The best new food books

Time Out has rounded up a list of the best new food books to give you culinary inspiration. Bon appetit!

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

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

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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

Feature by Time Out London's Food & Drink contributors