The best food books for Christmas

Amuse Bouche: How to Eat your Way round France by Carolyn Boyd

£11.62, Profile Books

When you hold Amuse Bouche in your hands, you wonder why no-one has thought of writing a book quite like it before. Part travel guide, part recipe book, part gastronomic encyclopaedia, it’s an essential travelling companion for any French road trip, answering every conceivable question you might have about the local specialities and food traditions.

Of course, you can find that kind of information online but it wouldn’t be nearly so engagingly or authoritatively written: Boyd is an award-winning travel writer who edited France magazine for 10 years. The book is packed with wonderfully abstruse insider knowledge and tips such as how to find an authentic French cornichon (most are apparently grown and bottled in India these days), where to find the best baguette (look for the winners and runners up of the annual Grand Prix de la Baguette de Tradition Française de la Ville de Paris) and what sort of dishes to order if you find yourself in an Alsatian Winstub. I long to eat the cabbage sausage of Arconsat – there’s even a Brotherhood to commemorate it – and try cheeses I’ve never heard of such as the Bleu du Vercors-Sassenage. I stand corrected on my recipe for salad niçoise, which should ‘under no circumstances’ include fresh tuna, potatoes or French beans, and can’t wait to make a tarte des noces (or honeymoon tart) from the Île d’Yeu in the Loire, whose fascinating ingredients include prunes, dark rum and an Earl Grey teabag. The perfect Christmas gift for any Francophile, especially one who laments the loss of the ‘old France’ – you’ll find plenty of it in these pages.

Fiona Beckett

Café Cecilia Cookbook by Max Rocha

£27.87, Phaidon

When Max Rocha opened Cafe Cecilia in 2021, there was a whirl of enthusiasm. Nailing what might be called the formula for London restaurant longevity, the food was focused on comfort over complexity. As Diana Henry wrote in her foreword, ‘sometimes you eat in a place that encapsulates simplicity and deepens your understanding of what the word means. I found it the first day at Café Cecilia.’ Henry saw it in the anchovy and sage fritti and outstanding Guinness bread. For me, it was the brilliant, deceptively simple desserts.

Rocha’s journey to chefdom is narrated with sincere gratitude to many – from baking bread at E5 Bakehouse to his first kitchen experience at Spring with acclaimed Australian chef Skye Gyngell, through to pasta-making at Mangia in Copenhagen, a vital year spent at St John Bread and Wine under Farokh Talati, and a period at The River Café, which he says we can thank for the wonders of the puddings.

The narrative is richly personal but this is a cookbook first and foremost. A whole chapter is devoted to the Guinness bread, which you can have with dressed crab and smoked mackerel pate, or put it to use in a treacle tart or ice cream. There’s also salads that feel very St John-esque in spirit, though with an original sense of composition, while the pasta section includes mouthwatering dishes of lobster tagliatelle and pappardelle with rabbit ragu. You’ll also find one of the restaurant’s signature dishes in onglet and peppercorn sauce, and the ingenious deep-fried bread and butter pudding with cold custard.

It’s almost become a rite of passage for a successful restaurant to publish a cookbook but I suspect many of them fulfil nothing more than decorative purposes. Turning the pages of Café Cecilia’s, conversely, I can picture the day when those pristine white pages are a whole lot muckier.

Joel Hart

A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France by Ned Palmer

£14.49, Profile Books

The resurgence of artisanal British cheesemaking has been well documented, not least in Ned Palmer’s 2019 book A Cheesemonger’s History of The British Isles. Now that he has performed his civic duty in confirming that we as a nation have broadened our horizons beyond clammy blocks of bland cheddar and Red Leicester, he has turned his attention to what is traditionally regarded as the cheese capital of the world: France.

As Palmer notes, the French are still the planet’s biggest cheese eaters, consuming 26kg per person annually, and it’s easy to romanticise France as a stubborn bulwark against the industrialisation of cheese production. As this book demonstrates, however, the reality is more complex; there may be certain ways in which the French resolutely hold on to their gastronomic traditions but they contend with many of the same issues faced by farmers and food producers in the rest of the world: increasing energy and labour costs, pricing pressures, succession, climate change, unhelpful regulations and the like.

