 FOODMatthew Fort on a food enthuslast who puts his money where his mouth is |
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| There are worse places of work than
Allaleigh House, the home of Tom and Sally Jaine and the heart of Prospect
Books. It's a fine, upright, 18th-century residence at the end of an obscure
country lane in Devon, a county of obscure country lanes.
There aren't many independent publishers devoted solely to food books. There's Grub Street, which specialises in rescuing 20th-century authors from obscurity. And Southover, which specialises in reprinting older, mostly pre-20th-century cookery books. And then there's Prospect, which specialises in, well, Tom Jaine's own eclectic taste, I'd say. Get this for a list of current publications: Apicius, A Critical Edition; Open-Mouthed, Poems On Food; The Centaur's Kitchen - A Book Of French, Italian, Greek And Catalan Dishes For Ships' Cooks On The Blue Funnel Line. There's more, of course, but you get the picture. It's all a bit left-field, with a bias towards the historical and academic, and full of oddity, curiosity, interest. And what about this? Persia In Peckham, Recipes From Persepolis (out this summer). Not an historical rarity, but as contemporary as can be because the Persepolis turns out to be a Persian deli. Yes, in Peckham. "It's a brilliant book," says Jaine. "Fascinating. Sally (Butcher), the author, is married to an Iranian and it's about domestic Persian cooking with a bit of social background. No one else would publish it. So we did." That "no one else would publish it" is something of a Jaine mantra. Jaine is a tall, angular fellow given to sudden vigorous gestures to emphasise his own vigorous opinions. He is steeped in food and food culture. He was brought up in The Hole In The Wall in Bath, one of the seminal regional restaurants. He edited the Good Food Guide for five years. And he is quite optimistic about the state of food in Britain. "People are saying the same things we were saying 20, 30 years ago, and they still need saying. But it's much better than yesterday, much better." |
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| Where
to get it
Prospect Books & Petits Propos Culinaires Allaleigh House, Blackawton, Totnes, Devon, 01803 712269, prospectbooks.co.uk |
At heart, Jaine is a word man and a book man.
I'm not much good at the selling bit! like producing books. I'm not much
good at covers, but I love all the rest, particularly editing. And typography,
and getting the paper right. I don't do it to make money. You've got to
be joking. We make what you might call a taxable profit one year in three.
And lose money one year in 10.
"How do I know what's going to sell? Well, Building A Wood-Fired Oven For Bread And Pizza, which I wrote and published in 1996, still sells pretty well, and who would have thought that? And Alan's books [Alan Davidson] go on selling. They help keep us afloat. And Traditional Foods Of Britain was a godsend because it was taken up by HarperCollins and republished as A Taste of Britain, and they have paid us a whole leap of money." Prospect Books even has a magazine section.
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Just the one magazine, mind, Petits Propos Culinaires,
which Jaine took over from Alan Davidson. You won't find it on the shelves
alongside Olive, though, not with articles on such diverse subjects as
Kafka's Soup, Working-Class Diet In Victorian And Edwardian Nottingham
and Tante Stella's Quince Sweetmeat, to select just three from the latest
edition. And it comes out only three times a year. But it has all the hallmarks
of a Jaine production: lively, exquisitely type-set, easy to read and elegantly
edited.
I was, however, struck by one novelty in PPC. The page opposite the contents list has this disclaimer: "In case it was not self-evident, any unsigned contribution to this journal is written by Tom Jaine." "Why?" I asked. "Oh, some silly bugger complained that they didn't know who some of
the book reviews were by. I mean, it's self-evident that if they weren't
signed by someone else, they were written by me. Isn't it?"
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