British Cookbooks are beter than American Cookbooks.

DWIGHT GARNER writing in the New York Times Book Review December 2.

Why are British cookbooks, circa 2007, so much better than American ones? By “better” I don’t mean that they are larger or more comprehensive, that you would necessarily give them to a new bride and groom, or that they are in possession of lustier photographs or crisper layouts or even bolder or more exacting recipes.

What I mean is this: The best of the decade’s British cookbooks — from writers including, but not limited to, Nigel Slater, Fergus Henderson and Simon Hopkinson — are smaller, more soulful and more idiosyncratic than their American counterparts. They’re the products of a vision one is tempted to call novelistic. Drollery and lack of pretension, as in the novels of Waugh and Wodehouse, are prized. The emotional climate is pleasantly autumnal. These writers like to talk about the best things to eat when you’re feeling a bit depressed or bewildered.

None of them will have you depositing cilantro foam onto slices of Cryovaced gazelle meat or tell you to kick anything up a notch. Their books aren’t meant to blow you away. They’re meant to be genial rainy-day companions, albeit genial rainy-day companions whose authors like to eat large, and very well, perhaps after crashing on your couch to drink wine and watch an old movie.
Here, for example, is Hopkinson talking about a favorite recipe for potato cakes (these writers love their potatoes): “They are at their best eaten on a Sunday afternoon, melting in front of the fire in their pool of butter. It should be winter, about 5 p.m., dark outside, and a Marx Brothers film has just finished on the television.” These potatoes are world-class; so are the instructions for consuming them.

My favorite among this set of Britons, Nigel Slater, doesn’t have a new book this season. (Look for his backlist stalwarts, like “Appetite” and “The Kitchen Diaries.”) But Fergus Henderson, the playfully dour king of offal dishes, the Sweeney Todd of the off-cut, has returned with a book called BEYOND NOSE TO TAIL: More Omnivorous Recipes for the Adventurous Cook (Bloomsbury, $35), written with Justin Piers Gellatly, his head baker and pastry chef.

And American readers are finally getting their first look at Simon Hopkinson’s classic ROAST CHICKEN AND OTHER STORIES (Hyperion, $24.95), first published in England in 1994.
Each of these volumes is nearly small enough to fit into your back pocket. Each feels like a keeper — Henderson’s book for its awesome fearlessness, Hopkinson’s for being among the most endearing and common-sensical kitchen primers ever composed.

Let’s begin with Henderson, the chef and proprietor of St. John, a London restaurant that is a mecca to serious eaters of offal. His ethos is a refutation of waste; he’ll find an ingenious and profound use for almost anything in the kitchen. His restaurant is austere and so are his cookbooks — photographs of his sometimes grisly dishes are set against acres of white space. Turning the pages in “Beyond Nose to Tail,” you may feel you’re wandering in an abattoir-cum-art gallery. Damien Hirst will take your order now.

Both of Henderson’s books have a few semi-barbaric, kitchen-destroying recipes my wife and I have taken to calling Big Uglies — dishes that tend to involve using Bic razors to scrape bits of hair from animal parts not often seen in the kitchen. In his previous book, “The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating,” that meant, for us, a vertiginous pile of fried pig’s tails. (They were grimly sublime.) Here it’s a pressed pig’s ear terrine and a pot-roast half pig’s head he calls “a perfect romantic supper for two.” Henderson continues, with a crooked grin: “What we are looking for is the half pig’s head to lurk in the stock in a not dissimilar fashion to an alligator in a swamp.” You will not be serving this during your mother-in-law’s visit. Unless your mother-in-law is Tim Burton.

The nice thing about “Beyond Nose to Tail” is that you can very profitably work its margins, even if you aren’t up to a Big Ugly. Henderson’s salad of beetroot, red onion, red cabbage, crème fraîche and chervil is a beautiful thing to behold, as are his recipes for “orbs of joy” (whole red onions cooked in chicken stock) and baked potatoes with garlic and duck fat. This book’s chicken and ox tongue pie is elegant and straightforward (after you’ve soaked the tongue in brine for two weeks). About this pie, Henderson quite accurately writes: “For those of us who sometimes feel a little frail, here is a pie that will sort you out for sure.”

My wife and I have already cooked nearly a dozen of the recipes in “Beyond Nose to Tail,” and none were disappointing. But two seem likely to stick with us for a very long time, and that’s more than I can say about most recipes. One is for an appetite-prickling cocktail, a mixture of white wine and Campari over ice called a bicyclette — so named, Henderson writes, because in Italy “old men drink it and then wobble home on their bikes.” The other is for something Henderson calls Trotter Gear: a gelatinous, Madeira-infused über-stock, made from pig’s feet and studded with their meat, that he employs in various recipes, most expressively in a dish called Snail, Trotter, Sausage and Chickpeas. With a bicyclette in one hand and a talismanic jar of Trotter Gear in the other, you’ll begin to feel as fearless in the kitchen as he does.
Simon Hopkinson is the chef who founded the London restaurant Bibendum. His “Roast Chicken and Other Stories,” written with Lindsey Bareham, was recently hailed by a panel of chefs, food writers and consumers in the British magazine Waitrose Food Illustrated, who voted it (and let’s not mince words here) “the most useful cookbook of all time.” It’s a designation I’m not tempted to quarrel with. I’d like to sleep with this book under my pillow.

The first thing that strikes you about “Roast Chicken” is what an interesting and friendly prose writer Hopkinson can be. His introduction is a no-nonsense manifesto about eating that’s worth quoting at length: “Good cooking, in the final analysis, depends on two things: common sense and good taste. ... We are all drawn to the smell of fish and chips, fried onions, roast beef, Christmas lunch, pizza, fresh coffee, toast and bacon, and other sensory delights. Conversely, to my mind there is nothing that heralds the bland ‘vegetable terrine,’ the ‘cold lobster mousse with star anise and vanilla,’ or the ‘little stew of seven different fish’ that has been ‘scented’ with Jura wine and ‘spiked’ with tarragon. I feel uncomfortable with this sort of food and don’t believe it to be, how shall we say, genuine.”