It’s perhaps because of the looming threat all these issues pose collectively to artisanal French cheese that this book feels like such a celebration of the quality, traditions and idiosyncrasies within traditional, small-scale French cheesemaking. The book’s 11 chapters have one famous French cheese as their theme but many more are covered in each as Palmer tours the country. This book is about the stories and culture that surround the products, rather than a set of tasting notes, and it is best considered as part food history, part travelogue. Palmer has a writing style perfect for this kind of book; easy-going but evocative, and you’ll finish it knowing much more about France and communities within it, as well as its cheese.

A cheeseboard laden to excess is, for many of us, one of the great highlights of Christmas and it’s impossible to read this book without feeling inspired to add at least five or six French cheeses to the selection this year. There can surely be no greater tribute to A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France than that.

William Morris 

Nights Out At Home: Recipes and Stories from 25 years as a Restaurant Critic by Jay Rayner

£17.97, Fig Tree

We’ve all thought about it. You’re dining at your favourite restaurant or perhaps a newly discovered gem and think – could I save a few quid by making this at home? How hard could it be?

In lockdown, many thought the same. There were Instagram pages dedicated to restaurant dishes. Now arguably Britain’s best-known restaurant critic has released his debut cookbook and, you guessed it, the recipes are inspired by cherished meals from restaurants.

Jay Rayner’s Nights Out at Home draws on his quarter of a century as the Observer’s restaurant critic. Reviewing a restaurant almost every week, that’s several thousand visited. If a dish has made it into the book, it must be good.

There’s good news for fans of Rayner’s writing. Scattered throughout are essays and musings, often pages of introduction to a recipe – this isn’t a book for those who skip to the instructions. In a recipe for dry-fried green beans with ground mushrooms and chilli, Rayner muses on the two Four Seasons on Gerrard Street in London’s Chinatown: ‘the other one is next door, at number 11. I have no idea what goes on in there. Never been. Never will.’ In a recipe for Caesar salad inspired by those served at Hawskmoor and Joe Allen, Rayner rants against the ‘cult of authenticity’ in food. Recipes, he insists, are not ‘holy scripture’.

The recipes are only part of the fun, though there are plenty and they’re mouthwatering and easy enough to follow. You’ll be whisked from Manchester via Erst’s now-famous flatbreads to London for Tayyabs’ tandoori lamb chops to Greggs, with Rayner’s take on a steak bake to prove his credentials as a lover of the high and low brow. Nights Out at Home is entertaining enough to read on its own but the recipes are approachable and a fascinating snapshot of a critic’s beloved dishes.

Tomé Morrissy-Swan

The Condiment Book by Claire Dinhut

£12.85, Bloomsbury

Claire Dinhut is the latest social media star to bag a publishing deal with this entertaining romp through the world’s favourite condiments. Who hasn’t squirted Sriracha over their eggs to elevate their Sunday brunch? Or slipped a spoonful of kimchi into a grilled cheese sandwich to ramp up the flavours? Well, Dinhut offers the lowdown on these and other food world unsung heroes, offering a few recipes and the odd flavour graph along the way.

And while it’s not a cookbook, she warns at the start, there are several recipes, which she’s not suggesting that we necessarily make – ‘shop-bought is always just fine,’ she writes. ‘Using condiments is about tantalising our tastebuds and keeping life exciting,’ she says. I’ll second that.

I’ll certainly be trying her recipe for tomato ketchup as Heinz is just too sweet for my palate (sacrilegious, I know). Condiment Claire, as she is known to her fans on Tik Tok and Instagram, offers up a lively history of the world’s key condiments, split into sections that starts with ‘Classics’ and ends with ‘Dips’, plus delivers an inspired selection of pairings along the way – honey mustard and tortilla chips, anyone? The lot dreamt up while spending time at her family home in the French countryside (she has dual citizenship with the US and France).

It might not be the most exhaustive work on the subject but with its lively presentation broken up by copious illustrations and annotations, it punches well above.

Fiona Sims

Dinner by Meera Sohda

£20.77, Fig Tree

Those of you who follow Meera Sodha’s columns in the Guardian will not be disappointed by this new collection of her trademark vegetarian and vegan recipes, which were prompted, as she freely admits, by a period of burnout as a food writer. ‘I did fall out of love with food but I have fallen back in love with it by taking the pressure off, by cooking for friends and family, not for work or social media’ she was quoted as saying in a recent Guardian interview.

