Restaurants

'Everyday Harumi'
Harumi Kurihara
Conran Octopus, £20
Often described as the Delia of Japanese cookery, Harumi Kurihara’s extraordinary career has seen a string of television shows and best-selling cookery books, two of which have been published in English before this latest offering.

Having already won over the Japanese public, the still-spritely sixtysomething now has set her sights on the West. ‘Everyday Harumi’, unlike its predecessors, focuses primarily on educating Western cooks; Kurihara researched and wrote the book while in London,
to ensure she understood the British way of eating and cooking.

It’s fair to say that Japanese cuisine in the UK has suffered from extremes of perception, from oversimplification (the raw fish and sushi cliché) to unnecessary complication (too fussy, too many obscure ingredients). While Kurihara acknowledges the complexities – she voices frustration at not being able to fully translate the multitude of cutting techniques used in the Japanese kitchen, for example – she is determined to highlight everyday dishes cooked by housewives like herself.

However, she tries hard to bring Japanese flavours in line with some Brit-style preferences – nestled between classics such as cold soba noodles with grated radish, buta shougayaki (pork with ginger) and chawan mushi (savoury steamed egg custards) are recipes for Harumi’s special barbecue marinade, mashed potatoes with a Japanese-style mushroom sauce, and halibut and aubergine miso gratin.

Local ingredients, such as mackerel, pumpkin and duck, are championed; for everything else, the volume is bookended with a comprehensive introduction to store-cupboard essentials and a handy list of (albeit London-heavy) addresses for suppliers of Japanese ingredients.

The elegance and beauty of traditional Japanese cookery, with its emphasis on presentation, is done justice with stunning photography by Jason Lowe and charming watercolour illustrations from Kim Marsland to highlight each recipe. A commendable contribution to the pool of modern Japanese cookery books, and one that will undoubtedly go further to educate than yet another ‘...Food Made Easy’ TV series. Charmaine Mok, Time Out London Issue 2043: October 15-21 2009
Go to www.bit.ly/TOHarumi to read our blog about Harumi and washoku.

'Tender'
Nigel Slater
Fourth Estate, £30
Nigel Slater’s latest book explores vegetables, and especially vegetable gardening. He’s a novice grower, yet ‘Tender’ is refreshingly different from the many other memoirs on the subject of ‘my war with slugs’. It’s primarily driven by a clear appreciation of the value of home-grown produce in the contemporary kitchen. Slater applies his very evocative, sensual writing style to such topics as tomato varieties – which ones he likes, and why – with impressive verve.

He’s an urban gardener and we follow his journey from weed patch to veg patch. There’s an aspirational element to this – if only we all had the time to fuss over seed catalogues, peruse garden tools, clip box hedges and move horse manure one bag at a time through the house.

And of course, most of us don’t have Monty Don to call on to pop around and give advice.

Yet it’s also an inspiring read; we are left feeling that if he can do it, so could we. After a short intro, each chapter of the book is devoted to a single vegetable, with growing tips that read much like his cooking tips. Even if you’re not a grower yourself, you’ll find the recommended flavour pairings and recipes very useful, especially if you’ve always wondered how to cook interesting dishes using the parsnips or leeks in your organic veg box (he covers more than 30 vegetables).

Beautiful, urban-rustic design and Jonathan Lovekin’s mouthwatering photography add to this exquisite book. One for all the gardeners, or just wannabe gardeners, living in London. Guy Dimond, Time Out London Issue 2041: October 1-7 2009

'Waste'
Tristram Stuart
Penguin, £9.99
Taking its place beside works such as Charles Clover’s ‘The End of the Line’ or Felicity Lawrence’s ‘Not on the Label’, ‘Waste’ is an exhaustively researched study of the problems humans have created in their unending search for that most basic need – a regular supply of food.

In what feels like many years of work, Stuart has overlooked no scrap of information or morsel of data in the quest to discover why we in the West discard half of the food we produce while millions starve.

It’s a hugely complicated issue, and one that Stuart tackles admirably, covering every stage of food production from farming to trade and sale, and what actually makes it to our plates.

Blame for the immense profligacy is spread far and wide: Western trade agreements; multinationals’ control over whole areas of food production; commodity markets; the relentless pursuit of profit by supermarket chains; and our own complicity in accepting a fundamentally illogical situation where food resources are seen as infinite.

Although Stuart supplies plenty of shocking illustrations of our modern attitude to food waste, recounting shop bins full of edible food and mountains of rotting bananas in the tropics, the book is not without optimism. The author has travelled the world investigating solutions which can reverse the trend of waste – from reducing consumption to redistribution and food recycling.

The only problem with ‘Waste’ is that the endless facts and dense prose can sometimes feel impenetrable. It is is a vitally important and impressively comprehensive book which should be compulsory reading for everyone from Gordon Brown to shoppers in the aisles of Tesco, but a more approachable tone would perhaps have garnered a wider audience.
Euan Ferguson, Time Out London Issue 2040: September 24-30 2009

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'Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey'
Rick Stein
BBC Books, £25
There have been many other TV chefs who have brought Asian cooking to our screens, most notably Madhur Jaffrey, Ken Hom, and, er, Keith Floyd. But few can have done it as affably, as colourfully or with as much infectious enthusiasm as Rick Stein in his latest BBC TV series. As with the show, the accompanying book is a trip through Southeast Asia, taking in Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, as well as the less well known culinary destinations of Cambodia, Bangladesh and Bali.

As well as dishes we recognise from restaurant menus, such as pad thai noodles or satay skewers, there are many which will perhaps be unfamiliar to all but the seasoned traveller, such as the rich Bangladeshi beef shatkora or fragrant Cambodian steamed mussels.

