French Cooking for Men
Len Deighton
Published by HarperCollins, 2010 (Hardback)
Revised from Où est le Garlic?, 1965; Basic French Cooking, 1979; and Cookery Course, 1990
Cover design by Arnold Schwartzman
French Cooking for Men was originally published in 1965 as Où est le Garlic? It was written and drawn by Len Deighton, a military historian, cookery writer and novelist. The cookstrips were originally written and drawn by Deighton for The Observer and developed from notes that Deighton pinned to his kitchen walls whilst cooking.
The cookstrips are fantastically simple: they present, in a concise, considered and practical manner, the very basic details needed to cook authentic French food. Deighton uses drawings to annotate and illuminate the cooking process with a minimum amount of text: these are perfect for consulting whilst cooking and reveal the author’s mastery of cooking in his ability to strip each recipe or technique down to its bare essentials. In a text that runs alongside each cookstrip, Deighton elaborates on the individual dishes, further revealing his love for and the depth of his knowledge of French cookery, building the trust and confidence of the reader.
Deighton is firmly associated with London of the swinging sixties: his character, Harry Palmer, as played by Michael Caine in the 1965 film of Deighton’s novel The IPCRESS File, epitomised a cool, sharply-dressed, working class and cultured masculinity. Palmer shares with Deighton, a passion for cooking, which, given Deighton’s fanbase and the popularity of his character, must have helped sales of this book and introduced a generation of men to the joys of cooking. The over-riding tone of the book is masculine: cool, concise and clever; with its core of Deighton’s erudition and enthusiasm, French Cooking for Men, with its practical approach to demystifying the process of cooking, functions as a timeless instruction manual that is as useful and relevant today as when it was first published.
Front Cover
The cover is a collaged photograph which juxtaposes a cut-out detail from a vintage (probably early 20th Century) sepia-toned photograph of a team of chefs against one of Len Deighton’s cookstrips which is reproduced in black and creamy-yellow. The chefs are wearing traditional kitchen whites: white double-breasted jacket, striped trousers, white neckerchief and tall white hat. They are organised in three rows; the front row seated and the back row standing on a platform of some kind. In the centre of the photograph sits a man in a dark suit, possibly the restaurant owner; the cover designer, Arnold Schwartzman, has replaced his features with the smiling face of Len Deighton. The featured cookstrip is ‘Potato’, chosen, according to the cover designer, because ‘it seemed to capture the very essence of this book’s friendly and approachable method of instruction.’
Original Penguin cover, 1965
The title of the book and the author’s name appear above the photograph, reversed out of a red band, in white. The title and author’s name are set in Goudy Heavyface Condensed; at this scale the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the typeface are revealed, amplifying the slightly irreverent treatment of the photograph and, by extension, the playful authorial tone inside the book. At the bottom of the photograph, reversed out in white, is a quotation from the food writer Fay Maschler, which is set in Condensed Franklin Gothic, an approximation of one of the hand-drawn typefaces rendered by Deighton in his cooking strips.
Around the photograph and the red strip containing the title is a narrow white border which, in turn, is surrounded by a wider, navy blue border: the combination of red, white and blue is an obvious reference to the Tricolore, the French flag.
Through its design, the cover references two disparate periods of time: the 1960s when the book was first published; and the early twentieth century. This melding of history highlights Deighton’s nostalgia for traditional French cooking and also plays on the current day nostalgia for the retro masculinity of characters featured in the TV series Mad Men and Len Deighton's own creation, Harry Palmer.
Inside Pages
The book is landscape format, with a modest size of 19.5 cm by 13.5 cm, it is printed one colour, black, on a grey-white uncoated paper which is not very substantial and gives lots of see-through. The landscape format, unusual for a cook book, has been designed to fit the size and format of the 50 cookstrips which form the heart of the book. The body text has been set on a two column grid with equal inside, outside and top margins with a deeper margin at the bottom containing page numbers and footers. The two columns of text are separated by a rule which although slightly unnecessary and decorative, fits with the elaborate use of borders and fleurons used elsewhere in the book. The body text is set in Optima and is justified. Titles, sub-titles, footers, page numbers and section openings are set in Clarendon in regular and bold, in various combinations of uppercase and sentence case.
The book is divided into sections, each dealing with, as you might expect for a cook book, types of food: meat, cheese, wine, etc. The book also includes sections on French and English culinary words; menu planning; advice on pots, pans and serving dishes for the kitchen; a complete description of French sauces; and, finally, the 50 cookstrips - ‘Basic French cooking in 50 simple lessons.’ The sections openings are announced with a full-page decorative design: the title is set in centred, uppercase bold Clarendon with a sub-title in centred, sentence case Clarendon below it; a flamboyant line border with fleur-de-lys corners and a printers ornament separates the title and the sub-title; in addition, each section features a historical black and white line engraving that relates to the content of the section. I would suggest that these section openings are knowingly kitsch, adopting bourgeois design affectations that gently poke fun at the perceived idea, by most English people, that the French are unnecessarily obsessed with taste and refinement.
The book contains no photographs but is illustrated with numerous black and white line drawings that appear throughout the text, usually at a modest scale and fitting into the width of the column. Some of these illustrations are in the same style as the drawings in the famous cookstrips. The cookstrips were produced by Deighton in the mid 1960s, when, instead of taking cook books into the kitchen with him, he drew comic strips of the recipes and stuck them to his kitchen wall. The cookstrips have a simple charm, drawn in black on white, they have a naive yet sophisticated style that places them firmly in the swinging sixties.
The cookstrips present a complete cooking course: the earliest strips begin with the basics of measuring heat and bulk, then progress to how to perfectly slice vegetables, make various sauces and pastry then on to more complex dishes such as daubes and poached chicken. The tone is wonderfully simple throughout: each strip usually consists of five numbered panels at most, but usually less; a minimum of written instructions or lists of ingredients is supplemented by line drawings that illustrate a process or particular ingredient. The cookstrips are mainly annotated with handwriting which is consistent, clear and readable; the handwriting is accompanied by titles and subtitles that are mainly set in different weights and widths of Bureau Grotesque - occasionally, these titles appear to be hand-rendered, adding to the quirky charm of the cookstrips.
It is perfectly possible to cook the dishes from the information supplied in the cookstrips but Deighton supplements them with a page of commentary that runs on the opposite page; here, Deighton offers his thoughts on the dish in question with tips for its preparation and variations that can transform it. This text is set in the same two column style as elsewhere but with the addition of a fleuron at the foot of the text, centred on the two columns, that balances the two pages and anchors the text.
The original drawing of the cookstrips are supplemented with found images - clip art - that are from a variety of sources but mainly appear to be Victorian. The selection of these images perhaps reflects the 1960s interest in Victoriana - Peter Blake’s use of Victorian ‘scraps’ for his collages for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, is a good example. Like the collage that appears on the cover, the use of these found images is interesting in terms of history and nostalgia and how the meaning an image can change with time and context.
Diagrams, in different styles, are used throughout the book: there are simple line drawings of animals showing French cuts of meat; simple tables that detail the preparation of food for freezing; drawings with hand-rendered type that explain the intricacies of French culinary language; simple but informative line drawings of kitchen equipment; and flow-charts that show the relationship between different types of French sauces.