While I’ve no doubt that there are food purists out there who’d be clutching their pearls should they even deign to flick through The Snack Hacker, George Egg’s joyfully iconoclastic debut cookbook, those of us with a somewhat gutsier love of eating and cooking, and rather less desire to police our pleasures, are free to greet it gaily and go with it gladly. What I love about it is that, unlike that particular US school of cooking which routinely calls for, say, a pack of yellow cake mix or can of condensed soup as the basis for a recipe, The Snack Hacker approach is about maximising flavour, banishing blandness and eliminating the closely guarded boundary between high and low taste. Like George Egg, I am impatient with food snobbery and feel that such fastidious demarcation does nothing but limit pleasure. I’d go further, and say it distorts the very nature of cooking, which relies on opportunism, appetite-led inventiveness and an openness to call upon anything to hand. “I’m happy, nay keen” he writes, “to employ the potentially frowned-upon (salad cream, processed cheese, crabsticks, oven chips, Tunnack’s Tea Cakes) alongside the more expected (garlic, herbs, spices, bread) and then to bring in the potentially exotic (harissa, honey, tahini) in pursuit of interesting flavour combinations.”
The design of this book just invites cheerfulness, the photography inspires greed, and the writing is endearing in its comradeliness. It may be a book that takes delight in rule-breaking and snob-prodding, but it’s nonetheless a touchingly sincere, reflective undertaking. And it occurs to me that it would be a great book to give to any child just about to start at University: learning how to zhuzh up a cheese and onion bake or use some breakfast cereal to make a loaf of bread could be an excellent way to lose fear and gain confidence in a kitchen. But it’s not all about that: I’m drawn in particular, I must say, to the The Big Mack(erel), Wild Garlic Pesto Loaded Chips, Marmalade and Aniseed Cake, the Peshwari Toastie, and the Blackcurrant and Liquorice Pancakes, but the recipe that reeled me in was the one I am very excited to be sharing with you today: yes, of course it’s the Fish Finger Spaghetti!
The Snack Hacker: Rule-Breaking Recipes for Cooks and Non-Cooks by George Egg is available now in Hardback, ebook and Audio (published by Blink).
Illustrations by Jem Ward.
Photos by Matt Lincoln.
