Literature is very much a source of inspiration for the kitchens we design at Johnny Grey Studios, whether to conjure creativity or explore how the latest neuroscience research might affect kitchen design. Here’s a list of several food and garden books Johnny has picked up this year, and he recommends you do the same. (And if you missed this last year, make sure to check out Johnny’s Most Delicious Reads from 2010.)

Since our outdoor kitchen for Alitex was opposite Cleve West’s show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, Johnny decided to go to Cleve’s talk about his new book Our Plot at Petersham Nurseries, near Richmond. Starting out gardening an allotment, Cleve ended up living there during the day, cooking and eating in a simple but sociable way with his newly-found extended family of gardeners. Our Plot details this with charm.

Dan Pearson’s newly published Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City is garden writing verging on poetry with photography to match. Colour in the Garden by Val Bourne, a subject Johnny always wants to learn more about, is very useful. Nicole de Vésian Gardens: Modern Design in Provence by Louisa Jones is inspirational and, from the English side of the Channel, a pleasurable fantasy.

There are two pillars of modern eating, according to Adam Gopnik author of The Table Comes First: the restaurant and the recipe.  We’d like to add a third, the sociable home kitchen, which captures our core idea of kitchen design based on instinct.

Build your own bread oven: Johnny’s family did. Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer is about the one most worth having, simply produced and usable.

Egon Ronay, a biography edited by JGS client Peter Bazalgette, is the story of a Hungarian immigrant succeeding in bringing food awareness to a grim post-war Britain, which probably suffered one of the worst dearths of decent ingredients and cooking in modern peacetime.

At Elizabeth David’s Table. Though written almost sixty years ago, these recipes stand out. They are delicious, authentic to their country of origin, and take us armchair travelling to the ‘blessed sun and shores of the Mediterranean’, as Elizabeth says. Johnny keeps it by his stove.

Throughout 2011, I will be quoting passages from contemporary fiction, as I come across them, on kitchens and interior spaces, selected for how they encourage emotional engagement with kitchens and interiors and engender a sense of belonging. They will show how houses and interiors can be more than just shelter, clever design or good investments.

In The End of the Land (2010), author David Grossman describes Avram’s house, near Jerusalem, into which the protagonist has recently moved:

The house itself was finely attuned to Ora’s moods. It carefully, hesitantly shed its age-old gloominess, stretched its limbs, and cracked its stiff joints, and when it realized that Ora was permitting it to retain the occasional pocket of charming abandon and even some healthy neglect, it grew into a comfortable unkemptness, until at times, when a certain light hit, it almost looked happy’. A place on the edge of becoming a real home.  Ora felt that Ilan (her husband and mutual friend of Avram) was  ‘content in the house, with the collegiate mess she created in it, and that her taste – meaning her assortment of tastes – was to his liking. Even when things suddenly went bad between them, and their togetherness emptied out with alarming speed, she believed his affection for the home she had made for them still pulsed inside him’…. Her voice pauses for a moment, and she quickly turns on the radio, like someone opening a window…. she needs talk, a human voice.

This passage shows how home owners embed their emotional experiences in their surroundings and make a subliminal investment in the fabric of their rooms, which is so hard to achieve via straight design. To some extent it is inevitable that with time and thought, but transference of this kind can be encouraged by avoiding too much built-in furniture, non-ageing surfaces, single style aesthetics and making visible items that tell of the owner’s life story. Above, this personal story is told through Ora’s personal assortment of tastes, a comfortable unkemptness, compatibility with different moods, the penetration of daylight. She also needs opportunity for eye contact that will allow for sociability and conversation.

By creating furniture with character, avoiding uniform design, encouraging cooking counters that face into the room, adding playful details and the qualities of handmade finishes, accepting the quirkiness of old buildings and not trying to correct every defect, there is room for these mental activities to occur. All of these design features assist in showering the fabric of the house with sparks of connectivity, constant mini-electrical shocks that massage your feet, or soft hooks that attach your brain cells to the circuit that says “I belong.”  At JGS we hope our kitchen and living spaces encourage these subliminal processes but have yet to record them, particularly in the extraordinary moving way that David Grossman has done in this book.

This week we’re posting excerpts from Elizabeth David’s Christmas. You can find her recipe on Pumpkin & Tomato Chutney here. Here’s Elizabeth’s take on how to keep it simple at Christmas*:

If I had my way – and I shan’t – my Christmas Day eating and cooking would consist of an omelet and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening. This lovely, selfish, anti-gorging, un-Christmas dream of hospitality, either given or taken, must be shared by thousands of women who know it’s all Lombard Street to a China orange that they’ll spend both Christmas Eve and Christmas morning peeling, chopping, mixing, boiling, roasting, steaming. That they will eat and drink too much, that someone will say the turkey isn’t as good as last year, or discover that the rum for the pudding has been forgotten, that by the time lunch has been washed up and put away it’ll be teatime, not to say drink or dinner time, and tomorrow it’s the weekend, at it’s going to start all over again.

Well, I know that any woman who has to provide for a lot of children or a big family has no alternative. This grisly orgy of spending and cooking and anxiety has to be faced. We are so many fathoms deep in custom and tradition and sentiment over Christmas; we have gotten so far, with our obsessive present-buying and frenzied cooking, from the spirit of a simple Christian festival, that only the most determined of Scrooges can actually turn their faces to the wall and ignore the whole thing when the time comes. At the same time, there must be quite a few small families, couples without children, and people living along, who like to celebrate Christmas in a reasonably modest and civilized way: inviting over a friend or two who might otherwise be alone (well, maybe, like you and me, they’d rather be alone, but this is an eccentricity not accepted at Christmas time) – and for much small-scale Christmas meals, at least, the shopping and cooking marathons can be avoided, the host and hostess can be allowed to enjoy themselves, and the guests needn’t have guilt about the washing up.

For such a meal, I’d make the main dish something fairly straightforward and conventional, the color and festive look being supplied by something bright and beautiful as a garnish. Not inedible decorations, but something simple and unexpected such as a big bowl of crimson sweet-sour cherry sauce with a roast duck; a handsome dish of tomatoes stuffed with savory rice with a capon; a Madeira and truffle-scented sauce with a piece of plain roast beef; slice oranges with a pork roast or a ham.

The first course I’d make as painless as possible for the cook: if money were no object, lots of smoked salmon or Parma ham to precede the duck; before the beef, a French duck pate with truffles and pistachio nuts, avocado pears, or simply a lovely dish of egg or prawn mayonnaise. Or, if you’d cooked a ham or piece of gammon or pickled pork to last over the Christmas holiday, then a few finely carved slices of that, with a bowl of cubed honeydew melon or some pickled peaches – there’s no reason why English cooked ham should not make just as good a first course as the raw Parma or Bayonne ham.

As for pudding, unless you feel you absolutely have to have at least the traditional mince pies (those who only each the Christmas pudding because of the brandy or rum butter will find it equally delicious with mince pies), most people will be grateful if you skip straight to the Christmas dessert fruits. Usually one is too full to appreciate the charms of Malaga raisins, Smyrna figs, almonds, glacé apricots and sugar-plums, or you could perhaps finish up with a big bowl of mixed fresh pineapple and sliced oranges.

*From Elizabeth David’s Christmas, David R. Godine: Boston, 2008. US Edition, p 6-8.