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The best cookbooks to gift or be gifted, according to our food editor
Cookbooks are being released at a rate of knots, bringing fresh inspiration to cooks everywhere. While new ideas are always welcomed, there are of course some tomes that we reach for time and again, that follow us from house to house and show their age through torn covers and oil-splattered pages. These are the best cookbooks from the last century or so, filled with recipes that we know will never fail us. Every household should have these cookbooks on the shelves, they make excellent Christmas, birthday, wedding and housewarming gifts. There are the absolute classics like Elizabeth David and Julia Child that everyone should have on their shelves, alongside modern essentials from Ruthie Rogers, Delia Smith, Nigella Lawson and Yotam Ottolenghi.
Australian-born executive chef of London restaurant Spring, Skye Gyngell has several recipe books in her arsenal, ready to bring out for reference during the festive season, or to give as gifts for foodie friends. “My favourite is The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers. I come back to it time and time again; it's a book for people who care about technique and precision,” she says. She also recommends Honey from a Weed by Patience Gray: “a very beautiful book whether or not you cook, as are Richard Olney's Simple French Food and Cuisine of the Sun by Roger Verge. I don't often buy new cookbooks: I go back to old friends.”
Of course, you'll also find one pot wonders for weeknight inspiration, Indian- and Asian-inspired recipe collections, dinner party worthy recipes, dedicated veggie and plant-based recipes book, and comfort food go tos. This is a round up of the best cookbooks that will inspire you in the kitchen for years to come.
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The best cookbooks to gift or be gifted, according to our food editor
Meera Sodha is a prolific and wildly popular chef, with a column in the Guardian on vegan cooking and several best-selling cookbooks including Fresh India (which won the Observer Food Monthly Best New Cookbook Award 2017) and East. This year's book had a different tone. After several busy years, Meera found herself suffering from burnout, fatigue and depression. Her love for cooking, entertaining and sharing family recipes was eroded. This book charts her return to health and happiness, with the help of the daily routine of cooking hearty, delicious dinners for her family. As always with Meera's books, they take influence from all over the world, and prioritise plant-based foods. “The ability to put a good dinner on the table has become my super power, and I want it to be yours too,” says Meera of this wonderful book, chock full of easy, time-saving and delicious dinners, whether you're giving your kids tea or hosting a dinner party.
For the New York fan who wants a bite of the Big Apple without the flight, this beautiful book is just the ticket. Yasmin Newman collates New York City’s most famous recipes, taking the reader from morning Everything bagels and Chinatown pork buns to lunchtime Matzo ball soup and New York’s finest hot dog to evening Manhattans and Harlem fried chicken. Each recipe explores its history and place in the city’s tapestry with photos of some of its most iconic institutions throughout the book. We particularly love the book’s graphics paying homage to the US diner.
Sit back and allow award-winning chef Russell Norman to take us on a journey to Florence with these delicious, authentic and simple recipes. Published last October, this was Norman’s fourth cookbook and very sadly his last, as he died unexpectedly just a month later. Emerging out of one of London's most acclaimed restaurants, Trattoria Brutto, this book has transportive powers. It's also about preserving traditional recipes, something that feels yet more pertinent following Norman's sad passing. His elegant Pasta e Fagioli recipe (a kind of broth with pasta, beans and rosemary) will keep you going all through the colder months.
Yotam Ottolenghi is a chef who requires very little introduction, having burst onto the London food scene in 2002 with the conception of his first eponymous delicatessen in Notting Hill. He's gone on to set up ROVI and NOPI, two of London's most well-regarded eateries, as well as penning a dozen best-selling cookbooks including Simple and Sweet. His latest addition has the tagline ‘make a recipe a few times and it becomes habit. Make it enough and it becomes home.' The book promotes a ‘flavour-forward’ approach to comfort cooking and has a myriad of wonderful recipes that will conjure up nostalgia, warmth and homeliness, from roast chicken to cheesy bread soup with savoy cabbage and cavolo nero.
