Galloping down to the final edit of his fifth cookbook, Nigel discovers it hard to part with fave recipes.

Friends and those who read my recent post, will recognize the irony of the headline, but this time I’m talking about having to cut 120 pages from my latest tome, Simplifood Too: More amazing recipes, simply prepared. Surprisingly, I did it, saying goodbye to each beloved dish and saving them in the so-called Graveyard of good ideas, where they will await further inspiration and perhaps reemerge in another book.

I disavow pretentious food in the book. Everything has to be something that if I can cook easily, readers can too. In my morning paper recently, there was a review of a restaurant, where the chef proudly claims the meal had 65 ingredients. It’s rather like premium Scotch whisky brands that claim to be blended from more than 40 single malts. With so much going on, surely all chance of a single grace note in the blend are lost. And so with food.

Rick Stein’s otherwise excellent book on Indian cooking claims more than 48 ingredients for his butter chicken recipe. That’s ok if you’re making up big batches in a restaurant, but why put that in a book for everyday folk? No one is ever going to cook from a recipe like that. On that subject, personally I don’t have a tandoori oven, so authentic butter chicken is out before I ever start hunting for 26 different spices!

On the other hand, one of my late wife’s carers was a young Sikh woman who showed me how to cook some simply delicious dishes with few ingredients. Lacking a decent Indian restaurant in town, I often make these easy delicacies at home. In my new book, I’ve happily said goodbye to butter chicken and kept pau bhaji, chana masala and aloo gobi.

Other interesting dishes that have gone are deep fried poached eggs. A chef at a culinary college was teaching them to her class, but I’ve never, ever seen them on a menu. Now you will never, ever learn the secret. Too fussy. The Oxley fish pie, made by roasting lobster shells and absolutely delicious, but far too complicated for simple cooks, has regretfully gone. Home made pasta, requiring the purchase of a special machine – gone. Proper English breakfast bangers, made from scratch, also requires a sausage making machine – delicious, but gone too. Slow roasted anything, such as bison ribs, too great a risk of burning. Gone.

Salads I seldom make as they are too complicated or not popular with my guests, similarly gone. I reluctantly said goodbye to Coronation chicken. The whole desserts section – gone too. They may surface in Simpli sweet: Just desserts, if I ever get around to writing it.

I anguished over the veggies section. In the end I decided to cut all those I don’t actually like – kale expunged from the new book in any iteration. Rapini barely got a mention, but is banished anyway. Neeps and tatties gone, denying my Scottish heritage, but reinforcing my distaste for swedes, known as rutabaga in North America, in any form.

Dishes made from offal – kidneys, liver, tripe, intestines, brain, heart and worse – gone, though I will miss liver and bacon with nicely caramelized onions. Haggis I will not miss. Actually, it was never in any of my cookbooks and I have never dared taste it. Blood sausage as a side in the full English breakfast gets a pass too. The French version, boudin noir, though much beloved on the Continent, no longer appears in my repertoire.

But don’t despair, most of these recipes can be found on my Gentleman’s Portion blog, as well as new ones almost every week. It has a very good search engine, so if you don’t have any of my cookbooks, or can’t wait for the new one, just enter any recipe in the space beside the search icon and the chances are you’ll find it there. Or send me a note in the comment section below, and I’ll try and direct you to a good source. Even when I’ve never included a recipe, chances are I’ve eaten it somewhere, or cooked it sometime.

Now, on to the new book. My art director is being very diligent, as this book will appear in print, where design becomes paramount. We’ve agreed on the covers, front and back. A final version awaits comments from chefs I have known, who are kindly reviewing the book at the moment. If they say something really nice, it will appear on the front or in the blurb on the Amazon site. In any event, their words of wisdom will appear on the back. We’ve agreed on the logo, slightly different from the previous book, but similar enough for people to see the family resemblance.

We are discussing photos and layout in great detail. I am sure it will all be worthwhile and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how it turns out myself. Simplifood Too: More amazing food, simply prepared will be available in early September 2024, exclusively on Amazon, in a large size trade paperback edition.

Until the new trade paperback revised edition titled Simpifood Too is available in the Fall, the complete compendium of all Nigel’s recipes from the past decade, Simplifood: Amazing food, simply prepared is available as an eBook well priced at 9.99 in any currency. Click on Amazon for Kindle devices, Barnes and Noble for Nook devices, Kobo for Kobo eReaders, and Lulu Publishing for any other formats, including Apple iPad.

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This is Nigel’s 420th blog on Gentleman’s Portion. The SEARCH function at the top works really well if you want to look back and see some of his previous stories, or check under CATEGORIES.