Skye Gyngell's How to cook is a mix of traditional favourites such as rice pudding (there are simpler and better) and bread and butter pudding (unnecessarily fussy), and the more extravagant such as freshly cooked lobster. However while this contains some interesting recipes along with some practical if sometimes rather obvious advice, I have a few quibbles with the book.

The book is are arranged according to occasion: Breakfast, Sunday Lunch . . . Afternoon Tea . . . Special Occasion . . . which apart from being rather prescriptive means that the recipes are all over the place; if you are looking for a main course it requires scouring the entire book, they are not grouped together, the same goes for deserts, cakes etc.

Some of the recipes I find rather fiddly, a lot of (unnecessary?) work, having been cooking for more years than I care to recall I don't believe all the extra work entailed is worth it, there are easier ways to produce a tasty dish. I also find some of the recipes wasteful; at least one requires that you discard the vegetables before serving, and the recipe for cucumber sandwiches not only wastes half the cucumber but instructs cutting the crusts of the bread - surely we are past such wasteful practices (and do we need to be told how to make a cucumber sandwich?).

This is not going to be a cookbook that I will be referring to often, there are too many irritations, a shame for simplified and arranged more logically it might prove a reasonable useful cookbook, if one ignores the extravagance. ( )