Like several other chefs at the top of their game, Max Rocha used cooking as an escape from depression and a career path that didn't make him happy. Starting with a recipe for Guinness Bread, the prodigious chef quickly worked his way up the ranks in restaurants across the UK and Copenhagen. In 2021 he opened Café Cecilia in east London, and it quickly became considered one of the best restaurants in the city. The restaurant, and the cookbook - which is made up of the best things they serve every day - isn't fancy. It's seasonal, beautiful and - unsurprisingly, that fashion designers John Rocha and Simone Rocha are his father and sister - exceedingly tasteful. This cookbook is the kind you'd like to have by your bed for proper reading, and it would be a perfect present for a foodie young person who's a bit tricky to buy for.
‘Amidst growing chaos and strife, these stories, recipes and the legacy of this ancient city, Bethlehem, endure,’ reads the cover of this beautiful book of recipes from Fraco-Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan. His aim with the book was to celebrate all the colours, smells and flavours of his home, and to introduce readers to the local farmers and artisans with whom he works. The book is a mixture of loving profiles and recipes either passed down in his family or developed in either of his two restaurants. It will teach you how to stuff grape leaves, slow roast lamb and make Mouhalabeih, as well as how to recognise Palestinian people, places and things.
Voted the Food Book of the Year by The Times and The Sunday Times, this is the baking bible that everyone needs in their kitchen. The book in split into two parts, the first is a breakdown of key elements and techniques (explained and enlivened by some lovely illustrations), and the second part is full of recipes, all organised according to how long they take to bake. This ranges from a ‘bake in an afternoon’ section, including a roasted strawberry Victoria Sponge and miso walnut double-thick chocolate-chip cookies, all the way to a ‘bake in a weekend’ section, which includes mocha passionfruit Opera Cake and Pain au Chocolat. This would be a great gift for any level of baker, whether it's a budding young chef looking to learn the basics, or an old pro seeking some refinement and expansion. It's a non-brainer, and will stand the test of time.
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It would be remiss to leave off our own cookbook, new for 2023. Think of it as a bible to eating good, seasonal, honest food. It's a culmination of recipes for throughout the year, some suitable for a quiet dinner at home, others for a grand celebration. All of them are thoughtful and lead by what's in season. In spring, you'll find sections on leeks, rhubarb and foraged produce like wild garlic. Summer brings ideas for asparagus and broad beans, courgettes, tomatoes and apricots, before autumn's earthier crop of beets, squash, apples and quinces arrive. In winter look for warming recipes involving root vegetables, beef and pork, enlivened by citrus and with a special section devoted to festive cooking. Each chapter brings menu ideas for every occasion, from quick suppers for two to long and relaxed lunches with friends.
Plus the rest we want this year
1/30Bao by Erchen Chang, Shing Tat Chung and Wai Ting Chung
This is a strikingly aesthetic debut cookbook-cum-manifesto from London’s cult Taiwanese restaurant group founders. Bao began with three art and design graduates serving Taiwanese steamed buns from an East London food stall which led to multiple award-winning London restaurants, each representing different interpretations of Taiwanese culture. The chapters describe each restaurant’s unique concept of ‘think food, serve design’, starting with the ‘holy grail’ recipe for their soft, fluffy, steamed BAO buns filled with Classic shredded pork, Fried chicken or the genius Horlicks ice cream; a witty riff on the Italian brioche filled with gelato. This isn’t a book for the amateur cook but it’s worth owning as a beautiful object and as inspiration into the delicious world of Taiwanese food.
2/30Moro Easy, by Samantha Clark and Samuel Clark
When the phenomenally successful first Moro cookbook by husband and wife Sam and Sam Clark was published over 20 years ago, the spices and flavours of North African, Spanish and Eastern Mediterranean swept into our kitchens. Now several more books and two more restaurants later, Moro Easy brings us more of their inspirational recipes, bursting with colour and flavour but simplified for quick and easy results.
