Anne Willan

Not everyone’s father sends his daughter a brace of pheasants while she is studying economics at Cambridge. With a choice of two gas rings on which to cook them, Anne Willan eviscerated and plucked the birds, then used one gas ring to cook a pheasant casserole and the other to make a caramel custard that she ‘steamed over a galvanised tin laundry bucket’. She was, I’d guess, nineteen.

The Cookbook Library is an eminently readable and informative survey of the development of European (and North American) culinary literature from antiquity until the early nineteenth century, from Greek and Roman texts to Antonin Carême. The project, inspired by Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky’s extensive personal cookbook library, draws on Willan’s considerable professional cookery expertise: in addition to setting up her own cookery school in Paris, La Varenne, in 1975, Willan has published extensively on French cookery and is a leading authority on the subject. But this is much more than a catalogue of an indisputably fine private collection. It covers the subject broadly, way beyond the confines of the couple’s own substantial holdings and their linguistic comfort.