Deighton, who is a keen cook, originally drew the cookstrips as instructions to himself in order to keep his expensive cookbooks from becoming dirty in his kitchen.
[1]Deighton's cookstrips were seen by fellow student Raymond Hawkey, who suggested that with the addition of a grid to increase legibility they could be a regular newspaper feature.
The first cookstrip, "Cooking Beef: Part 1", appeared in The Observer on March 18, 1962, eight months before the release of Deighton's debut novel, The IPCRESS File.
Len Deighton's Action Cookbook, which expanded these cookstrips into a full-length book was published in March 1965,[3] timed to coincide with the release of the film of The Ipcress File starring Michael Caine.
In the movie, Caine's character, Harry Palmer, is seen cracking eggs with one hand while behind him Deighton's cookstrips are pinned to the kitchen wall.