3/30Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many, by Jeremy Lee
These are recipes that sum up a lifetime of experience in the kitchen. Jeremy Lee has spent decades cooking in some of London’s iconic restaurants - Bibendum, Alastair Little and The Blue Print Cafe before settling at Quo Vadis where he remains the darling of London’s food scene. Lee’s inimitable writing style and infectious enthusiasm provides tales of purveying ingredients to cooking techniques (everything from pastry, pies, profiteroles and potatoes) and recipe inspiration, culminating in a classic that deserves a place on every shelf.
4/30The River Cafe Look Book, Recipes for Kids of All Ages, by Ruth Rogers, Sian Wyn Owen and Joseph Trivelli
“Cooking is about surprising connections” write the authors of this innovative, modern, colourful and visual new cookbook from London’s famous River Cafe restaurant. The soft binding allows the reader to thumb through the colour steeped pages like a flip book, displaying photographed dishes and corresponding “images that speak to them”. A dessert of smooth raspberry sorbet faces a photograph of a vintage pink perspex telephone while on another page, the colour of slow-roasted tomatoes with basil is mirrored by a photograph of a car body dripping with bright red paint. Over 50 delicious and simple recipes are printed on brightly coloured pages with a contrasting shade text that literally jumps out through its juxtaposition.
5/30Rice Table, Korean recipes and stories to feed the soul by Su Scott
Su Scott, a Korean born food writer living in London married to an Englishman, shares a personal collection of recipes from her Korean roots. This is a story of immigrant motherhood, raising a Korean-British child and passing on the food culture of her Korean roots. Scott introduces us to the sauces, seasonings and spices of Korean cuisine, charmingly describing it as ‘making friends with the ingredients’. With the tool kit of flavours under your belt, you can transform familiar vegetables, meat and grains into homestyle Korean dishes.
6/30One Pan Chicken, by Claire Thomson, £15.69 from Amazon
Is there ever a time that an easy chicken dish doesn't appeal? Claire Thomson doesn't think so and her latest cookbook is out to prove it. Each page is a showstopper and it's quite simply a collection of 70 dishes you will reach for time and again when you want an easy flavour hit and as little washing up as possible. It's perfect.
7/30A New Way to Bake, by Phil Khoury, £24.99 from Amazon
As Head of Pastry for Harrods, you can trust Phil Khoury knows a thing or two about the sweet stuff and now, he's distilled that into his first book. Not only that, but as a vegan, it presents a new way to bake (as per the title) without the addition of dairy. This is fairly revolutionary, given how much dairy runs throughout the pastry world. All of Phil's recipes are plant-based and entirely natural, not to mention completely, overwhelmingly delicious.
8/30Zaika: Vegan Recipes from India, by Romy Gill, £14.37 from Amazon
Zaika is chef and food writer Romy Gill's first cookbook. It is dedicated to her mum, who taught her to cook. The plant-based recipe book is based on the regional vegan food from her childhood growing up in West Bengal, where meat was only eaten on special occasions. The book is tenderly from the heart, where she dispels myths that all "Indian food" is the same, and that vegan food takes a long time to prepare, instead showing how quick, tasty and oh-so simple it can be.
9/30One: Pot, Pan, Planet: A greener way to cook for you, your family and the planet, by Anna Jones, £20.05 from Amazon.
Food writer, columnist and former apprentice of Jamie Oliver's Fifteen restaurant, Anna Jones' latest cookbook is all about keeping things simple, fast and easy. It not only contains a whole host of mouthwatering dishes, but also introduces a greener way to cook for ourselves, our families and the planet.
10/30Pasta Grannies: Comfort Cooking: Traditional Family Recipes From Italy's Best Home Cooks, by Vicky Bennison, £17.20 from Amazon.
In an unlikely turn of events, a group of Italian nonnas rose to fame through their YouTube channel in 2014, showing people how to make pasta. Their first book was a hit, and this new book is all about regional dishes from around Italy. Each page cleverly has a QR code on it too, so you can watch the YouTube video on the recipe, and instantly be transported to Italy.
