life and style

Recipes for a restaurant cookbook

Should a restaurant cookbook allow the home cook to bring exact replicas of famous dishes to the table, or is a glossy souvenir tome what most people are after?

Restaurant cookbook recipes:
Bife Ana steak sandwich from The Eagle
Devilled kidneys on toast from Canteen
Mushroom, pearl barley and Swiss chard stew from Canteen
Big Fat Duck Cookbook
Heston Blumenthal's Big Fat Duck Cookbook. Not one for the beginner. Photograph: James Powell

What do people want from a restaurant cookery book? It's a question that occurs to me every time a new volume from a famous kitchen hits the shelves. Are instructions which can actually be used successfully at home paramount or is a beautifully presented souvenir with a bit of history, some anecdotes and context around a handful of recipes enough?

Those which I actually cook from have several things in common. They contain dishes which are on the restaurant's menu, enabling the cash-strapped cook to come close to eating there. There have been times when I have felt cheated after forking out for a book only to find a particular signature dish wasn't included. If you bought The Eagle cookbook and found that the recipe for the Bife Ana steak sandwich, the only dish to have been on the menu every day since the place opened, wasn't there, chances are you wouldn't be very happy.

One of the many good things to say about the new Canteen cookbook is that the contents page reads like the menu plus specials boards. This is all too rare. Some chefs make no bones about altering their recipes before publication, for example in Heat, Bill Buford recounts how at the Babbo Cookbook launch, Mario Batali was heard to say, "the book will reveal our secrets; we're going to have to change our menu." That book ended up as a snapshot of the restaurant at a particular time - unavoidable if menus are to change and evolve as they should, but a bit of a shame for diners who want to carry on enjoying favourite signature dishes.

That said, this strategy is preferable to publishing deliberately altered recipes. I can understand why chefs don't want to reveal all their secrets, but isn't this cheating the home cook? Again, the Canteen book succeeds here - the dishes I have tried at home (the devilled kidneys, so different from my previously favoured Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe and the mushroom, pearl barley and Swiss chard stew amongst other things) were very similar to those I've eaten at the restaurant.

Finally, you need to trust that the recipes will work. It's a sad fact that restaurant cookbook recipes do sometimes fail, leaving frustration and wasted ingredients in their wake. Some even become famous for not working, such as the Chocolate Nemesis in the otherwise superlative River Cafe Cookbook. It must be tempting to simply scale down recipes that work in a commercial kitchen but I know from experience that without extensive testing this won't do – what works well in the restaurant will not necessarily transfer to a domestic kitchen, especially when it comes to temperatures and timings.

The one book that really does work for me in every respect is Ottolenghi. I've cooked my way through it, and while some of the methodology seems a bit counterintuitive at times (the recipe for red lentil and chard soup works beautifully but feels like it's been written down in the wrong order), the results are always good.

What are your experiences of cooking from restaurant cookery books? Which books do you rate and which aren't up to scratch? Should they be more than just glossy souvenirs and actually contain faithful replicas of the restaurant dishes which actually work? Finally, if you've eaten in a restaurant and attempted the same dish at home, have your efforts measured up?


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