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.

When I was driving my aunt Elizabeth David around Wales in pursuit of her research into historic ovens for her bread book in the early 1970s, I did not appreciate her obsessive interest in how ovens worked. Now I understand, at least in relation to cob ovens. These ovens miraculously transform the flavour and texture of bread, pizza and roasted vegetables. Radiant heat given off by the clay walls cooks food quite differently from the network of heat-producing electric elements in the metal boxes that are modern ovens.

The process of making them was the other transformative aspect of the cob oven course we sponsored at West Lexham in eastern England last weekend. It was held at the Norfolk country house of landscape gardener Edmund Colville, who offers educational courses in a beautiful setting. Our family spent an extraordinary weekend of learning how to build a bread oven made out of cob from scratch. This was an experience of making, involving head (in the planning), hands and feet (treading and kneading the clay and sand into cob) and stomach (on the receiving end of the first baking) – as well as the great pleasure of working together on a common project.

There was so much to discover. Dan Britton, an expert of building cob ovens at festivals like Glastonbury was course leader, who along with Viv Goodings, builder and nature lore expert, guided us through the process with quiet expertise and created a sense of shared exploration. On the second day, resident baker Simon Blackwell showed us how to make sourdough bread.

Pictures tell the story best.  My brother Steve and eldest son Harry sparked off inventive ideas like building in a recycled radiator for the extra bonus of free hot water once the oven is lit. My wife Becca and the others joined in and discovered new interests in, for example, making pottery.

My family and I are now in a rush to build a cob oven at home and also to persuade our clients, at least all those with garden terraces, to do the same. A feature like this is a perfect focus for an active, outdoor kitchen.  Add a few outdoor beanbags and you can settle down for a long evening in your new living space with the sky as a roof and not a TV in sight.

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.