11/30Meat Free Mexican: Vibrant Vegan Recipes, by Thomasina Miers, £16.99 from Amazon.
The latest book from Thomasina Miers, co-founder of Wahaca restaurants, cook and campaigner is Meat Free Mexican. In true Thomasina form, it's all about making food bright, bold, simple, fun and most of all, packed with flavour. Of course there's tacos, enchiladas and salads aplenty, as well as lots of inspiration for puddings to take care of sweet cravings.
12/30Mandalay: Recipes & Tales from a Burmese Kitchen, by MiMi Aye, £18.29 from Amazon.
As one of the few remaining Asian cuisines that's not so well known in the UK, author MiMi Aye, who was born in the UK to Burmese parents, draws on her heritage and family trips back to Burma to create this wonderful book. This collection of recipes showcases the umami and fermented flavours that are synonymous with Burmese food, including fritters, noodles, rice and salads. It also includes pictures of her family travelling around Burma, and is interwoven with stories to give a real insight into Burmese culture.
13/30How To Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food, by Nigella Lawson, £21.41 from Amazon.
Nigella's debut book How To Eat was first published in 1998 and instantly became a best-seller. It was dubbed the "the most valuable culinary guide published this decade" by the Sunday Telegraph and champions the pleasure of food, and the stress-relieving art of cooking in advance. At over 500 pages, it covers lots of the basics from how to roast chicken and making bechamel, to feeding babies and small children, where the biggest section is dedicated to the glorious weekend lunch.
14/30Sour: The Magical Element That Will Transform Your Cooking, by Mark Diacono, £15.99 from Amazon.
Award winning food writer Mark Diacono's cookbooks all explore one element. Sour looks at vinegars, yoghurts and fermentation – among many other things – and how they can take our food to the next level. Championing the ancient art, which is having another moment in the form of sour beers and kimchi, this book is both informative and highly tempting. His previous book is Spice.
15/30Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, by Alice Waters, £3.56 from Amazon.
From the restaurant of the same name in Berkley, USA, this book is based on the restaurant’s daily changing menu, which, when it opened in 1971, was a pretty ground breaking concept. It was here Alice started a farm to table ethos, only serving food using ingredients that were local and in season. This classic book essentially teaches you how to entertain with a perfectly balanced menu.
16/30Hoppers: The Cookbook: Recipes, Memories and Inspiration from Sri Lankan Homes, Streets and Beyond, by Karan Gokani, £19.29 from Amazon.
The first Hoppers restaurant opened in London's Soho in 2015, and it's had a cult following ever since. After opening two more restaurants, owner Karen Gokani has brought the much-loved recipes together in this beautiful book of the same name. It's so good, you'll no doubt find yourself buying a hopper pan to perfect the country's signature dish, the hopper: a bowl-shaped pancake made from fermented rice flour and coconut milk. Recipes are full of flavour and colour from dosas and pickles to rotis and curries. The book takes you on an adventure, and brings a little slice of the island to your home.
17/30The River Cafe Cookbook, by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, £23.45 from Amazon.
The River Cafe has long been a real institution. The Italian restaurant has seen many a now-famous chef working on its pass, from Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall to Jamie Oliver, and Ruth Bloomfield who went on to open The Spotted Pig in New York. The original River Cafe cookbook is still the best for simple, elegant Italian cooking.
18/30The Spanish Home Kitchen: Simple, Seasonal Recipes and Memories from My Home, by José Pizarro, £19.35 from Amazon.
As the godfather of Spanish food, José’s books are all inspiring and really bring home the essence of Spanish cooking. His latest gives a real insight into the home cooking of his family, by sharing recipes passed down through generations, which are all from his hometown Talvn in Extremadura in southwest Spain. It's dedicated to his mother, Isobel, and is full of regional dishes, each with its own memory of his family.
19/30Sugar, I Love You, by Ravneet Gill, £12.37 from Amazon.
