcorn (sic) chicken, which is unfortunately made with popcorn, the stink of which in cinemas, I loathe. Kids might possibly love it, but be warned, Heston’s idea of a ‘simple recipe’ is not the same as mine.
As you can see from the cover design, the sub-title of the book is Adventures in the Kitchen’ and in the introductory pages Heston explains his newish philosophy. This is (mercifully not in Italics) the most interesting part of the book. He explains how he’s become more interested in sustainability (and in among the recipes there are little tips on not wasting things), and he calls for a ‘learning revolution’ to enhance human creativity in everything not just cooking. He’s also on about ‘feeding the spirit’ and being mindful. (Which is why there’s the five-page intro to the sandwich. We should be mindful while we’re eating them, just as he was, on a plane, eating an airline sandwich. I kid you not. This is culinary satire, surely…)
He goes on to explain how quantum mechanics (a branch of physics) made him realise that dual possibilities exist and they are part of how we experience the world: we’re constantly changing between different perspectives. In the kitchen this translates into a split between human being and human doing.
Human doing is the culinary task with all its strictures and structures. Human being, on the other hand, is all that stuff that makes us, er, human beings. Our ability to respond to cooking in an imaginative way — noticing things, finding connections, responding emotionally, taking everything in and turning it into experiences, consciousness and our own personalised version of reality. (p.12)
I suspect that every weary parent who has cooked something nutritious that’s within the budget, knows about this difference in perspective when the offspring refuse to eat it and nobody helps with the washing up.
Ok, enough. Am I going to try any of the recipes? Well, I am a bit of a masochist when it comes to experimenting in the kitchen… but there are limits. I’m not doing anything from the section on fermentation, or mealworms or cricket powder, and if I knew where to get some hemp seeds I’d be growing them in the garden, not making a satay or a panna cotta with them.
And that’s the problem with this cookbook (if that’s what it is). The recipes are either seriously weird, or not particularly interesting. We’ve seen Heston do this on Masterchef where he’s made a grand theatrical production out of making a hamburger or (ugh!) Mac ‘n’ Cheese; and then he does something rather peculiar like his Chilli Con Carne with Spiced Chocolate… or Cricket Cookies.
However, the fish cakes with tartare sauce do look good. A little bit different, and not too hard, and fortunately Heston suggests any white round fish as a substitute for pollack fillets, which I’ve never seen in Australia. He doesn’t suggest a substitute for Maris Piper potatoes which are popular in the UK but not available here — but I’m guessing that Dutch Cream, Desiree, Coliban or Sebago spuds would be ok, and I do actually have a jar of goose fat to roast them in, and some thyme growing in the garden.
Is This a Cookbook? is not a practical guide to cooking, and it steers an uneven path between adventures in the kitchen and Tuesday night cooking jazzed up a bit (and sometimes a lot). But since Heston is so famous for being Heston, I doubt if anybody really expects it to be a cookbook, hence its title.
Like Heston himself, Is This a Cookbook? is entertainment.
And I enjoyed it.
Theresa Smith enjoyed reading it too.
Author: Heston Blumenthal
Title: Is This a Cookbook?
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2022
ISBN: 9781526621504, hbk., 367 pages
Review copy courtesy of Bloomsbury AU.