Although there are a few quick 20-minute suppers in here (Vietnamese clams with beer, black beans and ginger stands out), there is also a lot of grinding of spices, preparation of pastes and masalas and slow cooking of aromatic stocks. Stein knows there are no shortcuts to a good curry or pho, as hard as some stir-in sauce manufacturers might try to persuade you otherwise. The many authentic ingredients require some planning, too: some may be hard to find for those outside metropolitan areas, though there is a list of online suppliers. But with strong Bangladeshi, Vietnamese and Sri Lankan communities in London, we’ve no excuse for not tracking down the elusive shatkora (bitter lime) or some asafoetida (the stinky, pungent spice used in Indian cookery).

This is not a compendium of Southeast Asian cooking in the way that, say, Charmaine Solomon’s ‘Complete Asian Cookbook’ is, but it doesn’t try to be. Instead, the veteran chef’s irrepressible on-screen geniality comes through in every little recollection or scene-setting story which accompanies the recipes, giving them a personality not always found in such endeavours. The design and photography is lively and vibrant, and, refreshingly for a celebrity chef project, the book only features one snap of Stein himself, focusing instead on the regions and dishes themselves. This quietly echoes the book’s sentiment: that food – through production, cooking and eating – is as central to life in the East as sleeping or breathing, and by trying some of these recipes at home we can hopefully experience some of this passion ourselves. Euan Ferguson, Time Out London Issue 2038: September 10-16 2009

'Spooning With Rosie'
Rosie Lovell
Fourth Estate, £18.99
Rosie Lovell is a bit of a south London sweetheart - her cafe, Rosie's Deli, has been a firm fixture at Brixton Market since 2004, and within the pages of this, her first, book are anecdotes and musings on the vibrant community that has shaped her and her food.

But make no mistake: this doesn't pretend to be a straight-up cookery book. Its tagline is 'Food, friendship and kitchen loving', and for every recipe there is a background story or, in the style of so many Nigella/Nigel wannabes, gushing prose for the recipe or ingredients featured on the page.

Some of it is endearing: a recipe for 'Esme's hot wings, Daddy's Jamaican ackee & saltfish, fried plantain and coconut coleslaw' affectionately describes 'a wonderful Jamaican lady who runs an organic vegetable shop opposite [Rosie's Deli]', whose mothering instincts have clearly had an impact on Rosie.

But it does become banal at points, and the reader is often left frustrated with the amount of esoteric titbits that are, arguably, of no interest to anyone but the writer and her close friends ('glamorous, funny friend Zezi' and co, perhaps). If you look beyond this, the recipes themselves are basic but eclectic, in a good way; what this book does have going for it is a no-frills, easy-to-follow approach.

There's no shortage of honest, quick and faff-free cafe fare (that crosses borders occasionally): quail's egg and pancetta tart, Colombian scrambled eggs, Vietnamese salad, coconut and cardamom pudding. However, it lacks a certain spark that great globetrotting cookbooks, such as that of Ottolenghi or Moro, have in spades. You get the feeling that you'd much rather go to Rosie's and eat the food for yourself than replicate these recipes at home - which, in a way, can only be a good thing for her.
Charmaine Mok, Time Out London Issue 2037: September 3-9, 2009

'Economy Gastronomy: Eat Better and Spend Less'
Allegra McEvedy and Paul Merrett
Michael Joseph, £20
As our economy collapsed like a cooling soufflé, a wave of ‘economy’ cookery books cashed in. Economy Gastronomy ties in with the BBC TV series of the same name, but – surprisingly for a TV tie-in – it’s clear a lot of thought has gone into it.

The text avoids the slightly hectoring tone the show takes by focusing solely on the dishes. If you start to feel guilty when reading this book, it can only be because you know you’d benefit from the cooking tips within.

In the first section, the authors have developed an approach to meal planning which begins with one major ‘bedrock’ purchase (a whole chicken, for example) which is then made into three or four easy ‘tumbledown’ dishes (chicken pie with tarragon, hot and sour chicken broth), making full use of the freezer. In this respect, it mirrors the TV show. When followed rigorously, this system cuts down profligacy as well as, hopefully, the weekly shopping bill.

The rest of the book comprises simple, single-dish recipes for everyday meals, albeit selected for their affordability and prudence. Chapters include the innovative ‘Gastropubonomy’ (including Thai-spiced mussels) and ‘Home-made takeaways’ with a recipe for ‘Colonel Merrett’s Bucket of Chicken’.

Georgia Glynn Smith’s photography and the restrained design treads a tasteful line between austerity and allure, with close-up pictures of the dishes interspersed with shots of the authors looking relentlessly jovial.

The cynic might point out that this sort of cooking is nothing new; that there is a long (lost) British tradition of waste-not-want-not, of making the most of ingredients. It’s a tradition that was put into print so authoritively by Mrs Beeton, was made inescapable by rationing, and has been contemporised gracefully by Rose Prince. But with a third of all food bought in Britain ending up in the bin and shopping bills rising unstoppably, this book is a timely reminder of how easy (and rewarding) it can be to practise culinary thrift without sacrificing appeal. Euan Ferguson, Time Out London Issue 2036: August 27-September 2 2009.

'The Modern Vegetarian: Food Adventures for the Contemporary Palate'
Maria Elia
Kylie Cathie, £16.99
Author Maria Elia is currently head chef at the Whitechapel Gallery Dining Room, and before that made her name as chef at the Delfina Studio Café in Bermondsey. She’s known for her creative, flavour-packed cooking style that pulls together gutsy flavours and ingredients from around the world. This book is a further expression of this vein, drawing on influences from Thailand, Italy, Japan, North Africa, India, Greece and elsewhere.

