Ruth Rogers's Reading List

"She was crucial. This was before my time as I didn’t come to England until 1970. Certainly if you asked my business partner Rose [Gray] or anyone who is really interested in cooking, they would say that the influence of Elizabeth David is phenomenal. She took ingredients, she took seasonality and she used olive oil. Apparently, before Elizabeth David you had to buy olive oil from the chemist. She introduced recipes that people had never heard of before. She wrote about it beautifully, and she cared. She was amazing. She loved to travel and live in other places, and she was a great writer. You can take any of Elizabeth David’s cookbooks to bed and read them as you would a novel. She’s telling you, when you get a lemon or a tomato or have a piece of veal, this is how you should think about it, not just here’s a recipe for it. I love her introductions to each chapter – especially the one on pasta, and also rice which leads you to all the different kinds of risottos. It’s so full of knowledge and passion. I think it’s a really inspirational book."

"This is a book my mother had on her shelf. Ada Boni wasn’t as prolific as Elizabeth David but she had a wonderful style of writing. She keeps everything very simple. She writes about the essence of Italian food and communicates that in her recipes. She can make someone who doesn’t cook want to cook her food. Exactly. I totally agree. It’s a combination of science and art. It’s about detail and spontaneity. It’s a balance. You can see that in the books I have chosen. Marcella Hazan is much more detailed in her recipes. She is almost a dictionary of Italian cookery. If you follow her recipes, step by step, ingredient by ingredient, you won’t make a mistake. Elizabeth David is more vague – you take a few tomatoes, put them in a pan with some olive oil and garlic and so on. In central Italy you have quite a lot of meat. You don’t have much fish. You have lentils, beans, pork. Moving south there is more fish, and in the north is much richer food. That’s how I learnt, mostly. By staying with a family, being with them, cooking with them. My cousins also taught me. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That link is very important. Before I could speak Italian, I would just listen to the way people in a family kitchen would argue about what to do with a recipe."

"It’s a very interesting area. It’s between Milan, Venice and Florence and includes Parma, Bologna and Modena, which are amazing centres of cooking. It’s a region that is rich and very proud of its food. Bologna is where you have bollito misto , which is mixed boiled meats. It’s an extraordinary celebratory dish which you very often eat at Christmas. You’ll have boiled beef, boiled chicken and cotechino sausage. You serve it with lentils and salsa verde. It’s delicious. There are some books for when you are in a hurry and want to do something quick, but when I really have time to cook and make a long, slow recipe, this is the book I go for. It’s for making your own pasta and slow-cooked sauces. It’s not just about meat on the grill, it’s much more intense. It’s salivatory. Oh yes. In New York you can definitely find more regional Italian. There are Roman restaurants as well as Florentine and Venetian. It is much more sophisticated now. Exactly. Hopefully those days are over."

"Marcella Hazan really is a teacher. When people come to work at the River Café as a chef we ask them if they have read this, and if they haven’t we ask them to read it. She is a very disciplined and thorough chef. She takes you through each step and really cares about the way you go through a dish. She doesn’t talk too much about only using a certain tomato in the summer or only serving a certain dish in the winter. She’s not that seasonal but she really cares about the ingredients. I also love the drawings in this book. She’ll tell you how to prepare an artichoke or how to roll out the pasta dough using illustrations. She revolutionised Italian cooking for a very wide audience. You don’t want to judge Marcella on whether she did or she didn’t. Just look at her body of work, it’s extraordinary. If you were going to gift books to someone who wanted to start cooking Italian food, they would get a very good grounding with Marcella Hazan and Elizabeth David."

"I wanted to choose a really regional cookbook because I am so interested in regional cooking. This one is about Rome, a city that I love. It’s about what Romans eat and how distinctive it is. The most distinctive thing about Roman food is the meat. Whether it’s a spaghetti carbonara, their love of bacon and pancetta, or the way they do pasta sauces with quite rough cuts of meat. They use spinal cords – all parts of the animal. One of my favourite dishes of all time is something called vignole , which is artichokes, broad beans and peas. It’s very, very Roman. There is also the way they do their roast suckling lamb – it’s the offal, the tripe, strong flavours. The food in Rome is quite tough. There are other great books on Rome but I came across this one recently and started to use it. It’s very good."