I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a little fed up of being lectured by my cookbooks. Yes, yes, I know that since Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with his Internet wheeze, cookbooks stopped being merely a resource for recipes. They’re now more of a Sunday morning browse, more dipped in and out of than a chip-and-dip bowl of hummus at a suburban soirée. But page upon page of photographs of the restaurant, entire spreads of beautiful graphics (and I speak as someone who appreciates a beautiful graphic as much as the next person), and hectoring about the quality of one’s meat—now there I draw the line. Most of these books have a fairly self-selecting audience of those who already care about the quality of their meat. I’d like a few more recipes, please. Hawksmoor At Home, for example, doesn’t get going on the recipes until page 62. I’m not counting Steak in Butter, though others might. There are frontispieces, backispieces, quirky little illustrations, rants about animal welfare, educational spreads regarding cuts of meat. It’s not to say that those things aren’t important. They are. And I’m not a slave to recipes: I am a pretty confident and inventive cook when left to my own devices. But if I buy a recipe book, I want recipes.

Hawksmoor are laudably donating all proceeds (not profits, mark you) from their book to the charity Action Against Hunger – and they don’t trumpet this – which does admittedly make all this a good deal easier to swallow. But I hanker after the kind of cookbook that told you how to make an amazing dish out of a tin of tomatoes and a few cupboard-scrapings. One thing I do absolutely hold by is the idea that if you want to buy cheap meat, you should buy cheap cuts, not cheaply reared meat. The farming revolution needs to happen from the bottom up. (And you can be damn sure that it will be televised.)