Elia’s not afraid of a bit of culinary miscegenation, and that’s evident in recipes for watermelon curry with black beans and paneer, or miso-marinated kataifi-wrapped aubergines. The full title of the book pretty much sums it up: this is adventurous stuff, far removed from the usual clichés that are still too frequently served up as ‘the vegetarian option’ in restaurants. Recipes such as blue cheese cheesecake with sticky figs, and tomato, feta, almond and date baklava had us wondering of Elia sometimes goes a flavour too far. Other recipes though, such as chestnut pasta ‘rags’ with brussels sprouts and wild mushrooms, almost had us wishing for autumn so we could get stuck in.

Though it doesn’t make a big fuss about seasonality, this is an excellent book for making the most of seasonal produce such as artichokes, aubergines and plums. There are a few cheffy indulgences (such as ‘textures of peas’ and ‘textures of beetroot’ – trios of dishes meant to be served as an ensemble), and the book demands a well-stocked larder. But if you’re looking for new and unusual vegetarian recipes to add to your repertoire, this book does the trick. The hyper-real colours of Jonathan Gregson’s photography make the food look suitably luscious. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 2034: August 13-19 2009.

'Vefa's Kitchen'
Vefa Alexiadou
Phaidon, £24.95
Books on Greek cookery are never top-sellers. Not even landmark books such as Andy Harriss’s excellent ‘Taste of the Aegean’ (1992) or Theodore Kyriakou’s ‘Real Greek Food’ (2000) will shift as many copies as yet another book about Italian food to add the hundreds already out there. So this hefty text from Phaidon – publisher of the much-hyped older sibling volume ‘Silver Spoon’ (2005) – shows they’re confident that this book will be a winner internationally. And they’re not wrong. Author Vefa Alexiadou is a well-known food writer and TV chef in her native Greece, and this book is possibly the most authoritative written in the English language on contemporary Greek food.

There are more than 700 recipes, collected, she claims, from all over Greece. It kicks off with an overview of the regionality of Greek food, then goes straight into the recipes. It’s all to the point, and for people who cook: there is no ‘lifestyle’ element of the author pouting, just lots of tested, clear recipes. The photography is equally simple and attractive, immediately evocative of the food of the real Greece (as opposed to the fodder you so often find in tourist restaurants). So you find dishes such as squid with nettles; stuffed courgette flower fritters; crayfish stew; and a large chapter on pies. Both the range of ingredients (from kid to wild greens) and the simple cooking methods are unmistakably Greek.

The glossary at the back is useful, but If you know the proper Greek names for dishes, the recipe index is frustrating as names are only given in English. For example, if you want find a recipe for galaktobureko – a popular cake-like dessert – you need to guess the crude English translation (‘custard pastry’) and find it that way. On the recipe page itself, the name is first given in English translation, then in Greek script, and then in transliteration from the Greek. But the book’s a stunner, beautifully designed, and should give hours of page-flicking joy and cooking pleasure to anyone who appreciates real Greek food, and wants to recreate it back home. Guy Dimond, Time Out London Issue 2032: July 30-August 5 2009.

'My Cousin Rosa: Rosa Mitchell's Sicilian Kitchen'
Rosa Mitchell
Murdoch Books, £25
This new book by cook and food writer Rosa Mitchell emanates Sicilian warmth. She was born in Catania, in eastern Sicily, migrated to Australia in 1962 and now runs the Journal Café in Melbourne.

The book chronicles the recipes and food traditions that Mitchell and her extended Sicilian-Australian family and friends cook in their adopted home – recipes that keep Sicily alive on the plate. ‘Simple and tasty’ is how Mitchell describes Sicilian food, and the recipes are indeed simple to follow. Many of them are based on seasonal vegetables such as artichoke, cardoon, aubergine and fennel. There are deceptively straightforward recipes for classic Sicilian dishes such as tonno agro dolce (sweet and sour tuna) and the summery mixed vegetable dish caponata. Particularly interesting are the farmhouse-style recipes for the likes of home-made ricotta and pork and fennel salami – the sorts of dishes that every rural Sicilian family would rely on, but which few city-dwellers have the time or skills to make.

Pasta dishes, including bucatini with sardines flavoured with typically Sicilian ingredients such as saffron, pine nuts and currants, or the inventive ‘something from nothing’ dish of spaghetti with breadcrumbs and spring onions, are a high point too. Sicilians love sweets, so Sicilian classics such as cannoli, pastry tubes filled with sweetened ricotta, are not to be missed.

Because the book is written for an Australian readership, some of the advice about sourcing and the seasonality of some ingredients makes little sense to British audiences. Terminology may need translation too (chard, for example, is called silverbeet in Australia), but these are minor quibbles about what is a beautifully produced collection of recipes and stories. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 2031: July 23-29 2009.

'The Foodie Handbook'
Pim Techamuanvivit
Conran Octopus, £20
Pim Techamuanvivit – usually just called ‘Pim’ – is one of the world’s most successful food bloggers, for her site ‘Chez Pim’ (chezpim.typepad.com). Its success seems down to several factors. She was one of the first, and at the time, one of the best. She uses lush photography – her own. And I suspect most importantly, her blog is very aspirational. Barely a week goes by when she’s not jetting off to a far-off city to dine in the very best restaurants, or court favour with culinary legends.

How does she do it? Her blog infers that after moving from Thailand to the US she made a fortune working in Silicon Valley, which then allowed her to pursue a career in food writing.

