Orig. published as Kitchen in the corner.Serious staining on bottom edge. ( )

A bedsitter is a single room without plumbing, as one might inhabit when living thriftily in a shared house. I've always had kitchen-sharing rights when I lived in one of these, but I certainly remember being nervous of the kitchen or of my housemates. Whitehorn writes as though one was not allowed to do more than boil tea or heat soup in one's room but also wasn't allowed to use the real kitchen. Of course, if you're poor enough to live in a bedsit, you aren't going to eat at restaurants very often. This extremely slender, practical cookbook is full of advice on hiding the smells of cooking, keeping an asbestos mat under the bed, doing the washing-up in a shared bathroom. The comedy is innate.

She also makes one of the most sensible defenses of traditional English cuisine I've ever read, while abandoning it as impractical.

"The principles of English cooking demand that first-class food should be cooked as simply as possible, and that a number of different foods should be cooked separately and served together."

Indeed, if you have an Aga (vast thermal mass, will cook gallons of food at once) in a house with a country garden (fresh truck and eggs, the best thing to do is not fuss over it too much) you would produce... something a lot like the Pacific Coast standard of fresh, seasonal, and varied. But if you have one small, weak fire, and can't chop more than one thing at a time:

"...bedsitter people have far more natural kinship with nomads brewing up in the desert over a small fire of camel dung, or impoverished Italian peasants eking out three shrimps and lump of cheese with half a cartload of spaghetti."

Whitehorn was, therefore, working with more technical constraints than was [Edouard de Pomiane]. She recommends reheating rice or potatoes every few days instead of cooking them fresh, or eating bread as a filler (perhaps that went without saying for someone in France). Casseroles work, eggs work, green salads are the easiest veg, and there's simply nothing to be done about the smells.

That said, she has practical instructions for casseroles, fried fritters, many soups, creamed this and that, and parties from the raucous and artistic to the calculatedly intimate to the truly difficult: one's protective parents.

This is more of a curiosity than a cookbook, now, and a current version would surely abandon the heating element for a microwave -- perhaps disguised as a TV. Whitehorn's voice is delightful, though, and anyone who likes [Peg Bracken] might enjoy this. ( )

For those of a certain age this book is a time machine to take you back to the days when fish and spinach usually came in frozen bricks, fridges were hard to come by and you could get a bottle of Spanish red - "implies the rough peasant touch" - for 6/6d (32 and a half pence, that is) .

There is still useful advice for the culinary naif but times change and there are better books with a more contemporary touch available. As a nostalgia trip, Whitehorn's writing remains pithy and to the point and younger generations might enjoy finding out what their parents got up to. ( )

This book got me started when I could do little more than heat a can of soup and make toast. As well as providing recipes that can be followed by the most lazy and incompetent undergraduate student, it is full of hilarious and perceptive remarks about the difficulty of self-catering in student digs or the like. As Whitehorn says, "Cooking in a bedsitter is not just a matter of finding something that can be cooked on a single ring. It is a problem of finding somewhere to put down the fork while you take the lid off the saucepan, and then finding somewhere else to put the lid. ... It is cooking at floor level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl, which in any case is full of socks." Even though I probably only used about a dozen or so of the recipes more than once, this book was a huge delight: wittier than Delia Smith, and with a great understanding of the needs of the hungry troglodyte. I've only taken off half a star because it was originally written in 1961, long before the vegetarian revolution or the discovery of wholefoods, and even as revised, it offers little guidance on these topics. MB 14-vi-2007 ( )

A very useful guide to simple dishes. Miniumum fuss, minimum mess and tasty results. Not high quality gourmet food, but better than you'd do without the book. Now that I've a kitchen proper, it doesn't get used as much. Very helpful glossary/index. ( )