Growing up in the Seventies was tough for a young foodie. It wasn’t just olive oil and fresh herbs that were hard to find - it was inspiration. There was always St. David, of course, the middle-class Madonna of the Le Creuset, and I’d managed to get my hands on a samizdat copy of Julia Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cookery’. I’d been barred from the local library for returning Jane Grigson, besmirched with aioli but a friendly bookseller had slipped me my first MFK Fisher under the counter. For a teenage boy, though, all these riches just brought another problem. I lacked a role model. Though I was inspired by their words it seemed that everyone that ever dipped a pen to write about food was a woman and I, with the best will in the world, was not.

I’d pretty much accepted that my interest in food was sort of girlie quirk, a bit like my mate Pete who really liked David Cassidy, when I was passed a soiled paperback; dog-eared, spavined by rough use and redolent of fondue and stroganoff. On the cover, a man in a shoulder holster and a smirk, made spaghetti for a woman - a blonde, built for speed - who was so impressed that she’d forgotten to button her nightie. This was cooking in a way I’d never seen it… fun, cheeky, very male and promising the awesome prospect of sex. It was called ‘The Action Cookbook’ and the author was Len Deighton.

I knew, of course, who Deighton was. His 1962 debut novel 'The IPCRESS File' was in every Dad’s bookshelf and most of us had seen Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, the working-class anti-hero who could get a girl into bed armed only with an omelette even when handicapped by the most ridiculous pair of glasses the ‘National Health’ could provide.

What I didn’t know then, was that the same year he’d written the novel, Deighton had become a food writer on the London Observer. Though he’d trained as an illustrator and had worked in advertising, cooking was in his blood and he had somehow sold the magazine on an idea he called ‘cook strips’. These were recipes and cooking tips delivered in the style of a newspaper cartoon strip with about a hundred well-chosen words and a handful of simple drawings.

The early cook strips featured the sort recipes, popular at the time; liver pate, chicken Kiev or chile con carne, to which, it is fair to say, time has not been kind, but as appreciative letters came in from readers, Deighton began to alter the content. He concentrated on techniques, cross-referencing between the strips - a terrifically cheeky nod to Escoffier - and building eventually into a year-long, serialised course in classical cookery.

In 1965 the first fifty cook strips were published as ‘The Action Cookbook’. Deighton added explanatory paragraphs to each strip and a series of short essays on everything from the bewilderingly hi-tech new ‘goblet blenders’ to seasonality of produce. The lurid cover - Deighton says he had to fight to remove a ‘Men Only’ banner from the original design - capitalised on the success of the Caine film but the taut clarity of Deighton’s writing, his encyclopaedic knowledge and attention to detail shone through the slightly queasy ‘bachelor/playboy’ theme. At its best the prose reads like Dashiell Hammet channeling Brillat-Savarin.

Towards the end of the year the strips that formed the cookery course were collected into a second book, ‘Ou Est Le Garlic?’ This time there was no need for the guns ‘n’ girls cover. This was a superb cookbook that educated, democratised and demystified in way that still hasn’t been surpassed. Deighton, now highly successful, was able to donate the royalties of the book to OXFAM. “I thought, he says, it might start a trend, so that all cook-books did something to help the hungry”.

Elizabeth David was also reaching the peak of her popularity. Paperback versions had increased the sales of all her books and in particular, French Provincial Cookery had danced at the top of the bestsellers list with Deighton’s second novel, 'Funeral in Berlin'. On the day she opened her famous Chelsea shop, the grande dame of British Food writing received congratulatory telegrams from the nation’s most important gastronomes - near the top of the list was Len Deighton.

A year later Deighton wrote his last cook strip. The movie of 'The IPCRESS File' had been a blockbusting hit and was followed quickly by two sequels. He’d written screenplays, more novels and had produced films. He packed up and moved to Los Angeles where he’s lived ever since, a successful writer cooking for friends and family. The Observer approached Elizabeth David to write for them but at the time she was fully occupied with the shop and recommended a young Jane Grigson for the job. I’m not, God forbid, presenting this as prima faciae evidence of a conspiracy of female food writers but it seems that, at a crucial moment, the torch had passed. A decade later, by the time I needed them, Deighton’s cookbooks were already out of print.

Elizabeth David is too often regarded as the single writer who rescued the Britain from the dark ravages of rationing. I discovered later that there were many others. Some, Philip Harben, Clement Freud, Robert Carrier and Andre Simon among them, were even men so I suppose I might have turned to any of them as inspiration but, for me, Deighton was different.

I clung to his cookbooks like a lifebelt. Sure they were educational and entertaining, but most they uniquely represented what I felt about cooking. As I got my first jobs in kitchens, I fell in love with the heat, the sweat, the passion, the camaraderie and the sheer fun. Much as I loved them, the genteel writings of well-travelled ladies were little to do with my experience as a male cook.

Today, on my kitchen wall, hangs a copy of cook strip no.37 “Braising - basic method”. It’s the same cutting that’s pinned over Harry Palmer’s stove in the opening sequence of IPCRESS. Only the deepest film geek would ever recognise its significance but for me it’s a quiet little homage to a cookery writer before his time, a man who wanted to make cooking classless, sexy and fun decades before our TV cooks. A man who reminded me that cooking wasn’t, as Harry would have put it, just “for the birds”.