The Impoverished Gastronome - Brossura

For everyone who would dearly like all those chef books, but cannot afford either the books, the time, or the ingredients, over 50 renowned chefs share their culinary secrets on how to create a 3-course dinner for six for around a tenner.

Sub-editing articles on closed-end equity funds for the Investors Chronicle is just as dull as it sounds. Having demonstrated a remarkable ineptitude for so doing, David Chater was ‘let go’ a year ago. And so, skint but happy, he decided to get on his bike (literally) and write a cook book he’d use himself.

Armed with more cheek than knowledge, Chater pestered and pleaded with some of our greatest chefs, from Rowley Leigh and Stephen Bull to this country’s best Indian vegetarian cook. THE IMPOVERISHED GASTRONOME is the result.

With over 150 recipes divided chef by chef into menus, each preceded by a highly idiosyncratic preface by Chater, this book rehabilitates herring roe and neck of lamb, the humble banana and other offerings not often seen in Harrods Food Hall to make over 50 glorious -but cheap- meals.

As Chater himself puts it, ‘A perfect fishcake argues strongly that poverty, like hunger, is a strong sauce.’