This book is a real love letter to what Revneet Gill calls the ‘constant companion in her life’: sugar. After working in restaurants including London's St. John and Llewellyn’s, Sugar, I Love You is the second sweet tooth book from pastry chef, Ravneet Gill. This is a joyful book of baking recipes from the sugar queen herself that caters to every level of cook and celebrates sugar in all its forms.
20/30French Provincial Cooking, £11.05 from Amazon.
As the godmother of home cooking Elizabeth David is responsible for taking it from the drab and mundane to exciting and fresh. This book was first published in 1960, and its reprint decades later is testament to its reliability and importance. It is an absolute classic cookbook, and is as interesting to read as it is to cook from. There's no better introduction to everyday French cooking than this.
21/30Cooking With Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook, by Jamie Oliver, £15.53 from Amazon.
Regardless of if you're a well-weathered cook or if you're a real beginner, everyone needs a trusty guide with plenty of the basics in. This book from Jamie Oliver lays out easy to follow information on the tools you need, to the different cuts of meat. The recipes are simple, accessible and really good. There's nothing boring here, and it makes a really great first cookbook for budding chefs.
22/30Jikoni: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes from an Immigrant Kitchen, by Ravinder Bhogal, £18.29 from Amazon.
Ravinder Bhogal believes in cooking without borders, which is inspired by her heritage. She was born to Indian parents in Kenya, but grew up in London. In both her restaurant and cookbook which share the same name (it means ‘kitchen’ in Kiswahili), she celebrates the way recipes change as people move around the world. It's joyful, colourful and full of flavour, just as you'd expect.
23/30The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day, by Claudia Roden, £23.45 from Amazon.
Written by Claudia Roden, who was born in the Jewish quarter of Cairo, this celebratory cookbook has more than 800 recipes and took her 15 years to bring together, travelling across the world, gathering ideas and stories. The book is a fascinating history of the cuisines of the Jewish diaspora, which shows how this cuisine has developed across the world.
24/30Much More Veg by Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall, £20.05 from Amazon.
River Cafe alumni Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall went on to create the inimitable River Cottage HQ on the Devon and Dorset border that champions the farm to fork ethos. As a food writer his books have won numerous awards, where this one was the best-selling meat free cookbook. It inspires us to get creative with the humble vegetable, and to make it the main part of your meal, not just a side dish to meat.
27/30Nose To Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson, £13.71 from Amazon.
Based on the philosophy of his restaurant at St John, which opened in 1995 in London's Smithfield, Fergus has championed using the entirety of an animal and helped bring back offal onto modern menus. The photography and words in this book distill the quirky and ever popular character of this famous restaurant. It's not one for vegetarians, let's just say that…
28/30Flavour, by Ixta Belfrage and Yotam Ottolenghi, £15 from Amazon.
There's no shortage of excellent Ottolenghi books but Flavour has been widely received as one of the best to date, as well as his latest test kitchen series books. Written with Ixta Belfrage, Flavour boasts everyday recipes for making vegetables the absolute star of every show. Split into three parts, process, pairing and produce, it explains how to take vegetables and add flavour to really elevate them into showstopping dishes.
29/30Pierogi: Over 50 Recipes To Create Perfect Polish Dumplings, by Zuza Zak, £14.22 from Amazon.
Polish food writer Zuza Zak started her career by proving Polish cuisine was more than just dumplings. Now she feels attitudes to Eastern European food have matured-there's nothing left to prove and now it’s time to celebrate. Using pierogi, the nation's most famous type of dumpling, she takes readers on a journey to understand Poland’s regional cuisine through dumplings. The traditional part of the book is split into east, west, north and south, and the second section looks at more modern varieties, including vegan and gluten free.
30/30Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering The Elements of Good Cooking, by Samin Nosrat, £23.99 from Amazon.
Californian chef Samin Nosrat realised if something wasn't working, it was up to these four principles to make it better: salt, fat, acid or heat. This tome helps to teach essential recipes such as dressings or braising meat by understanding the basics. The book is a New York Times best-seller, was the Fortnum & Mason best debut book of 2018 and has inspired a Netflix series of the same name.
