London

'Recipes to Know by Heart'
Xanthe Clay
Mitchell Beazley, £20
There are hundreds of cookery books published in the UK each year, but very few of them actually tell readers how to conquer the fundamentals of cooking. This book is different. With an approach that is like a modern-day cross between Delia Smith and Mrs Beeton, author Xanthe Clay - cookery writer for the Saturday Telegraph – aims to set her readers free from the shackles of slavishly having to follow recipes without understanding the underlying principles.

There are recipes, of course - about 40 of them, including the likes of basic white sauce, white bread, batter pancakes, sweet and savoury pies, gratins, Sunday roasts, noodle soups, chocolate mousse and basic cakes, plus plenty of themes and variations.

It’s not just recipes though. Clay is a reliable teacher who ably explains the science of soufflés, or the proportions of flour, butter and sugar needed to make cakes, biscuits and crumble toppings. The idea is that, once you know a dozen or so common-sense recipes by heart ‘kitchen life will become immeasurably simpler’.  It is precisely the sort of book that Delia used to write, before she disappointed us all by cheating. Susan Low

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'Today's Special: A New Take on Bistro Food'
Anthony Demetre
Quadrille, £20
Prescient publishers are engaging with the economic downturn, with titles that encourage home cooks to get creative with cheaper cuts of meat and lesser-known fish. The author, chef Anthony Demetre, is a champion of the less revered bits of beast, which frequently play starring roles in the dishes he serves at his two restaurants, Arbutus and Wild Honey – both recipients of Time Out’s Best New Restaurant Award, in 2006 and 2007 respectively. Affordable meats such as rabbit, beef short ribs, oxtail, gurnard and chicken wings figure large in many of the book’s recipes, and look suitably glamorous in Simon Wheeler’s photography. Many of the recipes have the French touches for which Demetre is known (such as navarin of lamb with spring vegetables), but most are in traditional English territory, such as shepherd’s pie.

Refreshingly for a cookery book by a professional chef, the majority of the recipes are well within the grasp of the keen home cook. Some, such as rabbit à la moutarde with roast sweet onions, or pot-roast pheasant with bacon, are simple and straightforward; others, such as classic English brawn with home-made piccalilli, require good kitchen skills and three days’ forward planning. All recipes are written clearly, and we especially like the tips Demetre gives at the beginning of each recipe. Two that we’ll try are marinating game in pineapple juice to tenderise it, and adding a bit of cornflour to sweet shortcrust pastry dough to give it a crumblier texture.

Design-wise, we’re not sure the black-text-on-dark-background combo works, because this makes the text hard to read on the chapter introductions. Nonetheless, this book will be well-thumbed by both amateur cooks and professional chefs this autumn. Susan Low

'My Favourite Ingredients'
Skye Gyngell
Quadrille, £25
This is the second cookery book by Skye Gyngell, chef of Petersham Nurseries café and cookery writer for The Independent. And it’s every bit as beautiful and inspiring as her first, ‘A Year in My Kitchen’ (2006). Gyngell has a real talent for putting together ingredients and here she focuses on her favourites – ostensibly 16 of them, but some, such as ‘fish and shellfish’, ‘pulses and grains’ and ‘cheese’ are very broad, so the recipes aren’t as limited as you might at first think. Other (more specific) ingredients include cherries, chocolate, asparagus among others, with the text preceding chapters on honey and olive oil being particularly well written.

The range of recipes is admirably broad and palate-grabbingly enticing (we found the autumnal ones particularly so). Some ingredients, such as agretti (a kind of edible marsh grass) and Malenca (a cured meat from Lombardy) aren’t easy to find during the average supermarket grab, but then this book is probably more suited to the experienced cook who is after inspiration, advice on ingredients and brilliant recipe ideas, rather than the cook looking for quick and easy after-work suppers. Another plus is Jason Lowe’s beautiful photography, which shows real artistry. This is one that we’ll be keeping at close hand in the kitchen, particularly as autumn approaches. Susan Low

‘The Kitchen Revolution’
Rosie Sykes, Polly Russell and Zoe Heron
Ebury Press, £25 ̀
This cookery book is written by chef and former Guardian food columnist Rosie Sykes, documentary producer Polly Russell and kitchen-phobe Zoe Heron. The book’s concept is straightforward but ingenious: for each week of the year, there’s a plan of seven meals, based on seasonal ingredients and storecupboard stand-bys, complete with a weekly shopping list of fresh ingredients and essentials. The shopping list and recipes can be downloaded and printed from the dedicated website, thekitchenrevolution.co.uk . Book publishing can often seem as though it’s caught in a pre-digital age; this combination of book and website therefore marks a brave foray into multiplatform territory – a move that other publishers are certain to follow.

Each week there’s a big meal from scratch, a ‘seasonal supper’ based on what’s best at that time of year, two meals based on leftovers and storecupboard ingredients, a larder feast (made mainly from storecupboard ingredients) and a ‘two for one’, half of which can be frozen to eat later in the week.

The recipes are written in hand-holdingly simple step-by-steps, with tips for forward planning. The dishes won’t terrify kitchen novices, but they’re by no means dull – as well as meatloaf and chilli con carne, there’s fish stew with aïoli and rabbit with almonds and pine nuts. The idea is to encourage planning, cooking and shopping in a way that saves time and money and minimises food waste. It could all sound lentil-munchingly worthy, but the recipes are so good, and the approach so logical, that it doesn’t.