So, the recipes are easy, accessible, ideal for midweek as well as weekend eating. But given her Indian/African heritage (her parents emigrated from Uganda) they’re punchy too, with bold bright flavours that will make you think about vegetables in an entirely different way. The dish I recently tried of sprout and chilli peanut noodles is almost guaranteed to convert a sprout-hater.

Sodha cherry-picks around the world, freely combining ingredients. You’ll find marbled egg omelette with nam pla, cheddar and gochujang cornbread, Iraqi white bean stew, even Marmite risotto with tomato and crispy chilli butter. Heaven for those who like to play about in the kitchen.

The only downside is that you’ll need to check your store cupboard before you embark on a recipe, unless you are already stocked up with ingredients such as Kashmiri chilli powder, sambal oelek and black sesame seeds, but once you’ve got them you’ll be able to make many of the recipes in the book. An ideal gift for a well-travelled cook who likes to experiment in the kitchen.

Fiona Beckett

What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci

£14, Fig Tree

With his hit series Searching for Italy and book Taste: My Life Through Food, 2021 was the year Stanley Tucci burst into the culinary world. No longer just an admired actor, Tucci became a sage of Italian cuisine. Taste didn’t shy away from his personal life – including his experience of having cancer – but his latest book promises even more of an intimate anchor, with the format of a chronological diary running from 2 January 2023 to 2 January 2024.

Written in this way, it feels like a candid path to normalising and de-romanticising his life. Never florid, and often attractively succinct, his prose is in keeping with the format. Sure, he may be starring in a film with Ralph Fiennes in Rome and spending part of the Christmas holiday at Guy Ritchie’s country house eating a whole turbot but he doesn’t always eat like a king, and he misses his bed and his family as an on-the-road actor.

The book is, of course, rich in food content. There’s some handy tips to cooking Italian food better, such as ensuring to cut off all your crusts if making pappa al pomodoro, and it includes the odd recipe, such as for rabbit legs and borscht. There are meals at St John, Quo Vadis, Sabor, countless bowls of pasta, home-cooked meals of shepherd’s pie, and ham, roast beef, stuffing, and turnips on Christmas day.

Eating may be the book’s central theme – and you certainly see a man who takes enormous pleasure in the act of consumption – but much of its joy is the insight it offers on the man himself. He’s warm, a good communicator, often funny, sometimes insightful, and for all the spotlight that may come with being a Hollywood actor, he’s still at heart a somewhat modest family man.

Joel Hart

Flavorama: A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor by Arielle Johnson

£22.33, Harvest

René Redzepi, co-owner of Noma in Copenhagen, writes in the foreword to Flavorama that its author, Arielle Johnson, is ‘a legit scientist but she thinks like a chef’. High praise, given Redzepi’s credentials, and he has firsthand experience to make such a judgement; Johnson co-founded the fermentation lab at Noma and helped the chefs there reach an understanding of flavour that propelled the restaurant to three Michelin stars.

This book joins a category that already contains titles such as The Flavour Thesaurus and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat – those designed to explore the science of flavour and cooking to establish fundamental principles behind why and how ingredients and techniques work. It’s this knowledge and understanding that ultimately allows any cook, owner of Noma or not, to successfully experiment and adapt in the kitchen, rather than rigidly follow recipes without fully appreciating why.

The book is divided into ‘the four laws of flavour’, each of which has chapters containing theory, tips and recipes. Johnson has a PhD in flavour chemistry, so knows her onions scientifically as well as metaphorically, but this is not a dense textbook; the writing is easy to understand, and tables, diagrams and charts make the data digestible and useful. I enjoyed poring over tables such as ‘the umami boosters’, which is a list of foods high in the ‘ribonucleotides’ that enhance glutamate-rich food (thus providing an explanation as to why anchovies work so well with meat). There are plenty of other graphics that equip you with explanations and tools to build on what may hitherto have been, at most, your hazy intuitions.

Contrary to the old saying, people can, do and often should judge books by their covers and I can’t escape the feeling that Flavorama has been sold a little short by both its design and title – it’s much more interesting and substantive than either leads you to expect. Indeed, it will make anyone who reads it a more understanding, versatile and flexible cook via a fascinating journey through the science of flavour.

