I don’t know why anybody buys cookbooks any more. According to a ‘thinking allowed’ podcast I listened to last week it’s a matter of signalling to your peers what kind of person you are. I suppose in the old days you could judge someone by their record collection, and then their CD collection. Now everybody has ipods, and without rummaging around inside them they don’t say anything much about you except that you have an ipod. So your announce your identity by the cookbooks you live by. Are you a Ramsay man? Jamie? Ainslie? Delia? Nigel Slater? Nigella Lawson? Or maybe old school – Larousse, or Elizabeth David. Or American – Martha Stewart? Bobby Flay? Emeril? The celebrity cookbook, so goes the thesis, announces your aspirations about yourself. Anthony Bourdain on your shelf says that you are down to earth yet cultivated, and that you grab life by the bone and suck the marrow out of it. Gordon Ramsay cookbooks say ‘don’t fuck with me. I’m a fucking chef. And a wanker’. Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall says you’re simple, seasonal, concerned about recovering lost local traditions, eating dandelions and ‘wassailing’.

I’m not convinced about this thesis. What if you have more than one cookbook? Are you confused about the lifestyle aspirations you want to announce to your peers? Or do you just like to try different cookbooks? Some of them are gifts. What does that say about your identity? Just for the record, I have Delia, Jamie, Bobby Flay (a Christmas gift, but surprisingly good considering how annoying he is on his tv show ‘throwdown’), Madhur Jaffrey’s world vegetarian, a Wagamama book, and a few others whose names escape me.

My own cookbook collection notwithstanding, the only thing cookbooks say about you today is that you haven’t heard about the internet. It’s like the people who still buy magazines to get pictures of naked girls. Don’t they know you can get them for free online?

I found this recipe by typing ‘rhubarb’, ‘ginger’ and ‘cheesecake’ into google (that’s probably how you found it, too). I picked up the rhubarb at the English market (from the organic stall I mentioned in ‘Banana Bread’), because it’s cheap and fresh, and to work out what to do with it I just asked the internet. This recipe came from the Waitrose website. The recipe called for Waitrose products every step of the way, but I switched them for cheaper, non-Waitrose, non-fair trade, non-organic alternatives, and I suggest you do the same.

Rhubarb Ginger Cheesecake
50g butter, melted
200g digestive biscuits, crumbled
400g rhubarb (that’s about 200g trimmed of leaves and stubby ends, or 2-3 cups)
1 inch piece fresh ginger, grated
175g caster sugar
500g cream cheese (the original recipe called for mascarpone but I couldn’t justify the expense)
2tbsp cornflour
3 eggs

Prepare the base: Mix the crushed digestive biscuits (Graham crackers, for the Americans) with the melted butter, and press firmly into the base of a 9-inch round cake tin. Refridgerate until the filling is ready.

Put the chopped rhubarb in a pan with 4 tablespoons of water and 100g sugar. Poach for ten minutes, until the rhubarb is tender. I took my eye off it and it very quickly turned to mush. When it’s done, strain it, reserving the juice for later.

Whisk together the cream cheese (or mascarpone), the rest of the sugar, the three eggs and the cornflour. Add a pinch of salt, too. When it’s all good and creamily mixed, gently fold in the rhubarb. Then pour it all into the cake tin, and bake at 180 C for 45 minutes, by which time it should be golden and firm. Remove from the oven, take it out of the tin and cool on a wire rack.

Serve with the reserved rhubarb juice.