We love the timely concept and the recipes, but think that there’s a lot of unrealised potential to the website – for example, pictures of the finished dishes and the ability to rate and add feedback about recipes. Susan Low

‘Anjum's New Indian’
Anjum Anand
Quadrille, £20
Anjum Anand, the pop priestess of easy Indian cooking in the UK, continues her testament in this second book. It’s a follow-up to ‘Indian Food Made Easy’, a TV tie-in to her six-part BBC2 series of the same name in 2007.

This sequel features more recipes from the BBC series, which have been scrumptiously styled and simply spelled out. Her cooking tends to be a blend of traditional and fusion, though some dishes, such as Indian shepherd’s pie or Keralan salmon wrap, are figments of a particularly British imagination.

However, the book does do some justice to the diversity of Indian cuisine. She covers all bases from light snacks such as the Parsi dish taamota per eeda (which she calls tomato-poached eggs) or Maharashtrian ussal pav (spicy sprouted bean salad in bread roll) to mains such as Gujarati undhiyo (a vegetable stew).

Anand tries hard to pepper her concoctions with personal experiences in the kitchen for an intimate culinary journey. Her inherited nostalgia from the days of the Raj manifests itself between the lines, particularly when she describes the way in which British memsahibs taught their cooks dishes from the West and in the process ‘enriched’ Indian cuisine.

However, these quick recipes only scratch the surface when it comes to exploring Indian cooking. It’s useful as a beginner’s guide but will leave the seasoned food lover hungry for more. Sulakshana Gupta

'Using the Plot'
Paul Merrett
Collins, £16.99
Chef, television presenter and food writer Paul Merrett describes a ‘rival’ book in the pages of his own: ‘The book is basically a journal written by some bloke who has never gardened before, and he takes the reader on a month-by-month journey through the gardening year.’ Merrett admits, ‘I only read about three pages before realising the book I am struggling to write has already been written.’ This succinctly describes Merrett’s allotment project, which one can’t help feeling was done as much because he was given a commission to write the book, as because he eventually develops a passion for gardening.

Then, halfway through, ‘Using the Plot’ unexpectedly changes tack. Like the Rodriguez movie that starts off as an action flick then in the middle turns into a vampire movie, ‘Using the Plot’ turns into a recipe book. Surely these recipes are tied in with the allotment theme? Not unless your allotment produces sea bass, chorizo and lamb, among many other ingredients.

In its favour, Merrett’s recipes are often good, and some of them you’ll find at his just-opened restaurant, The Victoria. The book is beautifully designed, with plenty of attractive food photography. And if you’re a Merrett fan, you’ll find the details of his family life and the allotment project interesting and engagingly written. But as this is neither a book for gardeners nor a dedicated cookbook (is this where you’d turn for a vegetable samosa recipe?), it’s hard to see who it’s aimed at. Guy Dimond

'Crust'
Richard Bertinet
Kylie Cathie, £19.99
Watching Richard Bertinet knead his brioche dough on the DVD that accompanies thisexcellent book is mesmerising. TheFrench-born, Bathbased baker has an appealingly quiet authority you just don’t see in today’s TV chefs, and his unusual flourless grab-and-slam technique transforms a sticky puddle of yellow goo into a smooth cohesive ball.

customers of his baking courses, this is‘Crust’ is the follow-up to Bertinet’s classy first book, ‘Dough’, which won him several prizes in the UK and USA. Although designed to appeal to equally suited to someone new to baking who’s been inspired by the artisan-made sourdoughs on sale at farmers’ markets and swish bakeries.

Working with Times food writer Sheila Keating, Bertinet has a clear, thorough and highly practical way of explaining things – from which bits of equipment are best to how to shape viennoiserie like a pro – all helped by some good, simple art direction and photography. Jenni Muir

'The Acorn House Cookbook'
Arthur Potts Dawson
Hodder & Stoughton, £20

The metaphoric lovechild of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, the heavily PR’d Arthur Potts Dawson, chef and co-founder of ‘eco restaurant’ Acorn House , was naturally snapped up by a publisher and the spin-off cookbook has appeared less than 18 months after the restaurant opening. Pity they didn’t take more time to think it through.

Potts Dawson is no doubt well-intentioned but, for someone who purports to favour local foods, there are a hell of a lot of Mediterranean ingredients featured in this book – and at the restaurant. How’s that fresh, hours-old buffalo mozzarella travelling to his King’s Cross eatery then – Eurostar?

Nor does this book work as an authoritative reference on eco-living. For example, Potts Dawson claims his washing-up technique uses ‘considerably less [water] than the 45 litres used by most modern dishwashers’. It may do, but in fact modern dishwashers use an average of only 15 litres of water per cycle (some models use as little as ten). According to Waterwise, the non-governmental organisation focused on decreasing water consumption in the UK, ‘If 50 per cent more people bought a dishwasher we could save enough to supply enough drinking water to a city the size of Leeds.’