On the back of the perceived glamour of her lifestyle and the traffic to her blog, this British book was commissioned. The style of the writing is didactic: if you want to do it properly, you have to do it her way. Except we’re not talking about baking soufflés; in Pim world, being a ‘foodie’ is a competitive sport (and you’re left in no doubt who number one is) . She covers topics such as ‘How not to be a wine geek’ and ‘Fifty things every foodie should do’. She has a tendency to name-drop, but then she has done her share of networking with the famous. However, there’s little coherence between or within chapters and recipes pepper the pages almost randomly. The book’s not without some merit: it's illustrated and attractively designed. Some of the recipes are good; and some of the Thai ones in particular are excellent. But ultimately, this is a book for existing fans of the original food-blogger-turned-celebrity. Guy Dimond, Time Out London: Issue

'The Iraqi Cookbook'
Lamees Ibrahim
Stacey International, £24.95
The very word ‘Iraq’ is so politically charged that even when it appears in the title of a cookery book it’s an attention-grabber. This is not the first book on the subject to be published in English, but previous works are rare.The author is a Baghdad-trained medical doctor who now lives in London. The book started out as a project to collect cherished recipes for her children, but ended up being collated on a grander scale. Ibrahim says that the book was written for Iraq’s diaspora population, but the recipes are wide-ranging enough to interest food-lovers of all stripes.

There are classic Iraqi dishes such as hareesah, a spiced wheat and lamb dish traditionally eaten by Shi’ite Muslims on the tenth day of the sacred month of Muharram, and qoozi, whole roast lamb stuffed with saffron and rosewater-scented rice, which is served at important family celebrations.

Recipes for stuffed vegetables recall the cooking of the western Mediterranean, while rice dishes (‘pilaou’), similar to those found throughout the Middle East and beyond, abound, highlighting Iraq’s importance as a long-standing cultural crossroads. As well as collecting recipes, the author subtly outlines the social changes that have taken place in Iraq in recent decades, particularly the changing role of women in society and the political turmoil of the recent past – and how these changes have affected the cooking. It’s a fascinating look at a country through its food. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 2029: July 9-15 2009.

'Serendip'
Peter Kuruvita
Murdoch Books, £25
London is home to one of the largest Sri Lankan populations beyond the shores of their country, yet there are few notable restaurants serving the food of what was once Ceylon in the capital. Many Londoners of Sri Lankan heritage agree that restaurant food just can’t approach home cooking for quality, yet there have been few good books in English showing the keen amateur how to create Sri Lankan dishes – until now.

The author of this beautifully produced book is chef at the Flying Fish Restaurant in Sydney, but was born in London. The recipes are largely family creations, including dishes from his Sinhalese grandmother’s kitchen, which are some of the best in the book, including a chicken curry thickened with desiccated coconut and ground rice, and the ‘beginners’ curry’ known as kiri hoddy. The ‘On the Road’ chapter includes classic
‘short eats’ such as fish cutlets and mutton rolls.

The book is a cross between a family album with recipes and a travelogue. It’s helped along by lush, colourful photography (by Alan Benson and Peter Kuruvita) of the dishes, people and landscapes of this island once known as Serendip. A gorgeous book that brings Sri Lanka to life on the page and palate. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 2027: June 25-July 1 2009.

'An Edible History of Humanity'
Tom Standage
Atlantic Books, £19.99
Tom Standage is business editor of The Economist. As you’d expect, his writing style is therefore crisp, clear, and... economical. Which is no bad thing when you’re trying to view recorded history through the huge prism of world food history. This has been done before by others, from early luminaries such as Margaret Visser to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, who have all had their particular approaches, yet it seems there is room for yet another.

This book is necessarily derivative, but to his credit Standage details his sources carefully. The result is a summary, covering diverse subjects from the well known, such as the shift to agriculture from hunter-gathering, to the topics less documented by food writers. For example, Napoleon’s reliance on fast and light food logistics being responsible for both his military successes and failures was news to me.

Along the way Standage covers the disaster ensuing from farm collectivisation under Mao, gives a very succinct and clear explanation of the so-called ‘triangular trade’ and slavery in the Americas, and how the spice trade was responsible for the wealth and decline of the major trading ports of the early modern period.

The style might be Economist-dry, but the stories told are not. Christopher Columbus is exposed as a fraud who was insistent he had found Asia when he had in fact found the Americas; and starvation-induced cannibalism, including the Ukraine as recently as the 1930s. Malthusian arguments are described then discredited, modern processes of fertiliser production explained and applauded. The author has done a first-class job of collating available sources and describing complex information in a coherent and easily comprehensible way. My only criticism is that for such a well-researched and written book, better illustrations than the grey, sparse and rather superfluous images used would have made the £20 cover price seem like much better value. Guy Dimond, Time Out London Issue 2025: June 11-17 2009.

'River Cottage Handbook No.5: Edible Seashore'
John Wright
Bloomsbury, £14.99
The sheer number of these River Cottage-branded books might suggest they are being churned out, yet they’re all surprisingly good. This volume is particularly notable because it’s small enough to use as a field guide, is easy to use and is engagingly written. We used it on a trip to Norfolk to gather foraged plants we’d not tried before, including alexanders.

The necessary caveats are all still there – for example, hemlock (fatally poisonous) is easily mistaken for other umbellifers, including alexanders. With the help of the book, we lived to tell the tale. The many pages on collecting mussels, razor clams, crabs and the like are also eminently practical, and types of net are discussed along with the rules and ethics of foraging.

The recipes at the end seem a little superfluous, though they did presumably come in useful when The Guardian printed excerpts a few weeks ago, along with suitably luscious photography. A perfect, and beautiful, book for beginners or intermediate-level shore-foragers. Guy Dimond, Time Out London Issue 2023: May28-June 3 2009.

