A World in my Kitchen

If the term "mixologist" were used for a chef it would be a good description of Peter Gordon. He's a sort of Fat Boy Slim of the cookery world, with his mixing of different flavours - Asian, Japanese, Spanish, Turkish - extracted from the finest ingredients to produce his own distinct style of cookery.

His latest book, A World In My Kitchen, is a collection of recipes that he has written over the past seven years for the magazine, New Zealand House & Garden. It's a case of, "We've got the recipes, we've got the pictures, why not do a book?" Nothing wrong with that, but from a chef's point of view, I found myself wondering whether fusion recipes aimed at glossy mag readers would fit together.

Do food mixologists worry about precision? Is it just a case of adding 100g French to 5g Spanish with a pinch of Italian and a bit of Turkish and, hey presto, you've got frogs' legs with chorizo buttered tagliatelle and a touch of the baba ghanoushes?

I needn't have worried. In this book you are in the safe hands of Gordon, who really does know and care about what he's doing - unlike a lot of people who take the latest groovy ingredient from Vietnam and employ French techniques to cook it.

The book is like Gordon: clear, unpretentious and direct. And I think many professional chefs could learn from his honest approach to ingredients and the clean-cut flavours of his food. It's obvious - and, in fact, Gordon tells you in the book's introduction - that A World In My Kitchen is for the home cook, but there's a lot of information that restaurant chefs would find useful about ingredients and possible ingredient alternatives for some of the very specific New Zealand produce.

The book is divided into 12 logical chapters - light meals, sauces, veg, meat, poultry, etc - and each recipe has a few lines of introduction, which Gordon uses to personalise the food, giving you his thoughts on ingredients, sometimes a practical tip, and often its origins in his childhood or career.

I have had the honour of seeing the man himself in action when he ran a cookery course at the Hotel Tresanton in Cornwall while I was down there as head chef a few years ago. And I have to be honest, I like Gordon - the man as well as the chef. He stands for a lot of good things in this cut-throat catering world: charity work, involvement in education, and all this on top of running a very successful business, in which he remains true to his cookery style and values.

Peter Robinson, chef-proprietor, King's Arms, Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire

A World in My Kitchen
Peter Gordon
Aurum Press
£20
ISBN 1-86958-969-6