That’s not all that doesn’t add up here. ‘Sugar is a basic of most people’s cupboards, although not of mine,’ he twitters virtuously. Yet to make his warm autumn fruit salad you’ll need 250g caster sugar, and another 310g for the custard to serve with it. Better buy two bags of organic Fairtrade sugar, then, because that’s more than 500g sugar in one dessert. You’ll also need sugar for his carrot, beetroot and rocket salad. And the confit duck.

All is not lost – you can recycle the book at greenmetropolis.com once you’ve read it. Jenni Muir

‘¡Viva la Revolución!’
Fiona Dunlop
Octopus, £20
Following ‘New Tapas’ and ‘Medina Kitchen’, Fiona Dunlop’s third cook book makes for a Mexico that’s a world away from packet taco mixes and pub servings of microwaved nachos.

Divided into six of the central or southern states – the capital México DF, south central Puebla, west coastal Michoacán, sourthern Oaxaca and Veracruz, and the far easterly Yucatán – it’s evident that Dunlop travelled extensively while researching this book.

Dunlop presents two local chefs for each area, such as DF’s Martha Ortiz and Oaxacan housewife Abigail Mendoza, thereby offering firsthand insights into the traditions and realities of modern Mexican cuisine. Recipes? Plenty of those, ranging from street food through to first class restaurant fare. Caldo de mariscos (spicy seafood broth) made a soup every bit as good as we’d enjoyed recently in Mexico City, while the classier recipes such as fillets of fish with tomato marmalade are perfect for dinner party hosts to show off.

Aptly for such a cookbook, it’s richly coloured with gorgeous photography, and the short list of UK food suppliers and glossary are helpful. An impressive and highly useful book that could only be improved if it came with a plane ticket to Mexico. Simone Baird

‘Margaret Costa’s Four Seasons Cookery Book’
Grub Street, £16.99.
‘A must for any serious cookbook collection’, runs the breathless blurb on the book’s jacket. This is not a new release, but a re-issued hardback of a book first published in 1970, written by a very well regarded author (but one that many readers may not be familiar with). It’s attractively packaged, though there are no pictures of the finished dishes, which may make it one for serious food-lovers rather than the sort who insist on full-colour plates and carefully numbered steps in their recipes.

Several things are striking about the book. One is that, whether she’s writing about olives or recalling an English child’s first summer in France, Costa’s prose seems as fresh today as when it was first written, proving that really good food-writing never goes out of fashion. Like Elizabeth David, her main points of reference are France and Italy, so it’s recipes from the Mediterranean, as well as British classics, that are most strongly represented. Equally contemporary is the book’s approach: the focus is on seasonal eating and so it’s divided up into four seasonal chapters, with shorter sections on the likes of asparagus, strawberries, nuts, mussels, etc.

Like many seasoned restaurant-goers, it saves room for sweets; some of the most enticing-sounding recipes are found in the sections on cakes, baking and ‘proper puddings’. Of course, the food world has moved on since 1970, and not always for the better. The introduction to the chapter on salmon is a case in point: there’s not the merest mention of farmed salmon which then didn’t exist, while these days, it’s difficult to buy anything but. Susan Low

‘Delizia!: The epic history of the Italians and their food’
John Dickie
Sceptre, £8.99
John Dickie is an academic specialising in Italian studies at University College, London. His previous book was ‘Cosa Nostra’, a history of the Sicilian Mafia. In Delizia he turns his critical, journalistic eye to Italian food – near-inevitable for anyone with a serious interest in Italy, it seems. True to its title, the book takes an epic form, starting with present-day Tuscany – not the clichéd earth-toned Tuscany of travel brochures, but the knowing, wise Tuscany that can profit from marketing faux-rusticity to gullible urban dwellers. Subsequent chapters cover various eras and cities, starting with 12th-century Palermo and working through Renaissance Ferrara, Fascist-era Milan and so on, back to the present day.

Dickie has a highly readable style that keeps the pages turning but, being an academic, this book is made of far sturdier stuff than some of the recent lightweight works that have been written about Italian food after a whirlwind three-week trip. Dickie unravels the history of pasta, discrediting the theory that Marco Polo brought noodles back with him from China, ponders the importance of (and misconceptions about) regional Italian food, and recounts that Englishmen travelling to Italy on a Grand Tour found the food in the Italian countryside so vile that they actually sought ought inns run by other English people to avoid the local fare. An informative and fun read, recommended for anyone who wants to get beyond the clichés and find out more about Italian food. Susan Low

Ottolenghi: The Cookbook
Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi
Ebury Press, £25
Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, chefs at Ottolenghi, are purveyors of some of the city’s most beautiful food . The window displays at their four London cafés, which often feature their trademark cloud-like giant meringues, can set mouths watering at 20 paces. In this sleek, good-looking volume they spill the beans on some of their best-known dishes.

Tamimi and Ottolenghi are both from Jerusalem, Tamimi of Palestinian heritage and Ottolenghi with grandparents who hailed from Germany and Italy. The recipes are a glorious mix of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Californian influences, with a smattering of northern Europe (particularly in the baking department). It’s simple but intriguing food, and often features unusual ingredients or combinations, such as sour cherries with Gorgonzola or Camargue red rice with quinoa.