'Hsa Ba: Burmese Cookbook'
Tin Cho Chaw
Grassblades Limited, £20
Seldom does a book arriving with so little fanfare make such a splash in the kitchen. We’d been on the lookout for a good Burmese cookbook for years and came across this one, published in 2008, on the excellent blog and website www.hsaba.com (‘hsa ba’ is Burmese for ‘please eat’).

The author was born in Rangoon and moved to the UK when she was eight years old. The book is the result of remembered dishes from childhood and, more recently, visits to family still in Burma. The 100 clearly-written recipes have been honed and tested so that they work in western kitchens, but retain the taste of Burma.

Dishes such as tomato fish curry with fish sauce and red chilli, roasted eggplant salad, wing-bean salad and golden sticky rice had us heading back to the kitchen again and again to satisfy our cravings. Some, such as slow-cooked pork belly and mutton yoghurt curry recall the Chinese and Indian influences evident in Burmese food, while others, such as mohingar (a fish noodle soup, considered the national dish of Burma) and pickled tea leaf salad are emphatically Burmese.

The author has a background in graphic design, so this well-presented book doesn’t feel self-published – it’s as professionally put together as any other we’ve reviewed on these pages (and more so than many). As an added bonus, you can watch a selection of the recipes being cooked by the author on the website. This book deserves to get widespread international recognition. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 2021: May 14-20 2009.

'How to Drink'
Victoria Moore
Granta, £15.99
The Guardian’s drinks correspondent Victoria Moore has written an approachable, highly practical consumer guide to quality drinking at home. Every common category of drink is covered, from coffee to spirits; only wine is perhaps given too little space.
Most drinks books tend to be lavishly illustrated, with too much information about the history and mythology of drink, but not this one: it’s mostly narrative, and tells you what works and what doesn’t without too much extraneous background.

Take, for example, tonic water. Moore confirmed my own independent research, which had already discovered that Waitrose make a passable cheap version, that Fever-Tree is excellent but not worth the premium price, and that every low-cal version tastes awful. But Moore’s advice on only using small cans of Schweppes, so the bubbles stay perky in a G&T, was news to me.

The book is packed with useful tips, not only what to buy and make, but what to avoid. Expect your cocktail-making repertoire to increase dramatically if you read this book – but avoid reading it if you’re trying to cut down on alcohol units, as the book suggests many excellent new excuses for setting restraint aside. Guy Dimond, Time Out London Issue 2022: May 21-27 2009.

'The Vicar's Wife Cook Book'
Elisa Beynon
Fourth Estate, £18.99
Author Elisa Beynon was the winner of a competition run by book publisher Fourth Estate and Waitrose Food Illustrated to find a ‘new voice in food writing’. The winner would (and duly did) have their book published – and this impressively hefty volume is the result. With its cover depicting wholesome brown bread being torn by hand and its mildly religious-sounding title, the book has a homely, somewhat nostalgic, old-fashioned feel to it, the sort of thing that has you reaching for your pinny and dusting muffin trays with organic flour.

Chapters entitled ‘Sunday Lunch’, ‘Dinner for Friends’ and cost-conscious ‘Weekday Suppers’ make it plain that this book is about no-nonsense home cooking. There are plenty of stews and slow braises, a fair few roasts and some indulgent, classic English puddings – the sort of dinners you might just rustle up if you were inviting Nigel Slater round (Slater, incidentally, was one of the competition’s judges).

Beynon’s voice comes through as that of a pragmatic, accomplished cook with an obvious love of feeding people. Her recipes have very clear instructions, making them suitable for beginner cooks who need some practical advice in the kitchen. And, thanks to the sanity-checking of a couple of first-rate home economists who collaborated with her on this book, you can rest assured that the recipes work. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 2018: April 23-29 2009.

'The Rough Guide to Food'
Rough Books, £12.99
Not a cookery book or food travel guide, this reference book examines contemporary food issues – what some people call food politics. This paperback is ambitiously broad in its scope, covering every imaginable issue from the already well-documented (the power of supermarkets, food miles, the rise of obesity) to the trivial or even sensational (snippets on recommended ice-cream manufacturers, Delia and a mere two paragraphs on anorexia nervosa).

In its favour, the book is bang up to date and impressive in its range of topics; less impressive is the reliance on assertion, with sources not as well attributed as they might be. For example, one graph shows the decrease, over the last century, in the time the British spend cooking, with no footnotes to indicate the source of this difficult-to-gather data (which could prompt the cynic to wonder: did they just make it up?). Some topics are covered too fleetingly to explore the complexities of the issues involved; for example, Jamie’s school dinners is covered in three short paragraphs. But it’s a good book if you just need to brush up on the key issues of the moment, and want something you can dip into rather than read as a narrative, as you might with Michael Pollan’s ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’.

Perhaps most refreshing of all, the two authors appear to not be partisan to any particular causes or arguments; they are remarkably even-handed in their coverage of emotive topics from Fairtrade food to organic produce, and set the tone at informed and dignified concern rather than polemical outrage. Guy Dimond, Time Out London Issue 2019: April 30-May 6 2009.

'The Settler's Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food'
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Portobello Books, £20
The story of the South Asian community in East Africa is one of the greatest migration stories never told. A story of displacement, adversity, repression and triumph, its appearance in literature has been thin and fractured: until now. In this culinary memoir, journalist and political commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown uses the canvas of food to tell her personal history – and that of her kith and kin in Uganda and Britain.

Coming from a fine writer, with a keen interest in cooking, this is in some ways an Indian version of ‘Like Water for Chocolate’. Alibhai-Brown intersperses every few pages of narrative with a dish from her personal cookbook that is intrinsically linked to the action. So a recipe for watery dhal is preceded by a description of the dukanwallahs (shopkeepers) who formed the cornerstone of the community; the tale of a formidable local matriarch, Mama Kuba, is hemmed by her recipe for moon dhal bhajia; and an account of Alibhai-Brown’s last, troubled days in Uganda before Idi Amin’s expulsion order forcing Asians to leave Uganda features a recipe for biriyani.

