The idea to create an online library of the world’s best cookbook recipes came to Matt Cockerill five years ago as he lay in a hospital bed. While out riding in Hertfordshire with his local cycling club he had been involved in a 12-bike pile-up on black ice. Although he suffered no broken bones, a week later he was admitted to hospital after flesh-eating bacteria began feasting on his hip.
Cockerill, who lives in north London with his wife and three children, missed his cookbooks while he was recovering from the two operations that he underwent. Few people would be masochistic enough to want to read cookbooks while living on hospital food, but the 48-year-old Cambridge graduate, who was a science publisher at the time of his accident, has such a passion for them that he learnt Spanish just to be able to enjoy Ferran Adrià’s Los secretos del El Bulli.
The first task he set himself was to solicit recommendations from every famous chef he could think of, no matter how obscure the cookbooks were (MFK Fisher’s wartime How to Cook a Wolf was one of Yotam Ottolenghi’s eclectic top ten). He was soon to be blown away by everyone’s support for the project. An Instagram message from Nigella Lawson with multiple love heart emojis made him feel “a little trembly”, he admits, as did meeting her at a dinner she hosted in Oxford for her cookbook hero, Anna Del Conte.
The writers, agents and editors may have been enthusiastic, but when you’re trying to do for cooking what Spotify has done for music by creating a vast resource of recipes from the world’s latest cookbooks and its greatest classics, negotiating old contracts and new licences was never going to be straightforward. So while Del Conte’s recipes are on ckbk — the digital subscription service that Cockerill’s efforts culminated in — Lawson’s and Ottolenghi’s aren’t. Yet.
“It’s clear this increased access to the best cookbooks is going to happen, is the future,” Cockerill says. “Exactly which books and when is down to the process — book rights are complicated — and to individual publishers, some of whom are quicker to embrace the idea than others, for whom the brave new world is more of a worry.”
Locating chefs to ask for their permission has also proved something of a challenge. For instance, Graham Kerr, who came to fame in the Seventies TV series The Galloping Gourmet, is in his eighties, and it was only after a great deal of detective work that Cockerill found him in a retirement home in deepest America.
I first heard about ckbk when Cockerill contacted me asking for permission to put my father Quentin’s book The Great Chefs of France on the site. In 1977 Dad visited and interviewed all the three-Michelin-star chefs in France outside Paris at the time. There were 13, and they constituted some of the greatest names in French cuisine.
I am organising a charity fundraising dinner to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the book’s publication, and have been amazed by how many chefs have told me that the book inspired them, including Marco Pierre White, who read it when he was 16 and says that he wouldn’t be a chef today had he not read it. Through ckbk I hope it may gain recognition among the wider public once again, so I said yes to Cockerill immediately.
There are, of course, tougher deal-makers out there than me and, for them, Cockerill has a secret negotiating weapon: homemade marmalade — his preferred method of demonstrating some basic level of culinary credentials when approaching potential partners. When Marcella Hazan’s husband, Victor, said he was prepared to discuss the rights to the recipes of the doyenne of Italian cuisine in America, Cockerill hopped on a flight to New York with a batch of it.
“The pressure change during the transatlantic flight led to several jars exploding in my suitcase,” he says. “Luckily, enough of the consignment survived. I had a minor last-minute panic that offering marmalade to a Floridian had a coals-to-Newcastle aspect, but I needn’t have worried. The marmalade was declared a hit . . . and Marcella joined our list of licensed authors.”
That list is now in its hundreds and includes such esteemed names as Rowley Leigh, Keith Floyd, Ken Hom and Mrs Balbir Singh, the so-called Indian Delia who is credited with having invented chicken tikka masala.
For £8.99 a month a subscriber can read all the books and access their 100,000-plus recipes, create recipe “playlists”, receive personalised recommendations “like with Netflix” and share favourites with friends. Menu planning, nutritional analysis and quantity scaling are all there.
Eventually the service will help people to source ingredients, generate shopping lists and make online grocery orders, but Cockerill doesn’t want to rush things. “As the slow food movement has shown, time and patience are often the key to great results,” he says, “whether you are baking sourdough bread or growing your own wasabi.”
ckbk.com
For information on the Great Chefs’ Dinner, visit musculardystrophyuk.org/events/the-great-chefs-dinner/