William Morris

A Thousand Feasts by Nigel Slater

£14, Fourth Estate

Nigel Slater should need no introduction. One of the UK’s best known and loved food writers and presenters, he has been scribbling down his thoughts in notebooks for years. This is a curated collection of those thoughts – often moving moments and events that delivered pleasure, hastily captured before disappearing into the mists of time.

Most of us have happy places we escape to in our heads; things we’ve seen and done that light up the darker days. These are Slater’s and what a pleasure they are to read, from the simple joys of the crisp pages of a new diary and the satisfaction of a hand-raised pot (he highlights those by Scottish potter Jennifer Lee) to a plate of ‘untidy crisp pork dumplings that I would be happy to live on for the rest of my life’ savoured in an alleyway eatery in Seoul, South Korea.

Memories logged from his travels in Japan crop up more than once, such as the tempura of orange pumpkin brought ‘still crackling from the kitchen’ that he was served during a Japanese country breakfast on a winter’s morning. There’s a lamb feast he enjoyed in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, ‘where the conversation rises slowly to a joyful hubbub’ despite the sound of explosions in the distance.

He remembers a train journey through the snow in Norway, where he passes ‘ravines and waterfalls and tiny stations whose platforms are white with snow while eating tiny red apples from a paper bag and drinking cups of hot chocolate.’ At midnight in Mauritius, he recalls feeling ‘drunk on flowers’ after smelling rich, sickly-sweet frangipani so pungent that he felt hypnotised.

We’re right with you, Nigel. ‘They are moments of gold that can last an entire evening or be over in a flash,’ he writes, urging us all to cherish the positive in life, which we should strive to be doing a lot more during these troubled times.

Fiona Sims

Cooking and the Crown: Royal Recipes from Queen Victoria to King Charles III by Tom Parker Bowles

£24.73, Aster

Tom Parker Bowles has a unique place in the pantheon of British restaurant critics. Day job: write about restaurants. Rest of the time: King’s stepson. He’s uniquely placed, then, to tell us how the royals eat.

Once upon a time, before the British food revolution of the past few decades, they would have eaten better, certainly more lavishly, than pretty much everyone else. An ‘extravaganza of excess,’ as Parker Bowles dubs it and, with a sharp turn of phrase, there was plenty of ‘soufflé diplomacy’ – the use of fine dining to impress kings, queens, emperors, presidents, princes, prime ministers and more. Back then, the finest chefs fused British ingredients and French techniques in royal kitchens; today they do it on the BBC’s Great British Menu.

Parker Bowles guides us through the royal meals: breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, puddings – no elevenses? We start, mundanely, with ‘Queen Camilla’s Porridge’, which she eats daily in winter, according to her son. Camilla uses her own honey – the rest goes to Fortnum & Mason. Vignettes like that one are peppered throughout. Edward VII loved devilled kidneys (he would’ve enjoyed St John – half their dishes wouldn’t look out of place in this book).

The good news for those actually looking to recreate these royal recipes is that they’re not as fancy or high-brow as one might think. Sure, there’s crab mousse and lobster salad, but also fish goujons, an ‘eternal royal favourite’, and Irish stew, a shooting lunch staple. Cooking and the Crown is a fascinating insight into one (very extensive) family’s relationship with food, illustrating how Britain’s cuisine has long been a merger of hearty, rustic local fare and French flourishes. Crucially, the recipes are simple enough – you won’t need a royal cook to make them.

Tomé Morrissy-Swan

The Four Horsemen: Food and Wine for Good Times from the Brooklyn Restaurant by Nick Curtola

£28.55, Abrams

I rarely queue long for a table but I did just that at The Four Horsemen in Williamsburg, nabbing a couple of bar seats and a few plates of its creative comfort food, washed down with wines plucked from an astonishing list drawn from many of Europe’s most coveted natural wine producers. Now it has published its first cookbook, where it explains how this modest-looking little neighbourhood wine bar became a much lauded, uber-cool dining destination with a Michelin star and a James Beard Award for best wine program in the country.

And what a story. Part-owned by LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy and his wine loving mate, Justin Chearno, who sadly died recently, it tells how their individual epiphanies led to The Four Horsemen’s creation in 2015. For Murphy, it was a little place in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighbourhood called Ahiru Store that he visited with his wife – ‘We were happy there – we thought, how hard can this be?’. For Chearno, it was a natural wine bar in Paris called Racines, then co-owned by the legendary Pierre Jancou – ‘I knew it was where we needed to be.’