Readers may know Yotam Ottolenghi through the column he writes for The Guardian on Saturdays, ‘The New Vegetarian’. As well as meat-free dishes, many based on pulses and grains, there are also plenty of meat and fish dishes in this book. The downfall of so many cookery books written by chefs is that the recipes are overcomplicated and full of frou-frou. Not so here. The recipes, while a bit wordy, are well within the reach of people who, though they may love good food, wouldn’t count themselves as dab hands in the kitchen. It’s very modern, very metropolitan and is a marked departure from the nostalgic, old-fashioned British cooking trend that’s currently evident in food publishing. It’s in the vein of the ‘River Café’ and ‘Moro’ books – and we suspect it will be just as popular with London’s farmers’ market shoppers this summer. Susan Low

Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History
John Reader
William Heinemann, £18.99
By now the 'Animal/Vegetable/Mineral That Changed the World’ format is a well-known construct for authors and publishers. This not the first book published about the spud’s place in history, yet Reader’s book is a good read. The book traces the tuber’s rise from its humble home in the South American altiplano to world vegetable-patch domination.

Reader has a breadth of knowledge in subjects as diverse as botany, anthropology, ecology, history and political sociology, so this book goes well beyond the scope of kitchen book. He writes cogently about the post-revolution potato famine of the nascent Soviet Union and about the manner in which science was sacrificed to political doctrine in both the Soviet Union and Mao-era China, resulting in the deaths of millions through famine.

Given the recent increase in food prices, this is a timely book, providing a much-needed perspective on an issue that will always be with us. Susan Low

The New English Table
Rose Prince
Fourth Estate, £25
Some new cookery titles are essentially gastro-porn, filled with lush shots of aspirational dishes you know you’ll never cook, made from ingredients you know you’ll never find – and which would cost a bomb even if you did. Others – increasingly few, it seems, given book publishers’ over-reliance on telly chef tie-ins – are proper kitchen books, made to spend time on the kitchen table, getting slopped with cake batter and egg yolk and becoming increasingly dog-eared with use.

This book is the latter type. As in her previous books, ‘The New English Kitchen’ and ‘The Savvy Shopper’, Prince gives plenty of no-nonsense advice about sourcing top-quality ingredients in their season and then how to cook them simply. In this third book she focuses on store-cupboard basics that help keep food bills low, and which can be augmented by a few ‘splurge’ ingredients – a kind of ‘frugal and the feast’ approach.

Some of her recipes have been gleaned from food producers she’s met and written about in her column for The Daily Telegraph, some are family classics, others are the result of home-style kitchen economy (you won’t find Prince dismissing leftovers as unsexy). Many of the recipes have a vaguely nostalgic air. Indeed, it’s a book that chimes with the ‘new austerity’ ethos of buying wisely and making it last – advice that’s relevant whatever the political weather, and even more so as economic skies continue to darken. Susan Low

Eating India
Chitrita Banerji
Bloomsbury, £12.99
Chitrita Banerji moved from Bengal to the United States as a student, but too late: she had already caught the Bengali obsession with food. This stood her in good stead as she has since become one of the acknowledged experts, and certainly the best writer, on Bengali food.

This latest book is a departure for her. For the first time, she ventures beyond her familiar West Bengal, to other areas of India with different culinary and social customs. It is a real anthropological exploration of where regional Indian food is today, but it’s also autobiographical, and describes her personal journey too. Some themes recur: that Indian food, like all cuisines, is in constant flux; and that there is no such thing as ‘Indian food’, as the sub-continent is so vast, and ethnically and religiously diverse. Anyone who has read Salman Rushdie or William Dalrymple will already know that much. But Banerji has a special gift for making the cuisines and the dishes come to life: she puts them into the contexts you find them in today, and also makes the dishes sound mouthwatering. This is a rare gift.

Her writing, although scholarly, has a light touch and is very readable, and will surprise even those who think they know ‘Indian food’. It may lack the social insight into everyday India of a writer such as Pankaj Mishra (of ‘Butter Chicken in Ludhiana’), but I’ll bet Banerji is a far better cook. Guy Dimond

The Oxford Companion to Italian Food
Gillian Riley
Oxford University Press, £19.99
This is the first in a series of regional reference guides from OUP, and this Italian guide is written by food historian Gillian Riley. As you’d expect from the stable mate of the food-lovers’ bible ‘The Oxford Companion to Food’ by Alan Davidson, the research is meticulous, the scholarship exacting, and the writing pure pleasure.

Riley’s wry, unstuffy sense of humour glints brightly through lengthy entries for ingredients, regions, produce, dishes, practices and concepts and contexts that define ‘Italian’ food. Ever wondered what the difference is between ‘cucina delle nonne’ (‘granny food’) and ‘cucina povera’ (‘poor food’)? You’ll find out in glorious detail here, along with the advice that the concept of granny food ‘needs to be taken with a generous pinch of peperoncino’ – because Riley’s quite a one for debunking myths.

Alphabetical entries make for intriguing juxtapositions: ‘meatballs’ are followed by ‘Medici, Caterina de’ – who the author describes as having ‘pop-eyed, jowly, Medici looks’ – no hero-worship there, then.

