The Constance Spry Cookery Book

"I had to have at least one English book in here because I live here, and because when I moved here I thought, shit, I don’t know how to make these British puddings. Well, all of these steamed puddings. We just don’t have anything like that. And also the fruitcake. It has just the worst reputation in America. Here everybody goes crazy for it at Christmas time – everyone’s like, hey! Christmas pudding, Christmas cake! There you go! That’s how Americans feel about it. But in England I thought, if this many people are this passionate about it there’s obviously going to be a really fantastic recipe for it, and it’s just been bastardised and sent out to America and turned into something absolutely disgusting with glossy cherries in it. So I looked to Constance Spry to reveal this delicious original ancestor and I was not disappointed. She really helped me to learn. I looked up quite a few other fruitcake recipes too, in fact. And I came up with one of my own that I really liked, and now I do Christmas cake and I really love it. So Constance Spry is kind of my English Paula Peck. But Peck’s book is just on pastries, whereas Spry’s book covers everything, the whole range. Well, my husband’s a vegetarian, but my fruitcake is never dry."

"In 2015, a few weeks after the death of my father in Italy, I moved back to the UK. My husband is British, and I was at boarding school in England from the age of 9, so in spite of not having a British passport, it’s the country where I feel most at home. We rented a barn down a small lane near Oxford, and one of the first things we were told was that we might see Mary Berry walking along it, as her son lived nearby. Neither my husband or I had ever heard of Mary Berry, but from this we gathered she was famous. Neither of us have yet watched her on TV, or fully understand the phenomenon of The Great British Bake Off. But we are the best of friends with her son and his wife, who are lovely, and, as a result, we are able to present you with this Five Books list—of Mary’s Berry’s own favourite cookbooks. She scribbled them on an email for me, but was too busy to do an interview."