If you are not a fan of Alibhai-Brown’s grandstanding, her recipe for spicy gora chicken is unlikely to make you warm to her; she claims that Indians upped the chilli content of dishes to unpalatable levels for goras (white people). And for someone so often maligned for ‘political correctness’ her one-dimensional depictions of Uganda’s other communities is at times difficult to swallow. This is an otherwise admirable, highly personal endeavour packed with some evocative recipes, but those wanting a more definitive history of the East African Asians will have to wait a little longer. Tamara Gausi, Time Out London Issue 2017: April 16-22 2009.

'The National Cookbook'
The National Gallery Company, £25
With its pillarbox-red cover and high-quality, heavy-gauge paper, this book feels almost as substantial as the National Gallery itself. If you’re wondering what the relationship is between the cookery book and the art gallery, it’s The National Dining Rooms, the acclaimed restaurant located in the National Gallery.

This restaurant, run by Oliver Peyton (whose name appears on the cover ), was the winner of a Time Out Eating & Drinking Award for Best British restaurant in 2007.The National Dining Rooms turns out carefully conceived modern British cooking that doesn’t fall into the usual pies and pasties clichés. The recipes in the book are an enticing read. Most were written by the Dining Rooms’ former chef Shaun Gilmore, who tragically died in a motorcycle accident in 2008.

Dishes such as lavender ham, or potted rabbit with perry and prunes flavoured with spices (such as allspice and mace) much-used in medieval times, show the subtlety and artfulness of proper, traditional British cooking. Most of the recipes are short and easily achievable by the average home cook.

The book is divided into four seasonal chapers, with evocative photography by Dan Jones interspersed with full colour pages of paintings from the Gallery. These detail shots show English landscapes or beautifully rendered details of food by artists such as Gauguin, van Gogh or Monet. It may look like a coffee table book, but we think it really belongs in the kitchen. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 2015: April 2-8 2009.

'Our Troubles with Food: Fears, Fads and Fallacies'
Stephen Halliday
The History Press, £18.99
Nineteen-eighty-eight: few comments from Edwina Currie on the prevalence of salmonella in eggs nearly leads to the collapse of the British egg industry. First century AD: Greek physician Galen claims that ingesting fruit has potentially dangerous consequences, a false belief which remains largely unchallenged until the eighteenth century.

The connection? Ill-informed speculation, that’s what.

According to social historian Stephen Halliday’s chronicle of the past two millennia’s food fads, having more information doesn’t necessarily make our decisions smarter. Or our population healthier. For our nation’s madcap early nutrition scientists, their experiments were so ill-informed they included restrictive diets that led to fatal malnutrition. And while Halliday acknowledges improvements in the science of modern nutrition through the pioneering twentieth century work of Nobel Prize winner Krebs and biochemist team McCance and Widdowson, he argues that our problems are far from over.

Obesity levels are rising, processed food now contains more kilocalories than nutrients and we consume far too much sugar, salt and high levels of saturated fat. According to Halliday, the latter are the new poisons, yet the food industry and Government – fully aware of the detrimental effect these foodstuffs have on our health – fail to act decisively.

At times, the reader may become slightly disoriented by the chapter cross-referencing, repeated information and leaps across centuries, yet Halliday provides a very broad perspective on our troubled relationship with food. Zerlina Mastin, Time Out London Issue 2011: March 5-11 2009.

'Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes'
Jennifer McLagan
Jacqui Small, £18.99
‘Fat’. it’s not a title that’s going to have much appeal for the slimming, calorie-counting masses who assuage their food guilt by tucking into ‘99 per cent fat-free’ biscuits. We suspect the author, an aficionado of all things fatty, wouldn’t be saddened by the loss of fat-averse potential readers.

The book sings the praises of all sorts of fat, with specific chapters on butter, pork fat, poultry fat and beef and lamb fats. The introduction, which aims to argue against the continued nutritional demonisation of fat, is a bit of a polemic, with too little evidence to back up the too many assertions made about heart disease, cholesterol, and health. These subjects alone could fill several volumes.

The book is stronger on the individual chapters, which are well researched and competently written. Pull-out boxes contain some fascinating facts on the likes of fat as a medium in Joseph Beuys’s sculptures, or the history of the fat-tailed sheep. The recipes are lengthy and discursive. Many, such as duck fat biscuits with cracklings or bone marrow tacos, sound quite quirky; while others, such as duck rilletes and burnt butter ice-cream, are reassuring in a fatty kind of way.

A refreshing departure from the plethora of quick, low-fat, after-work suppers books out there. It’s one for people who actually like to cook, and eat. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 2010: February 26-March 4 2009.

'The Clatter of Forks and Spoons'
Richard Corrigan
Fourth Estate, £25
When Richard Corrigan talks about poaching salmon, he doesn’t mean cooking it gently in water. His journey from bogland smallholding in County Meath to celebrity chef with restaurants off Park Lane and Piccadilly is a tale as suited to the silver screen as a cookbook.

The family ate well but was cash-poor and didn’t have electricity until 1973: they spent weeks turf-cutting every August to provide fuel for cooking and heating. At school – which he left before turning 15 – Corrigan was called Bog Man. Tales of these times and learning to cook in Amsterdam and London are bound up with profiles of favoured food producers, culinary musings and, of course, recipes, which run from Irish rusticity to haute cuisine.