There’s a wealth of information here and it’s easy to spend hours browsing the entries. The tiny, black and white pictures, though, add nothing and are eccentrically chosen. Surely, readers would be able to recognise an aubergine without pictorial reference? That said, this book is for those who like their facts peppered with wit, and their knowledge seasoned with good humour. Susan Low

In Defence of Food
Michael Pollan
Allen Lane at £16.99
Michael Pollan’s 2006 book ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ is one of the best-researched and most thought-provoking food books of our time: a well-constructed argument against agribusiness in the US, and explanation of how the current situation arose.

Pollan’s follow-up, ‘In Defence of Food’ – recently excerpted in the The Guardian – is this time an attack on the nutrition industry. Part of the problem with this subject is that he tries to marshal hard facts and figures about what little we know about nutrition and the Western diet – a task as hopeless as herding cats. ‘Defence’ also reads like a response to the question raised by his earlier book, ‘So what should we eat?’ To which his answer is: ‘Eat Food. Mostly plants. Not too much.’

To back up his assertions he chooses facts that fit his arguments, mostly against what he calls ‘nutritionism’. He argues that the dietary diseases of our modern age are caused by a combination of factors including reductionist nutritional ‘science’, the sensational reporting of these nutritional studies, and the industry’s desire to sell us more junk food.

All correct up to a point, although ‘Defence’ does come over more like a polemic than a panacea. But if you’re prone to pondering the nutritional advice we’re spoon-fed by ‘experts’, this book is a very necessary antidote. Guy Dimond

Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper
Fuchsia Dunlop
Ebury Press at £16.99
Author Fuchsia Dunlop is a young Englishwoman who bridges East and West. She is already the leading writer on Chinese food in the English language, and her previous books – ‘Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook’, and especially ‘Sichuan Cookery’ – have helped rank her as one of the UK’s top Chinese food experts. But this latest book is not an ode to China’s regional cooking – it’s the story of how Dunlop fell in love with China, and illuminates the complexities of both Chinese food and Chinese culture.

Although not unique, Dunlop’s story is nevertheless very unusual, and the early chapters detail how she ended up living in Chengdu in the south-western province of Sichuan, learning Mandarin, and training to be a chef in the city’s chef training college – she became the first westerner to successfully graduate. But the real journey is allowing herself to eat and think like a Chinese person, and discard her Western prejudices and squeamishness about the very different Chinese approach to food. We travel with her as she learns to relish eating roasted rabbit heads, a late-night snack in Chengdu; as she adjusts to the appreciation of gristly and rubbery textures; and to the unsentimental treatment of animals that in the West we consider cruel.

As well as the apparent horrors of Chinese food, the delights are beautifully described too, from the sublime street dishes of Chengdu in the mid-1990s to the banquets held in Dunlop’s honour as her fame grew. However, Dunlop’s love affair with China is not blinkered – we travel with her as she discovers the bureaucracy and corruption, the xenophobia, the senseless destruction of historic architecture, the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, and China’s huge and growing pollution problem. Much more than just a book that helps explain Chinese food (which it does par excellence), this book is also a brilliant travelogue. It makes particularly compelling reading in a year when all eyes are on China. Guy Dimond

The River Cottage Fish Book
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Bloomsbury, £30
‘What kinds of fish are okay to eat?’, is a question that many people pose and few are qualified to answer. Environmentally aware shoppers know that stocks are dwindling and that ‘solutions’ to overfishing, such as fish farming, also cause problems for the environment.
So what’s a piscivore to do?

You could do worse that arm yourself with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s latest book. Written with angler and journalist Nick Fisher, it follows in the same vein as Mr River Cottage’s excellent ‘Meat’ book. This new work doesn’t shy away from the complex issues surrounding the fishing industry, such as declining fish stocks, pollution, fishing quotas, and fish and human health. It’s assuredly written and enlightening, even if it makes for depressing and angering reading in some places.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The authors have worked closely with the Marine Conservation Society, which ‘rates’ fish from British waters on a sustainability scale, from one (eat more) to five (avoid). The third part of the book, dedicated to British fish, gives a MCS ‘score’ to each fish and provides plenty of background, such as fishing methods and other issues relevant to the species.

The middle section is more of a traditional recipe book, with methods of cooking fish and shellfish from the minimal (tuna tartare) to the complicated (stuffed conger eel). This erudite volume looks likely to become a much-used kitchen fixture for eco-aware cooks. Susan Low

Moro East
Sam and Sam Clark
Ebury Press at £25
The ‘East’ of the title could denote the eastern Mediterranean, from where many of the recipes in this book hail, but it’s more likely that this ‘east’ refers to the former site of the Manor Garden allotments in east London, the source of inspiration – and much of the photography – for this book by the chef-proprietors of Moro.

For followers of the Sams, whose two previous cookery books have been critically well received, there’s more in the same vein – mouthwatering, gloriously spiced recipes from the eastern Med and Moorish-influenced Iberia, with a seasoning of food history adding a certain erudition.

This time, foraged foods and unusual veg such as artichoke leaves, onion tops, wild poppy leaves and vine leaves figure large, giving a creative, waste-not-want-not edge to the dishes. The vegetable dishes are the most inspiring, although there are fish and meat starters and mains, plus soups, sauces and dessert recipes. Some of the recipes may seem familiar, but that’s to be expected in the Clark’s cooking, which has a very strong identity. A Moro book without, say, a tahini sauce recipe just wouldn’t do.

