Read This: Books under the Radar is a weekly post written by a guest author – often a friend of mine, someone I’ve met on my writerly travels, or an author I admire – who recommends three books they think deserve more recognition. If you’re interested in buying any of the books, please click on the covers and give these hidden gems some love. You can see the full list of books which have been selected, as well as the author’s latest book on Bookshop.org, where you can have a browse and buy any that take your fancy. Happy reading!

Read This: Claire Thomson

You might not know this, but as well as novels, I LOVE cookbooks. I have a pretty big collection and love sitting down on my kitchen floor besides the shelves where I keep them all and browsing through. I can’t remember when I first started following Claire Thomson on Instagram with her vegetable-led recipes, but I have loved her easy to follow but interesting style of cooking. I urge you to follow her too: @5oclockapron. Her 10th cookbook, One Pan Beans is out this week and I also urge you to buy it, because it’s brilliant and I’ve already cooked several delicious recipes from it. Here’s what she has to say about herself:

Claire Thomson is a chef, food writer and a constant source of family-cooking inspiration to her 180,000 Instagram followers. Claire has written for the Guardian, Telegraph, BBC Good Food Magazine and Delicious and is a Guild of Food Writers award winner. She has appeared on BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen, Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch and BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. On her podcast The 5 O’Clock Apron, she chats and chops with people from other professions about what they cook for dinner. Her previous books include Art of the Larder, Home Cookery Year, One Pan Chicken and Veggie Family Cookbook. @5oclockapron

Podcast https://shows.acast.com/the-5-o-clock-apron-podcast

Instagram @5oclockapron 
And here are the books Claire has chosen:

Stoner by John Williams

I read this book on a cookery retreat that I was teaching on out in Sicily last year. Reading it in the darkness lit by a very old lamp in this old Sicilian farmhouse, the evening very, very quiet, quite tired after a day of teaching cookery, I was completely bowled over by the quality of the writing. Nothing especially huge or pertinent happens in the book, it is simply about a man and his passage of time on earth. Essentially how huge life is, even if you live it in its most simple form, a timely reminder to all of us. I was struck by this motif and loved Williams’ prose throughout. It is precise and tender all at once. I gave the book to my teenage daughter Grace to read who then chose to use it as her A level coursework text and loved it just as much as I did.

Reflexions by Richard Olney

I read Olney’s diary at the very beginning of my career as a chef. I loved his obsession with food and wine and the art of living well. The diary starts in New York where Olney is working as a struggling artist, France beckons and soon he details so much culinary adventure, all at breakneck speed, he writes about tearing around France in the  80’s in a low slung sports cars, visiting wineries, drinking pale rosè under fruit trees at dusk with friends, and always without fail cooking something delicious. Olney died unexpectedly in 1999, and what’s remarkable about this book is his brothers write the epilogue of the book, setting in stone what a wonderful man Olney really was, how food and cookery shaped him as man who lived an extraordinary life fuelled by towering beauty which was always at the forefront, from setting the table to travelling around France. I cried buckets at the end of the book.

How to Eat by Nigella Lawson

This was the first book I bought after leaving home, for my very first bookshelf, owned by me! I read it cover to cover. I’ll be honest, not so much for the recipes, more for the food writing. I was by now on my way to a career in food and was learning new recipes and ways of cooking in my day to day, what I really devoured from this book was Nigella’s ability to write about food. I knew I wanted to earn my stripes in a professional kitchens, but looking down the barrel of a career, food writing was where I knew I ultimately wanted to end up. There were a few other food writers who helped shape me along the way, too many to list here, but Nigella certainly gets top billing.

 

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How to Eat was one of the first cookery books I bought – I think it might have been left behind at my first husband’s house, because I don’t seen to have it any more. I’ve read and loved Stoner, but Richard Olney I’ve never heard of. Any that you like the sound of? If you’d like to be told about future Read This recommendations, you can follow me on Instagram, or subscribe to my newsletter.

More Read This: Books Under the Radar

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