Many dishes are familiar from Corrigan’s restaurants, including Bentley’s and Lindsay House. Sheila Keating is credited as writing partner but even so Corrigan’s astonishingly well read for someone who (like a few other well-known chefs) has suffered from dyslexia: ‘…you learn to memorise huge amounts of information,’ he says. ‘You have to. I do believe that ignorance is self-inflicted.’ Colourful, we expected. That this is also an intelligent and captivating book sets Corrigan above many of his TV rivals. Jenni Muir, Time Out London Issue 2009: February 29-15 2009.

All too often Kiros lazily writes ‘this is on every menu in Venice’, when introducing a recipe, without explaining the history or context of the dish she is enticing us to cook. But when she doesn’t get too distracted by her reverie, Kiros presents a good mix of traditional dishes along with more ambitious, yet workable dishes inspired by restaurant visits. She must have managed to snatch a few tips from reluctant locals, after all. Where the book succeeds in winning over hardened Venetians is the chapter devoted to cicheti, the tapas-like snacks that we love washing down with a glass of wine in the company of friends, while taking refuge from daydreaming tourists. Elena Berton , Time Out London Issue 2000/1: December 18-31 2009.

‘A Beer a Day’
Jeff Evans
Camra Books, £16.99
If you think phooey to New Year’s resolutions and want to start as you mean to go on, this daybook of good pints and bottles is a friendly source of trivia that will help you through any pub quiz. In the vein of our own ‘Any Excuse for a Drink’ column, expert beer writer Jeff Evans finds an event (Battle of Hastings, Brunel’s birthday, the last episode of ‘Blackadder’) for each day of the year and chooses an appropriate tipple with which to celebrate.

On February 2nd he explains the Christian traditions behind what, thanks to Harold Ramis, many now recognise as Groundhog Day – but did you know it was also the date of Queen Victoria’s funeral, the opening of New York’s Grand Central Station, and marks the death of Gene Kelly, Boris Karloff and Fred Perry? The suggested glass to raise is one of Crouch Vale Brewers Gold – a two-times consectutive winner (repetition – geddit?) of the Champion Beer of Britain title. Although this is published by the Campaign for Real Ale’s publishing division, it’s not all real ales, however: Belgian, French, German, Mexican, Spanish and US beers (amongst others) all feature – we have 366 days to get through after all.

Our only concern is the lack of support on the sourcing front: ‘Most beers will be reasonably easy to get hold of, given the number of specialist beer shops that now exist and... internet mail order.’ The fact is few would go online to order a whole case of a beer they’ve never tried. But as Evans argues, ‘Therein lies part of the purpose of a book such as this – to encourage the wider distribution of fine beers,’ and with that we can’t argue. Jenni Muir, Time Out London Issue 2002: January 1-7 2009.

‘Gennaro’s Italian Home Cooking’
Gennaro Contaldo
Headline, £20
Simplicity is a virtue in Italian home cooking - as is kitchen parsimony, with an emphasis on inexpensive ingredients such as pasta, pulses and seasonal vegetables. This book, by Gennaro Contaldo, the man recognised as Jamie Oliver’s early mentor of Italian cooking, slots right into the current need for budget-conscious cooking. Yes, there are hundreds of Italian cookery books out there, but we were more impressed with the tempting recipes in this tome than with Contaldo’s links with celebrity.

Recipes such as savoury escarole and smoked mozzarella pie, or braised oxtail with celery, hold plenty of appeal. There are some impressive-looking party pieces too, such as roast pork with mustard, apple and speck, which serves 12. Yet it’s the recipes that can be whipped up from a few tins and packets from the store cupboard that we’ll be experimenting with this winter: dishes such as chickpeas in anchovy sauce; cannellini bean and polenta bake; or risotto with chestnuts, sausage and porcini.

This is the kind of food that’s served in Italian families but all too rarely in Italian restaurants in the UK. There’s also a great recipe for tuna preserved under oil that dates from the time before tinned tuna was available on every supermarket shelf.
The book plays up the big Italian family theme in a way that’s slightly clichéd, but you can ignore the family portraits and concentrate on the recipes - you’ll be in for some pleasant surprises that go way beyond the usual pasta and Parma ham. Susan Low

‘John Torode’s Beef’
John Torode
Quadrille, £25
Australian-born chef John Torode has made British beef his business. His restaurant – Smith’s of Smithfield, near the famed meat market, is renowned for its well-presented good steaks, and this nicely-designed book follows suit. It starts out with the basics: a few words about sourcing beef, then a round-up of cattle breeds with cartoon-like drawings of each type before moving on to cuts of beef, with brief descriptions. Rather ingeniously, the book jacket can be unfolded into a full-size poster of a ‘meat map’ showing the part of the animal from which the various cuts come.

This is not abutchery manual: the focus is on cooking and recipes and the tone is much more light-hearted than, say, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ‘River Cottage Meat Book’. Recipe-wise, there are a few Asian-inspired ones such as grilled beef with Thai flavours in rice paper, beef rendang with lemongrass and ginger, and Japanese style beef with tobiko (flying-fish roe).

There are a few stocks, gravies and accompaniments too, but the recipes concentrate on hearty, meaty mains such as bollito misto, pies and pasties, and braised ox cheeks. And, of course, plenty on steaks, from clear instructions on how to fry, griddle or barbecue a steak properly, to recipes for carpet bag steak, the rarely seen double-cut porterhouse steak with béarnaise sauce, and T-bone steak as well as burgers and roasts.

‘Variety meats’ are not forgotten, as there’s a chapter on offal, as well as a section on veal with classic recipes such Italian favourites as ossobuco, vitello tonnato and veal saltimbocca. The recipes are clear and easy to follow, making this one for the bovine buffs. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 1997: November 27-December 3 2008.