The recipes make you want to roll up your sleeves and get into the kitchen, or out in the garden. If you’re feeling selfish buy it for yourself. If generosity strikes, buy it for a veggie friend in need of inspiration. Susan Low

Swindled
Bee Wilson
John Murray, £16.99
Think the food we eat today is adulterated and unsafe to eat? Read this book and be amazed our ancestors ever survived to their next meal. Food cheating and counterfeiting has been around as long as agriculture (and probably longer), and in this book author Bee Wilson picks out some of the more recent and better documented examples to amaze and inform.

Wilson’s food writing is among the best in Britain, as readers of her column ‘The Kitchen Thinker’ in Stella magazine can testify. A former research fellow in the history of ideas at Cambridge University, her intellectual rigour and disciplined research skills prove a great match with her seamless and engaging writing – she manages to bring history alive, and leaves you wanting more.

From lead and arsenic in Victorian sweets to the perils of food scares which can paradoxically change the diet the nation for the worse, Wilson manages to uncover new material, and, more importantly, present it in an entertaining way. She makes many thought-provoking points: that while wine, for example, has become more rigorously policed and better quality over the centuries, the quality of bread has declined to the extent that most supermarket loaves are now more adulterated than bread has ever been. We are still slow, it seems. to learn the lessons of history. Guy Dimond

'Curry Lovers' by Roopa Gulati

Curry Lovers
Roopa Gulati
Jacqui Small, £8.99
Regular Time Out food writer Roopa Gulati grew up in Cumbria, but learned to cook Indian food from her Punjabi mother – then fine-tuned the recipes while working in India for 18 years as a cook and TV chef. This small hardback is the pick of her favourite recipes, from classics such as a stunning version of lamb biriani to novelties such as okra stir-fried with dried mango powder (a taste and texture sensation). It doesn’t have the scope of Madhur Jaffrey’s books, but beautiful photography and very clear recipes make it easy to achieve the correct result. Few recent Brit-Asian cookery books have recipes that work as well as these; it’s easy to grasp the most complex recipes and get gasps of admiration for the results. Keep it next to Madhur’s books. Guy Dimond



Wild Garlic, Gooseberries… and me
Denis Cotter
Collins, £20
What more can be said on the subject of growing, cooking and eating vegetables? Quite a lot, it seems. The author is chef-owner of Café Paradiso, a vegetarian restaurant in Cork, Ireland, and he has previously published two other well-received cookery books: ‘Café Paradiso’ and ‘Paradiso Seasons’. A natural story-teller, Cotter doesn’t believe in writing a single paragraph when ten would be more fun. Unusually, there’s far more prose than recipes in this book, so it’s just as well that he (unlike many chefs) can actually write.

'Wild Garlic' by Dennis Cotter

This is a quirky, personal book, one that defies a structure that most book publishers would insist on, such as chapters divided ‘logically’ – alphabetically, say, or by seasons. Here the four chapters, arranged rather whimsically, cover green vegetables, foraged foods, garden-cultivated vegetables, and foods grown in the dark. Great for telling a tale, perhaps, but not so helpful when you want a recipe for courgettes (‘green’ or ‘cultivated’?) or mushrooms (‘foraged’ or ‘dark-grown’?) Arbitrariness aside, the author’s love of all things live and edible comes through clearly and there’s plenty to capture the cook’s, as well as the reader’s, attention.

Cotter’s globally inspired recipes are a far cry from the usual-suspect lentil and pasta dishes that are the bane of many a vegetarian cookery book; the recipes are unusually enticing, especially with sucha high quotient of vegan dishes. The author writes, ‘I’ve always been more of a magpie, taking a little of this culture and that cooking style, to make dishes that are somehow coherent but not necessarily faithful to a historic culture,’ and this approach shows in the fusion style of the recipes. They do require a certain level of skill (and time spent tracking down ingredients), but this is a book that rewards the slow and thoughtful approach. One for the thinking veggie, who enjoys reading as much as eating. Susan Low

'Persia in Peckham: Recipes from Persepolis by Sally Butcher

Persia in Peckham: Recipes from Persepolis
Sally Butcher
Prospect Books, £17.99
This is a Londoner’s cookbook if ever there was one. The ‘Persepolis’ in the subtitle is a Peckham-based purveyor of Iranian foodstuffs and handicrafts. The owner, Sally Butcher – beat that for an east London surname – is the owner of the shop. She’s a one-time chef who married into an Iranian family and learned ‘by osmosis’ the language, culture and recipes of ancient Persia and modern-day Iran.

Butcher says that the book aims to be a ‘kitchen-table book, rather than a coffee-table book’, and it is. There are no lusty food-porn images (though there are some nice line drawings) and the author has a writing style that’s witty and charmingly irreverent.

So too with the recipes. From kebabs and khoreshes (stews) and kuftehs (stuffed rissoles or meatballs) to pulaos (rice dishes), classic Persian recipes make up the bulk of the book. Yet the recipes aren’t precious or overinvolved, and are written in a way that’s likely to encourage neophytes.

