The Greens Cookbook

"Or just about Greens in general. Madison has been running this wonderful Zen Buddhist restaurant since the 1970s, and the book is named after it. And the amazing thing is that it’s the first book that was entirely vegetarian and didn’t make you feel like you were missing out on anything by only choosing vegetables. It sounds like heaven on earth. Something much more. Some of the recipes are very complex – and very liberating. I was only 23 when I got the book and hadn’t really heard of butternut squash, all the different kinds of squash. It was like a whole new world of vegetables. But I’m not a vegetarian . I love, you know, pork products. So I’m totally not a vegetarian but I think I could probably live off vegetables and beans knowing I could go to this book because it’s got Japanese food in it and all kinds of chilli butters and herb butters that make eating vegetables a delight. It’s the opposite of eating your greens because you should. I think just reading mostly. My tastes sort of align from childhood, but my mum and dad were definitely not foodies. Outdoor, practical types, but not foodies. We went out mushroom picking. My dad is a biologist and granny is a botanist so there was a kind of a wild food aspect to our diet but we didn’t go in for anything exotic. I sort of taught myself to cook because I became interested in food and didn’t have the traditional background or training. I find that lots of people that I like actually have done that as well, like Richard Olney. He came from Iowa and is the authority on Chateau d’Yquem. So there he was, a young gay man who went to New York and then he went to Paris and then he ended up in this kind of magical place in Provence in the hills. He started out as a painter and I think he carried on trying to be a painter in Paris for quite a long time and then sort of realised… As a chef he was self-taught but then rapidly became somebody whom even the French treated as an authority. What’s really annoying is that he wrote a biography and then died before he could properly edit it. So he never really tells us how he came from being a student in Paris to enjoying this extraordinary reputation as a chef and general foodie. He probably just read Larousse from cover to cover. Some of his food is very complicated, but I do wish – though I’m sure he would have been terrifying – that I’d lived with him in Provence on his lovely hillside and eaten the food he cooked for his friends. He probably would have been horrified by my cooking. He writes so lucidly, but you always feel like he’s not taking himself – the idea of himself – too seriously. Instead, he’s part of a tradition. All really good chefs are like that. Elizabeth David said, ‘No cookbook could exist without all the other cookbooks’. They had a meeting, you know, Elizabeth David and Richard Olney. And she teased him and said he was all about garlic and that he wouldn’t like her food. But in fact they were as waspish as each other and became bosom pals as soon as they met. The 60s do you think? Elizabeth David was writing in the 60s."