Enter California-born chef Nick Curtola, who has been with them right from the start, and the magic started to happen. Curtola’s recipes have universal appeal, with techniques and ingredients that jump from Japan to The Med, to North Africa, with dishes such as poached chicken with jasmine rice and green garlic broth, to roasted squash with brown butter and vincotto (both at the top of my list to try).

Chearno, who wrote the wine notes throughout, goes with the flow, explaining that he always looks at the whole meal to find the perfect match – gravitating towards minimal intervention wines with higher acidity, lower alcohol and a sense of place, in a wide range of styles. There’s much to absorb, with insights galore to glean, leaving the reader with a strong desire to visit – just book well ahead if you don’t want to queue.

Fiona Sims

Mangal II: Stories and Recipes by Ferhat and Sertaç Dirik

£27.87, Phaidon

Under the vision of brothers Ferhat and Sertaç Dirik, a traditional ocakbaşi was transformed into one of London’s most creative restaurants. The book – co-written by them – is more than just a restaurant cookbook; it’s a story celebrating migrant grit and resilience, paying tribute to their father Ali, who is from Anatolia and opened the restaurant some 30 years ago.

Mangal II under Ali is seen as an essential precursor to what the restaurant has become. He was obsessive and always had a keen sense of quality and class. Whilst the brothers both helped their father in the kitchen in their teens, the eventual division of labour emerged when Sertaç headed to Copenhagen to learn how to cook, eventually returning to help Ferhat in 2021 at a low moment in both his own life and the restaurant’s.

The recipes are organised by the restaurant’s stages, moving from classic ocakbaşi dishes like ezme and beyti to transformative dishes like the mackerel pide, which had Dalstonites queuing in their masses during lockdown. The third section shows how their evolution was driven by the Turkish concept of vijdan (conscience), with the rule that everything must have a Turkish reference, like the celebrated cull yaw kofte with grilled apple sauce. It turns to reinvention in the final section, with trademark dishes like the raw beef ezme and tahini tart.

Between the recipes there’s poignant passages detailing significant moments of change. I loved reading about Sertaç’s journey to the exceptional sourdough pide that now starts any meal at Mangal II, as well as many of the other parts, mostly written by Ferhat, whose high-energy tone and proclivity for storytelling is given a chance to shine. One amusing passage captures the book’s spirit, paying tribute to Gilbert & George for attracting artsy customers and respectfully understanding why they eventually abandoned the restaurant. The narrative is vulnerable, honest and leaves nowhere to hide. It goes without saying that I can’t wait to whack some homemade cull yaw koftes on the barbecue.

Joel Hart

Hokkaido: Recipes from the Seas, Fields and Farmlands of Northern Japan by Tim Anderson

£19.25, Quadrille

A cookbook about Japan’s farthest flung region? Bring it on. Most of us probably won’t ever get to Japan’s most northernmost shores. Just don’t call it a frontier, as many do. ‘Positioning Hokkaido as a frontier is to portray the island as historically empty and simply “discovered” by the imperial government. The reality is that Hokkaido was already home to the Ainu and other indigenous groups for centuries,’ impassions Tim Anderson, in this his eighth cookbook. And if you’re in any doubt about his allegiance, check his opening page with ‘Hello!’ written large in the Ainu language (‘Iranka Rapte!’).

Hokkaido is much more than a cookbook. It’s a deep dive into Hokkaido culture, with the Ainu hogging the lion’s share of coverage, such is Anderson’s fascination with the people and their cuisine. The book, supported by stunning photography, kicks off with an introduction to Ainu food, where we learn that they are known to have eaten at least 500 different varieties of plants, including delicate, dried hamanasu rosehips used to flavour rice, a recipe which Anderson includes, crediting its source in Ainu chef Hiroaki Kon.

Hokkaido milk is a treat, enthuses the Wisconsin native, who has lived in South London since winning BBC’s Masterchef, declaring Hokkaido ice-cream the best, along with sweetcorn, lamb and crab, to name a few more Hokkaido highlights. He brings the ingredients alive in his surprisingly straightforward recipes that are either his homage to specific dishes that he’s tried in Hokkaido restaurants or regional recipes that he’s adapted, each set in a cultural context – my favourite kind of cookbook. Armchair food and travel at its best.

Fiona Sims