That's handy

"What we say is get a handful of this, a handful of that; forget about making pastry, it takes too long! Everything you can make with a pan and a bit of fire."

Ironically, but with good cause, Magdalena is adding to the weight of autumn cookbook releases, alongside the Nigellas and the Jamies, in the form of Hand To Mouth, the first book from York's first new publishing venture this century, ENDpapers.

Is it just another designer book for the coffee table? No, Hand To Mouth bears the sub-title No Ordinary Cookbook, and to prove the point, there are no glamorous celebrity portraits, no fashion-photography shots of impossible concoctions, no irritatingly hard-to-find ingredients.

Yes, the cookbook has recipes, from vegan to gluton-free to carnivorous, from dips to desserts via house-speciality banana curry, each accompanied by stories of the recipes' origins.

However, where else would you find recipes organised into cooking-by-colour sections, the technique used by El Piano, the restaurant with Latin verve in Grape Lane, York?

What could be simpler than orange for Carrot and Coriander Soup; black for Chocolate and Marshmallow Pie; kaleidoscope for Roast Vegetables?

And how many cookbooks do you know with a foreword by the local MP - "a good read and a good feed," says "survival cook" Hugh Bayley - or weighted with a ribbon book mark, crafted in copper in the shape of a hand by jewellery designer and El Piano chef Lisa Sharman?

Above all, rather than food-as-soft-porn photographs, Hand To Mouth's 120 pages are truly works of art: a series of collage backdrops designed by Rachel Stainsby. Some of the originals now hang in El Piano. This 21-year-old student from North Yorkshire is in the final year of her fine art course at York St John College, where her talent was spotted by Magdalena.

"Rachel had done these amazing sketchbooks, using old and damaged books from second-hand bookshops to save money," she recalls. We'd been talking at El Piano for some time about doing a cookbook, and seeing those sketchbooks, we thought Rachel's collages would be an interesting way to present recipes."

The book project was set in motion in January, and now the first print run is in the shops, with its distinctive, colour-driven recipes providing a collage education in the joy of preparing food.

"We've purposely not put pictures of dishes in the book because people feel they can't match them, but then food is not about performing; it's about socialising and being together" says Magdalena.

Her cookbook is not a blueprint but a guide, a starting point.

"I'm the mother of four children, three of them young adults, and what they ask me is not precisely how I make something, but what's the chemistry going on in there," Magdalena says. "If I have a hope for readers of the book it's that it builds their confidence not to follow recipes but to deviate. I want them to be deviant!"

The name Hand To Mouth is inspired partly by the sensuous nature of food but is more a testament to recipes being passed by word of mouth.

"No cook can ever truly say this is my recipe, and while celebrity chefs have done so much for food at home, what surprises me with those guys is how little credit they give to those who help them. They're like a lead singer who doesn't introduce the band," says Magdalena.

"Hopefully with the stories we tell, some philosophical, some risqu, some maybe a little obscure, we convey that what we do at El Piano stands on the shoulders of so many people you don't see. It's one of those human meshes that is positive in an alarming world.

"Hand For Mouth stands for how we get the information for cooking, and I see it as the last oral tradition in northern Europe, the last information that's passed from one generation to the next, because the fact is, it doesn't matter how many cookbooks you read, most things you eat will be what you ate with your mother, your grandmother, your friends, your colleagues at university."

There's food for thought.

Hand To Mouth, by Magdalena Chavez, Lisa Sharman, Rachel Stainsby, published by ENDpapers, York, at £14.95. Available from Borders, York, and Waterstone's nationwide.

Recipe: banana curry

In 2 tbl sunflower or soya oil, fry the 'holy trinity', in other words, garlic, onions and ginger. For this recipe, a teaspoon of each, finely chopped or grated.

When they are translucent, but not brown, add a teaspoon of madras curry powder followed quickly by six peeled and sliced bananas. Don't be fooled: bananas take longer to peel and slice than you think.

Fry all lightly and restrain from over-stirring or the fruit will break up. Within only a few minutes, add coconut milk to just cover the fruit, bring to the boil, add salt. Remove from the heat. Stir in chopped fresh coriander. Eat.

Updated: 12:03 Saturday, September 21, 2002