I guess it’s rather like childbirth – at the time we swear we’ll never do it again, but once it’s over we forget all about the pain and only see the remarkable result.  I may never be able to write standard US English again – my ‘z’ has been lost forever, I fear . . .

but it was worth it – and in the end, we DID do it again.

We were initially a bit stymied as to how to actually put our grand plan into form.  After much debate, we decided that as novices we should stick with the basics – start at the beginning and work our way to the end of a meal.  How hard could that be, after all?  Just collect the recipes, sort them out, plop them into a Word document and presto!  A cook book.

A very dull cook book.  We needed to tweak that plan . . . but first we needed to sort out the recipes.  And oh, did we have recipes.  Over 200 of them.  With the permission of the Chefs, I took responsibility for choosing which recipes would make the cut.  After many hours, a final set of recipes emerged; each of the twenty-six contributors had at least one recipe – most had recipes in several sections of the book – and there was a more or less equal distribution of recipes in each section.  Excellent.

Next was standardizing the recipes.  We decided to use UK English, since the book would be published in the UK, and offer both US and metric measurements.  Several chefs took up the challenge of creating conversion tables (you all just think it’s easy!) and took the lead in starting a glossary of translations as we debated such culinary conundrums as ‘when is a turnip not a turnip? (When it’s a Swede)’ and ‘what is Jell-O and why would I eat it?’  These questions also led to quite a bit of recipe revision, to make sure that it could be made on both sides of the pond.

Now we had recipes, but we needed more to create something special.  Having our celebrity contributors’ was a tremendous boon to our ‘Sharpe’ theme; how could we push that along?  After discussion, we fixed on giving our recipes ‘Sharpe’ names – and then our Welsh chef, Carol Penny, tossed out a funny little introduction for one of the dishes and a great idea was born.  Led by Carol’s talented pen, Las Vegas chef Shirley joined her in creating short ‘Sharpe’ stories for many of the recipes – a few of us offered up an intro or two as well.  Humour was added – but we still needed more.

It should be said that a number of the chefs are historians by trade - and we wanted to add some history to the mix.  History in a cook book is a shaky proposition, so we needed to tread softly in that regard.  I decided to introduce each section with a bit of the past, add two essays, and a collection of historical ‘tidbits’ – along with the very important NOS essay and bone health tips scattered throughout the book.  Carol wrote the section introductions and one of the essays, while our talented Norfolk chef, Muzzick, wrote an enlightening piece on cauldron cooking.  I added the tidbits and created a bibliography for the curious.

We had the words, and we had the basic order.  Now we needed the photos . . . but that’s another story!

In retrospect, it sounds easy – though I distinctly recall spending long hours pouring over the massive files that accumulated on my computer.

All images and text are property of Sharpe Chefs and

ITV, Picture Palace, Rex Features, Jason Salkey .