The Game Cook: Inspired by banter at the New Street Butchers

New Street in Horsham is a residential street lined with Victorian terraced houses. Nothing special about it you might think. But you’d be wrong.

In a small parade of shops, you’ll find the New Street Butchers, which is a very special place indeed. Unless a vegetarian, you can’t fail to love what they sell: an array of every delectable meat you can imagine, designed not just to provide sustenance, but a mouthwatering gourmet experience. Animals reared with care by local farmers and prepared by skilled master butchers who take the time to learn your name (and remember what you bought last time).

Almost as good as the beef is the banter — the family run team make it their business to be in good humour and make customers feel looked after. This butchers, despite being a walk from Horsham’s centre, is a jewel in the town’s crown and attracts custom from far and wide. Among them, me. And Norman Tebbit.

My experience and Tebbit’s is that once you’re a customer, you’re a regular. Supermarket meat never tastes as good. Your curiosity about how to cook things you’ve never tried before is aroused. Which is why my eyes were drawn to a book on the counter when I last visited — a book called The Game Cook, written by Tebbit himself.

A relic of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, he makes an unlikely celebrity chef for the noughties, but the idea is inspired. I confess to being a little unsure as to what constituted “game” until I looked at the book, but I now know it to be any wild animal that is hunted for food, including pheasant, goose, partridge, quail and rabbit. And, despite the objections that many have to hunting, game is an incredibly eco-friendly food. So the book, although presented in quite an old fashioned style, is actually quite “now”.

So what was the catalyst for a new career in cookery writing? A conversation in the New Street Butchers no less. The story goes that Tebbit came in one day and was looking at the pheasants, which were priced between £4 and £5. He said: “Why do people pay more for a rubber-boned supermarket chicken than they would for a pheasant?” “Well,” replied the butcher, “I think mostly it’s because they don’t know how to cook them – and they think it would be very difficult.”

And there was the start of a bright idea. The Game Cook provides simple, classic recipes collected by Tebbit, with a fluid approach to instruction — measurements are not precise and dishes are meant to be tweaked to taste.

Me Cheeta: Aping the Hollywood memoir with true wit

A shout-out on Twitter for book recommendations yielded an interesting crop of titles. One stands out for its hilarity… Me Cheeta: The Autobiography is billed as the “incredible, moving and hilarious story of Cheeta the Chimp, simian star of the big screen” and a “behind-the-scenes romp through the golden years of Hollywood”.

I remember Cheeta from the Tarzan flicks I used to watch as a kid, but had no idea that the 76 year old chimp has survived both Tarzan and Jane and is now living out his twilight years as an abstract painter in Hollywood.

James Lever has written a novel disguised as his memoir, which is — so the publishers say — “Full of humour, wit and emotion… the truly unique tale of a monkey stolen from deepest Africa and forced to make a living among the fake jungles and outrageous stars of Hollywood’s golden age.”

A novel masquerading as a monkey’s autobiography? Intriguing. An insight into tinseltown in the 1930’s and 40’s? Tantalising. I want to know more.

Carole Cadwalladr at The Observer calls this “a rather joyous satire” and Cheeta’s observations “rude, funny, vindictive, revelatory, brutal”. Anne Billson at The Telegraph finds the best part of the book “laugh-out-loud hilarious”. This sounds like a blast — I’m going to snap up a copy and report back on whether this chimp should stick to finger painting — or actually has a future in writing.