‘Balance & Harmony: Asian Food’
Neil Perry
Murdoch Books, £30
This book wins full marks for presentation. It’s beautifully designed and made, with a padded cover, sumptuous photography by Earl Carter and striking imagery that conjures up 1930s Shanghai. Author Neil Perry is a respected chef, the owner of the Rockpool restaurant in Sydney, which is known for its Australia-meets-Asia style of cooking.

We question the validity of an ‘Asian’ cookery book containing recipes from countries as gastronomically diverse as China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea (as well as some recipes that seem to blur national boundaries). Imagine a similar book on ‘European’ cookery that presented recipes from Norway, through Scandinavia and the Baltic and from Portugal across the Mediterranean to Bulgaria. Asian food is such a vast and complex subject that it can’t help but seem oversimplified and somewhat diminished by such an approach.

That said, the book is presented with some semblance of logic. It starts off with basic techniques and recipes for steaming rice, making stocks and sauces, making salads, steaming, stir-frying and braising, etc. The braising section in particular has some wonderful-sounding recipes, such as sweet black vinegar pork belly and Shanghai-style salted duck. The idea is that cooks master these basic dishes before going on to more difficult ones in the second half of the book.

In reality, none of the recipes are that difficult; they’ve all been simplified enough to make them well within the reach of the averagely ambitious home cook and are well thought out. One word of caution, though: because it’s an Australian book, the finding some of the fish – such as blue-eye, Murray cod, mud crabs – would be impossible, and substitutions aren’t given. But if you love ‘Asian food’, give this book a go. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 1996: November 20-26 2008.

‘London Heritage Pubs’
Geoff Brandwood and Jane Jephcote
Camra Books, £14.99
This pub guide from the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) is focused not on pints, but on historic interiors. Of course, there’s no shortage of online and print guides to pubs already – but getting hard facts about pub history is tricky, and too many guidebooks and websites in particular just reiterate hearsay and disinformation. Not here: co-author Geoff Brandwood has a PhD in architectural history and is a former chairman of the Victorian Society; while co-author Jane Jephcote is chair of Camra’s London Pubs Group. The pub listings are arranged by area, and with plenty of amateur, but adequate colour photography to illustrate the descriptions. Additional essays cover topics such as the great gin palace architects. Several unlikely pubs that even pub bores might not be aware of are carefully documented, and therein lies the only catch. Many of the pubs listed might be of historical interest, but this doesn’t make them good pubs; some of those listed are pretty rough, and don’t even serve decent beer, yet no mention of this is made in the reviews (natch). So it’s a guide to use in conjunction with another (or even our own online pubs guide, timeout.com/bars), rather than as a definitive list of good places to drink. Despite this caveat, it’s a brilliant book which any pub enthusiast will take pleasure in browsing. Guy Dimond

‘Knife Skills’
Marcus Wareing
Dorling Kindersley, £12.99
The impressive group of chefs who authored this book did not club together one night over a pint and decide they really wanted to tell people how to use knives. Instead much of the content is extracted from Dorling Kindersley’s whopping 2005 culinary encyclopedia ‘The Cook’s Book’, to which they did contribute, and expanded with new and more detailed information – a wise move considering the popularity of knife skills classes in the capital. The result is a keenly priced and very useful reference with step-by-step photographs that take you all the way from slicing onions to how to handle sea urchins. You’ll learn why it matters how knives are built and sharpened, as well as various different ways to grip them safely while cutting. In other words – all you need to know about this truly essential kitchen tool. Jenni Muir , Time Out London Issue 2005: January 22-28 2009.

‘Riverford Farm Cook Book’
Guy Watson and Jane Baxter
Fourth Estate, £16.99
If your New Year’s resolution is to commit to a regular organic veg box delivery, be in no doubt that using up all the contents before they become inedible can be a challenge. Sadly, suppliers are often more committed to the ideology of their schemes than good food – witness the all-too-frequent inclusion of sprouts, withered greens, brown avocados and bruised bananas.
However one veg box company, Riverford Farm, has literally put its money where its mouth is, opening an excellent flagship restaurant on its South Devon property. Chef Jane Baxter is a River Café alumnus and their style can clearly be seen in her dishes, which make up a large portion of this beautifully photographed book. It’s an inspiration when you’re looking for more ways to glam-up the carrots, cabbage and turnips that play such a monotonous role in our winter diets, or need to use ‘The Last Leek’, as one section is called. The bonus is compelling essays by Riverford owner Guy Watson, which are scattered throughout. His frank tone and years of experience in the organic movement combine to give readers much food for thought. Jenni Muir, Time Out London Issue 2003: January 8-14 2009.

‘Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food’
Pavillion, £25
Sri Owen is the renowned author of numerous cookery books, but this one is her most personal, with autobiographical detail about her early life in her native west Sumatra, her childhood and student years in Java, and her move to the UK after marrying Englishman Roger Owen. The first half of the book comprises personal stories and recipes: remembered dishes that her grandmother cooked, interpretations of the international food she ate as a student in Jakarta and some excellent recipes from central Java in the 1950s, brought up to date for the contemporary kitchen.

The second half of the book deals more generally with Indonesian ingredients, including staples such as tempeh, rice and sago, plus cooking methods and techniques. There are lengthy explanations about each recipe but Owen is a great simplifier – ingredients lists are short and cooking methods are well explained and easy to follow. Susan Low, Time Out London Issue 1991: October 16-22 2009.

'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, Time Out London Issue 1989: october 2-8 2008.

'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, Time Out London Issue 1988: September 25-October 1 2009.

'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, Time Out London Issue 1987: September 28-24 2009.

‘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