Are you sick yet from all those adverts for turkey, stuffing and mince pies? Not to worry. There are culinary delights for every palate in our collection of great food writing. Swot up on your baking with Nicola Lamb, layer flavour on flavour with Yotam Ottolenghi or go Greek with Georgina Hayden in these picks. Chefs of every calibre will find something worth savouring, whether you’re at the wine-pairing stage or you prefer your dinner air-fried in 20 minutes.
If you find baking a mysterious art in which success and failure are bestowed seemingly at random by a capricious kitchen god, Nicola Lamb is on hand to add a little scientific rigour to your pastry, biscuit and cake making. For those who want it, the book opens with a deep dive into the properties of flour, sugar, eggs and fat and how they interact to achieve the kind of bake you want. Fear not, though. Above all, Lamb knows how to turn out a delicious treat: she was trained in some of the best bakeries in London and New York (including Ottolenghi and Dominique Ansell). Earl Grey-scented scones, brown-butter banana cookies, tomato and fennel tartes tatins and apricot and rosemary polenta cake all feature in a baking bible to savour.
Ebury £30
Buy a copy of Sift here
Easy Wins by Anna Jones
My resident vegetarian has recently left home, but I’ll continue to cook from Anna Jones’s latest offering, which is plant-focused, but decidedly not vegan. Divided into chapters based on key flavour-boosting ingredients — lemon, vinegar, chilli, miso, garlic etc — it avoids the pitfall of many vegetarian books in that almost every recipe stands on its own as a main course. Double lemon pilaf with buttery almonds, roast sweet potatoes with sticky chilli salsa, and aubergine, tamarind and peanut curry have all become staples. Nice puddings too, such as miso banana caramel whip.
4th Estate £28
Buy a copy of Easy Wins here
Comfort by Yotam Ottolenghi
For some of his detractors, Otam Ottolenghi’s recipes are far too complex and lengthy for the day-to-day, but with cooking you get out what you put in. As the Israeli-British chef might say, to make an omelette you’ve got to break a few eggs (and add aubergines, shallot, garlic, cumin, allspice, cinnamon, minced lamb and harissa in the case of the tortang talong Filipino omelette). Ottolenghi’s genius is not just in the many layers of flavour he achieves, but in his shrewd mentoring of the cooks and home economists in his stable, which gives him a global breadth few recipe writers can achieve. Here we go from Chinese one pots of soy-braised pork belly to Austrian kaiserschmarrn in a celebration of the food we crave round the world, seen through a British lens.
Ebury £30
Buy a copy of Comfort here
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Gino’s Air Fryer Cookbook: Italian Classics Made Easy by Gino D’Acampo
Don’t laugh. I too once thought Gino D’Acampo was a TV sideshow, but this is the most useful of the crop of air fryer recipe books that have hit the shelves this year — to match, no doubt, the number of mini ovens that will be wrapped under Christmas trees. I’m not sure D’Acampo’s dishes would be recognised in Italy, but his carbonara potatoes, rich with cream, bacon and cheese, and chicken Kyiv with sage and pecorino are comfort dishes of the highest order. That they can be cooked in an air fryer (or regular oven) is a bonus.
Bloomsbury £22
Buy a copy of Gino’s Air Fryer Cookbook here
Amuse Bouche: How to Eat Your Way Around France by Carolyn Boyd
This richly researched and highly readable wander round the regions of France is a tour de force and essential reading for anyone (myself included) who finds they have more misses than hits when it comes to eating in the birthplace of modern European cuisine. It’s not so much a guide book as a celebration, but as you learn to tell your opera cake from your bagatelle or identify the non-negotiables of an “authentic” salade niçoise (anchovies or tuna — no green beans or potatoes), you emerge out at the other end knowing you’ll make much more of France’s rich bounty the next time you visit.
Profile £18.99
Buy a copy of Amuse Bouche here
A Most Noble Water: Revisiting the Origins of English Gin by Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown
You don’t have to be a gin drinker to know two “facts” about the spirit: one, it derives from Dutch genever and, two, it was a cause of such social delinquency that the government had to introduce several gin acts to curb its abuse. Unfortunately, as Anistatia Miller, a drinks historian, and Jared Brown, a co-founder of the distillery Sipsmith, tell us in the first sentence: “We ought to begin with an apology: pretty much everything we thought we knew about gin history is wrong.” They go on to explain that juniper-flavoured alcohol was popular in Britain long before soldiers developed a taste for genever during the Thirty Years’ War and that Hogarthian scenes of depravity were “tabloid puffery”. Gin’s origins and the reasons for its growing popularity are much more interesting than that, making this concise history as essential to the drink’s story as ice and a slice.
Mixellany £14.95
Who’s Afraid of Romanée-Conti? A Shortcut to Drinking Great Wines by Dan Keeling
Dan Keeling used to be in the music business and he brings a little rock’n’roll swagger and “outsiderness” to this compendium of contemporary wines; the subtitle says the book is “a shortcut to drinking great wines”, and while Keeling takes the subject seriously, he also treats it with a delicious swig of irreverence. After all, if drinking isn’t fun, why bother? So, while he ticks off all the usual boxes — the best grape varieties, terroirs and producers — he intersperses it with asides such as how to spot the plums on a restaurant wine list (Keeling should know: he is a co-owner of the Noble Rot restaurants in London) and why it’s better to drink a superior wine from a bad vintage than an inferior wine from a good one.
Quadrille £30
Buy a copy of Who’s Afraid of Romanée-Conti? here
Vegetables: Easy and Inventive Vegetarian Suppers by Mark Diacono
Mark Diacono has a popular column in The Sunday Times in which he introduces minor tweaks to enliven familiar dishes. Here he does something similar for vegetables, adding caraway to the pastry in a potato pie or substituting aubergines for the smoked fish in a very successful kedgeree. Diacono’s prose is a joy — chatty, informative and always encouraging — and the recipes are within even the most amateurish cook’s capabilities.
Hardie Grant £27
Buy a copy of Vegetables here
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Mediterra: Recipes from the Islands and Shores of the Mediterranean by Ben Tish
It’s horses for courses with chefs’ books; each brings their trademark style. Ben Tish, the chef-director of the Cubitt House restaurant group, has long championed the food of the Mediterranean, from southern Spain and France to the Maghreb and every country in between, but really he specialises in deliciousness. There’s not a single recipe in this beautifully photographed book that I don’t want to dive straight into. Buy it, cook from it, make friends through it.
Bloomsbury Absolute £26
Buy a copy of Mediterra here
Greekish: Everyday Recipes with Greek Roots by Georgina Hayden
Greece is enjoying its time in the sun at the moment, with a renaissance of interest in its cuisine. Georgina Hayden, who grew up above her grandparents’ Greek-Cypriot tavern in Tufnell Park, north London, has brought her heritage up to date with the kind of practical cooking that allows you to put supper on the table with the minimum of fuss. Spanakopita jacket potatoes, halloumi fried chicken, baklava cheesecake … Greekish is the word.
Bloomsbury £26
Buy a copy of Greekish here
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What was the best food or cookbook you read this year? Add your recommendations in the comments
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