The book also delves into the wider culture of Iran, covering topics such as the Persian music scene, Iranians and their relationship with Islam and Iranian wedding rituals. One chapter is dedicated to ‘The Peckham Influence’, with recipes that reflect the multi-ethnic mix of this particular slice of south-east London, such as suya chelow with jerk chicken, or Persian pizzas. It’s a book that – like the best kitchens – is marked by tolerance, generosity and great food. Susan Low

Francesco's Kitchen by Francesco da Mosto

Francesco’s Kitchen
Francesco da Mosto
Ebury Press, £25
Following his artistic journeys through Venice and Italy, Venetian architect and author Francesco da Mosto has turned his attention to the food of his home town. His latest book features a good selection of classic recipes from Venice and its surrounding region, the Veneto, while the accompanying anecdotes provide an entertaining insight into this lesser-known Italian regional cuisine.

However, da Mosto can be so entrenched in the comfort of his own kitchen that he often forgets that he’s writing for an audience unfortunate enough not to have the abundant, relatively inexpensive fresh seafood and produce of Rialto market at their doorstep. As a result, a few recipes feature ingredients that are either impossible to find outside Venice or are extremely costly, if they can be tracked down. After all, even Venetian expats have resorted to timing visits home to quell their cravings for local cuisine highlights such as moeche, deep-fried soft-shell crabs that are caught during a brief moulting season in spring and autumn. If you don’t mind da Mosto’s constant references to himself and his aristocratic family (it turns out Lord Byron contracted gonorrhoea during a fling with a da Mosto beauty), this book is a lively read and a reliable introduction to the gastronomy of Venice. Elena Berton

Taste: The Story of Britain through its cooking by Kate Colquhoun

Taste:
The Story of Britain through its Cooking
Kate Colquhoun
Bloomsbury, £20
‘Taste’ is a history of Britain’s relationship with food. The author starts with a thumbnail sketch of prehistoric Britain before considering Roman Britain at table, moving swiftly through Anglo-Saxon Britain, then pausing to fill in some lovely detail on the delights and eccentricities of medieval British cuisine. Author Kate Colquhoun’s scholarship is equally authoritative on the Tudor, Stuart, Restoration, Regency and Victorian periods, before taking reader straight up to the present day, with our ‘need for reassurance’ from the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson.

Don’t let the word ‘scholarship’ put you off, however; this is no dry-as-dust anthology. It’s scholarly in that it’s well researched, but it reads as well as any of the many novels to which the author refers and never feels overworthy. This is largely because Colquhoun looks at food from numerous perspectives: through literature, through the changing roles of science as it develops and, importantly (from a modern sociological perspective), summing up the state of play at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century as being about ‘the extremes of the inordinately overfed and the distressingly underfed’, a theme that she returns to at the end of the Victorian era, when the hunger of 6 million people defined the politics of the day.

Lighter themes cover food fashion, the rise of the cookery book and the roots of the modern-day celebrity chef. And if you've ever wondered why Americans call their main courses ‘entrées’ or why offal is called offal, there’s plenty more here to enlighten. Susan Low

Creole by Babette de Rozières

Creole
Babette de Rozières
Phaidon, £24.95
Caribbean food lovers often complain about the paucity of good books on the cuisine, and nowhere are the complaints louder than from the Caribbean diaspora where the need to reproduce the taste of home is strongly felt. ‘Creole’, by Guadeloupe-born chef Babette de Rozières should go some way to redressing the balance. This is not is a clichéd jerk chicken and ackee cookbook but a successful exploration of some the region’s strongest ethnic and cultural influences through the food. De Rozières, owner of the popular La Table de Babette in Paris, has compiled an amazing collection of Caribbean-inspired dishes. The 120-page fish chapter for example, is so comprehensive that it could have been a book on its own.

One of this book’s strong points is that most, if not all of the recipes can be easily reproduced in the UK, as many of the ingredients are either found in good supermarkets or easily substituted. Creole food, De Rozières says, ‘awakens the senses and never leaves you indifferent’ – and neither does this book, with its vibrant and mouthwatering photos that truly capture the colour and excitement of Caribbean food. Franka Philip

1,080 recipes by Phaidon

1,080 recipes
Phaidon, £24.95
In Britain we have ‘Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management’ (and latterly ‘Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course’); in France it’s the ‘Larousse Gastronomique’; in Italy ‘Il Cucchiaio d’Argento’ (‘The Silver Spoon’). These are the exhaustive manuals of everyday cooking, the books handed down from generation to generation, covering everything from boiled eggs to fillet steaks, fish stews to chocolate mousse, and all sorts in between. Following the success of its 2005 English edition of ‘The Silver Spoon’, Phaidon, the celebrated art publisher, is bringing out a translation of the Spanish equivalent, written more than 30 years ago. Much like the Italian tome, it contains a vast arsenal of recipes and techniques organised by main ingredient, as well as potted digressions on various subjects and bonus recipes from celebrity chefs at the end.
As you’d expect given the book’s age, there’s none of the fancy frolics associated with Spanish nueva cocina here; moreover, some readers may be surprised that most of the recipes have nothing to do with the exported clichés of Spanish food (although there are recipes for those things, too). But this is a faithful portrait of what Spain’s food has always been about: good ingredients and simple cooking. Anyone who loves gastropub grub will find plenty of rustic treats to take their fancy here. The book’s beautifully presented and, considering the sheer number of recipes, very reasonably priced. Andrew Staffell

