Roast Chicken and Other Stories
Simon Hopkinson with Lindsay Bareham
Published by Ebury Press, 1995 (Paperback)
Designed by Paul Bowden
Illustrations by Flo Bayley
Cover design by Rebecca Forster
This book is written by Simon Hopkinson, ‘one of Britain’s top chefs’ and a respected food writer. The design is simple, uncluttered and, on the whole, helps the reader navigate the contents. The design of the book and its relative small size, which is closer to a reference book than a cookery book, establishes the idea that this is a serious book: the over-riding effect is of understated authority generated by the use of Garamond in a formal manner. Running parallel, and in contrast, to the authority of the reference book is the idea of the book as an anthology of stories, established by the title of the book and amplified by the cover design which, with its illustration of a lemon, has more in common with the cover of a novel than a cook book.
I would argue that the design of this book suggests it can be read in two ways: the reader can choose to consult the book as a reference book, using the contents page or the index to navigate the content or, with its continuous text, it can be read as an anthology of stories, of recollections about food. It is this tension between the two functions of the book, amplified by the design, that make it such an interesting read.
Front cover
The cover is a solid vibrant blue with a dominant element of a simple illustration of a brightly-coloured lemon that contrasts against the blue; an outline illustration, barely noticeable on first glance, of a carving fork adds another level of detail to the cover. The title of the book and the author is set in lowercase sans-serif typeface, possibly Corbel, and is ranged left in the upper left-hand corner. The title of the book and the subtitle are the second most dominant element in the cover hierarchy, they are printed in two lighter blues with the author’s name in white.
The cover is simple but perfectly balanced. The lack of information and the tension between the title of the book and the seemingly non-related illustration of the lemon creates an intrigue which invites the reader to find out more. The cover acts as a taster for the ‘stories’ contained within; the format of the book, which is under sized for a cookery book, adds to the conceit that this is a story book, looking more like a novel than a cookery book.
Inside Pages
The book is 15 cm by 21 cm with black text and some full colour illustrations printed on white coated paper. The layout is based on a one-column grid with narrow inside and outside margins and symmetrical facing pages. Garamond is used throughout the book: centred titlecase bold Garamond is used for recipe titles; regular Garamond for the justified body text with bold sentence case Garamond for emphasis. Running heads are centred, set in small caps Garamond with a decorative rule beneath; pagination is centred and appears at the foot of the page.
The book is divided into sections, each dealing with a type of food, that open with a double (or occasionally single) page spread; watercolour illustrations are used on these pages to add interest and the opening pages are demarcated from the main pages by having no running heads or decorative rules. The recipes themselves are set in the same style as the ‘stories’ that precede them and are separated by the list of ingredients.
The idiosyncratic watercolour illustrations are scattered throughout the book, acting as a foil to the formality of the typography; they usually show, in a fairly representational manner, the ingredients being discussed. Section openings are announced with a larger illustration, contained in a square; these tend to be excursions into whimsy - a hake swimming in a scarf or the Eiffel tower topped with a head of garlic for example. The recipes themselves are not illustrated and I would suggest that this places the book in a lineage of books by respected food writers such as Elizabeth David and Richard Olney that have few or no illustrations. The subliminal message is that this is not a book for looking at - for idly flicking through, it is a book by a serious writer that is intended to be read.
This is not an easy book to follow whilst cooking: the type is quite small and the line length a little too long; it feels like a book which is intended for reading and not for consulting whilst cooking. The lists of ingredients are centred on the page; this works surprisingly well with the majority of ingredients being only three or four words - where the ingredient is longer, taking up the width of the page, the result is not pleasing and line breaks might have helped the reader.
There is a contents page at the front of the book which, through a controlled and simple typographical hierarchy, shows the contents of the book, breaking it down into the various sections which are shown in bold uppercase Garamond with the recipes in each section presented underneath in regular Garamond. The contents page clearly explains the structure of the book: ingredients (anchovy, asparagus, aubergine etc) arranged alphabetically with recipes focussing on each of the ingredients underneath. I feel it is worth highlighting the contents page of this book as it functions so successfully. It is clear, that when contents pages function well, they help the reader to understand and navigate, from the very start, the various parts of the book, offering a key to the structure.