The man whose cooking became a comic book

In 1962, The Observer published the first of Len Deighton’s cookstrips, a format of his own invention. Though best known as a novelist, Deighton, who died last this week aged 97, was a recipe writer first: his debut cookstrip was published eight months before The Ipcress File. His was a famously varied career – before that he was an illustrator and before that, while he was at art school, he was a pastry chef at London’s Royal Festival Hall. There, he’d sketch out the directions for the dish he was making.

It became the way he cooked at home to preserve his expensive cookbooks. At a dinner party, a sketch was spotted by designer Raymond Hawkey and journalist Clive Irving, who saw a potential for publication. After a brief stint in the Daily Express, Deighton’s cookstrips found a regular home in The Observer.

Deighton’s cookstrips show that the only constants in a recipe are ingredients and method – everything else is the cook’s flair. In the pages of The Observer, that concept proved quietly radical: visual, modern, attuned to changing times. They spoke to younger men with disposable income, time and a taste for pleasure. “At the start of the 60s, it was unusual for a man to be into food – and some of the things I did hurried that process along a bit as incomes rose,” Deighton told The Observer in 2014.

Their influence was significant enough for the cookstrips to make a cameo in the film of The Ipcress File, with the spy using them just as his creator had. Their first anthology, Deighton’s Action Cook Book (1965), was given out at the film’s press lunch. In 1966, a second collection, Où Est Le Garlic, was published, and the column came to an end.

Alex Deighton remembers growing up in a house where what to have for dinner was discussed over lunch. “Dad started us off cooking from an early age,” he said this weekby email. Their father saw the kitchen as a classroom for science and mathematics , and cookstrips were occasionally the lessons.

In 2014, Allan Jenkins, The Observer’s food editor, contacted Deighton for an article about Cookstrips’s legacy. Deighton agreed to write a couple of new ones with Alex. “Almost as an afterthought, we suggested that we could do more,” Alex said. The article announced the return of Cookstrips from January 2015. “It just made sense,” Jenkins said. “It was a homecoming.”

Until 2021, the new column was Len & Alex Deighton’s Cookstrips. “Dad insisted that we shouldn’t be constrained by his original work,” Alex said. Fifty years on, the process had changed: analogue art met digital boards, with a typeface created from Len’s handwriting. As with the 60s column, they began with French recipes then, in line once more with changing appetites, they explored other cuisines, in particular Mexican classics.

“It was a privilege to contribute to the cookstrips’ return to The Observer – I treasure the memories of working with my father,” Alex said. In either century, Cookstrips has been a mirror to The Observer’s approach to food: informed, innovative, useful and humorous, reflecting and shaping how people want to eat. A few years ago, Alex had a dozen of his favourite pieces printed on mugs, a daily reminder of his father’s legacy.

“Some of his original cookstrip recipes just work so well,” Alex said. “I wouldn’t reach for any other recipe to make those dishes.”