Holiday by Bill Granger

Holiday
Bill Granger
Murdoch, £19.99
If you’re dreading the long, cold, and oh-so-dark evenings of winter, Bill Granger’s new book will prove as essential as a large bottle of St John’s Wort. Thought by industry pundits to be ‘the next Jamie Oliver’, Granger’s last book ‘Everyday’ was a hit, even though his TV shows have not been televised in the primetime evening slots. This book proffers more of the same; it’s themed around holiday cooking but Granger’s food is always so breezily uncomplicated there’s not much to pare back for lazy days. (He does tackle Christmas, but it’s Aussie-style glazed ham and salads, not the innovative ways with turkey and Brussels sprouts you may be seeking.) Ideas we love: chicken burgers with lemongrass and lime (from the barbie, mate); sweet potatoes with coriander and preserved lemon; green ratatouille; slow-roast pork shoulder with cumin and coriander seeds; hazelnut and fig cake, and a coconut ice cream that demands only three ingredients. Winter gets a look-in with chapters called ‘Rug-Up-Warm Soups’ and ‘Fireside’, but Aussie expats be warned: the beachside photography may induce homesickness. Jenni Muir

Relish by Joanna Weinberg

Relish
Joanna Weinberg
Bloomsbury, £20
No ifs, no buts, no qualifications – this is a great cookery book. Being book-sized, not cookbook-sized, with pretty etchings on the cover, it looks somewhat like a trendy reprint of a Jane Austen novel. Inside, food writer Joanna Weinberg introduces her love affair with food and recipes. So far, so Stinking Bishop. However, Weinberg soon gets to the point – how to entertain your loved ones at home without reaching for a Valium sandwich. No matter how busy your life gets, she begs, don’t give up cooking for your friends, and she offers her favourite roast chicken recipe as an easy fall-back. Around 50 of the book’s 288 pages are given over to tips and etiquette, which sounds dreary but is actually helpful; from entertaining in very small spaces (she once lived in NYC) to ‘who sits where and why it matters’, for instance. Recipes are broken into categories (supper, parties, comfort cooking, barbecues…). Her gorgeous slow-roast lamb with melting vegetables proved too tempting for the nominally veggie member of our party, and ‘Sex and the City’ fans will appreciate having the Magnolia Bakery cupcake recipe within easy reach. ‘How to Feed Your Friends with Relish’, to give the book its full title, will go a long way in helping you successfully do just that. Simone Baird

Dinner in a Dash by Lindsey Bareham

Dinner in a Dash
Lindsey Bareham
Quadrille at £14.99
Lindsey Bareham’s ‘Dinner in a Dash’ shows how to put a three-course dinner party for six together in under an hour. But this isn’t about seeing how much culinary activity you can squeeze into 60 minutes (a common mistake with time-focused cookbooks). Bareham – a former food editor of Time Out – has an original and highly experienced take on when it’s worth putting in the effort and when it’s not. She shows how to make chicken liver pâté from scratch in 15 minutes, but includes the likes of canned cream rice (jazzed up with pistachios, fresh cream and orange flower water), Doritos hot salsa dip and frozen broccoli florets on her sensibly organised shopping lists. A great choice if you’d like to have people round after work more often, and keenly priced too. Jenni Muir

Beaneaters & Bread Soup: Portraits and Recipes from Tuscany

Beaneaters & Bread Soup:
Portraits and Recipes from Tuscany
Lori di Mori
Quadrille, £20
'Beaneaters', or 'mangiafagioli' as the Italians would have it, is how Tuscans are referred to by other Italians. Although Tuscany is now a wealthy region and Tuscan food the envy of many a 'rustic' London restaurant, it was historically an impoverished region. Tuscan cooks,
making a virtue out of necessity, created a flavoursome cuisine out of not much. Beans and bread, as the book's title suggests, were important mainstays.

Di Mori, a student of Italian literature, has an evident respect for and deep knowledge of Tuscan food and food culture. The book is a collection of evocatively written portraits of artisanal Tuscan food producers, including a coffee roaster, a shepherd and cheesemaker, a tripe vendor and a Lardo di Colonnata producer, among others.

Each portrait is followed by several of each producer's own recipes. These are an eclectic bunch, including classics such as ribollita (the classic 'reboiled' bean and cabbage soup), pappa al pomodoro (a thick soup made from ripe tomatoes and stale bread) and zuppa di ceci (chickpea soup), plus producers' personal favourites, such as a terracotta-maker's peppery beef stew. The recipes reflect the simplicity and essential frugality of true Tuscan cooking.

Di Mori also happens to be married to Jason Lowe, one of Britain's most celebrated food photographers and the photographer for this book. The pictures, it almost goes without saying, are stunning. They're also refreshingly unpretentious, helping to give the book its insight into Tuscan food and life away from the 'Chiantishire' cliches. Susan Low

Cook Simple by Diana Henry

Cook Simple
Diana Henry
Mitchell Beazley, £20
In ‘Cook Simple’, Diana Henry’s focus is not on speed but ease, which became a priority when this hitherto enthusiastic cook had children. She relies a lot on the oven – not the appliance you’d immediately associate with hassle-free food – but dishes such as chermoula lamb with hot pepper and carrot purée will have you reassessing your old-fangled stove. We also love the chapters dedicated to chops and sausages. This is the book for the harassed foodie in your life. Jenni Muir