The best food books for Christmas

The Sportsman at Home by Stephen Harris

£23, Quadrille

Full transparency: The Sportsman is my happy place. In fact, the restaurant in Seasalter, Kent, which was opened in 1999 by self-taught chef Stephen Harris, is many people’s happy place. It has won National Restaurant of the Year multiple times and continues to draw people to a beautifully bleak stretch of Kent coast for Harris’s deceptively simple cooking, deemed worthy of a Michelin star since 2008.

The Sportsman at Home is Harris’s second cookbook. This time he has chosen to share the recipes that he cooks at home for family and friends; think moussaka, ratatouille, cottage pie, cream of tomato soup and coq au vin. Some of those recipes might already be familiar to those that followed his weekly column in the Telegraph between 2017-2023 but others are drawn from his early food memories, where he elevates childhood favourites, such as chocolate milk. And I want to cook every single one of them.

As I happened to have the ingredients to hand the day the book dropped through my letterbox, I tried the baked salmon with thousand island sauce in the ‘Tea’ chapter (not to be confused with afternoon tea), running after a short essay on ‘no-fuss’ cooking. On the table in 15 minutes from start to finish, it more than hit the spot – as Harris’s cooking always does.

I still remember my first taste of his slip sole with seaweed butter (still on the menu at the restaurant), the recipe appearing in his first, much more cheffy cookbook. The Sportsman at Home, however, won’t require the gathering of seaweed for a three-hour dehydration process; instead, eggs are to be beaten for a cheese soufflé (served with rarebit sauce – excellent), onions stewed for a tart and shop-bought puff pastry rolled out for a beef and Guinness pie. The book makes the perfect Christmas gift, too, as there’s an entire chapter dedicated to Christmas dinner, all without a sous vide machine in sight.

Fiona Sims

Padella by Tim Siadatan

£2o, Bloomsbury

Padella is one of the few restaurants that regularly makes it onto ‘London’s best cheap eats’ lists while serving food that tastes anything but budget. The tagliarini with dried chilli, garlic and pangrattato is one of the best plates of pasta I’ve eaten and it’s a) vegan and b) £9.50. Indeed, it’s difficult to find a place in the capital making better pasta at any price and there are infamous queues at the branches of Padella at Borough Market and Shoreditch as a consequence. Devotees now have the option to sidestep the lines and attempt their favourite dishes at home with this, the restaurant’s beautifully produced cookbook.

Co-founded by chef Tim Siadatan of Trullo in Islington, Padella is the product of his ambition to bring a casual pasta bar to London. Fans of both restaurants will be relieved to hear that the recipe for the legendary beef shin ragu is to be found within the pages of this book, along with more than 100 others, including fettucine with nduja and mascarpone and tagliarini with crab, chilli, lemon and parsley. For those who frequently find themselves eating pasta every evening of the working week (guilty), this book represents the ultimate way to refresh repertoires without sacrificing the convenience and comfort of pasta. And what’s more, the recipes aren’t all quick midweek dinners either; there are slow-cooked showstoppers to perfect for when guests are next in town too.

The third Padella has just been announced for Soho in early 2026 and, other than visiting an existing branch, there’s no better way to understand the hype and success around the expanding empire than to browse the pages of this book and then cook plenty of recipes from it.

William Morris

All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now by Ruby Tandoh

£14.50, Serpent’s Tail

There have been a number of retrospectives recently on the cookery scene of the last 50 years but Ruby Tandoh’s All Consuming doesn’t really fit the mould. Not so much because the subject matter is different but because she delves deeper than most and pursues by-ways less explored. As a food writer, I flatter myself that I keep up with what’s going on but I was introduced by Tandoh to numerous individuals and trends I’d never heard of.

Although her extensive bibliography – helpfully listed at the end of the book – is impressive, much of her research is done online. She roams over TV chefs and TikTok, supermarkets and vending machines, cookbooks and dinner parties, admitting an unfashionable fondness for fast food and drink: bubble teas, Magnums, Wimpy.

She’s also smart and sardonic. Tandoh has a way with a one-liner that makes me feel she might have missed her vocation as a standup comedian. To share some random quotes:

‘Instead of barbecuing – a verb, a way of cooking – it felt like people were doing barbecue in the same way as your uncle will do Sean Connery when he’s taking impression requests.’

‘The algorithm brought these videos to me tenderly but insistently, the way a cat drops a dead mouse on the carpet.’

‘The food your ego wants to make is probably not the food your guests want to eat.’

She’s clearly not in awe of the food world’s usual icons. In fact, oddly for a Masterchef contestant, one’s left with the impression she doesn’t much enjoy cooking or even restaurant food, these days. I have to say that the book is the better read for her detachment, rather than the usual breathless enthusiasm we witness about food. It’s a cliché but I don’t think you’ll be able to put the book down.

Fiona Beckett 

Adventures in Fermentation by Dr Johnny Drain

£16, Penguin Life

Fermentation might be heavily associated with certain countries (Japan), regions (Mitteleuropa) and culinary movements (Nordic cooking) but Dr Johnny Drain demonstrates that it’s global – with tales of sweet enzyme syrups made from red mangoes in Brazil to the more expected koji and miso in Japan. The book’s striking image section, just over halfway through, further proves the point: there’s smen in Marrakech, chickpeas fermented with tempeh mould in southwest France, cacao beans in Ecuador and Drain’s own version of Mexican-fermented tepache.

Drain is a chef and scientist who’s collaborated with restaurants including Noma, Mirazur and zero-waste pioneers Silo in London. He co-founded Win-Win, the world’s first company to bring cocoa-free chocolate to market in 2022. The book weaves narrative and place throughout, with recipes that are always weird and wonderful: a 30-ingredient gut-boosting kraut featuring pear, broccoli stalk, lemongrass, fenugreek and miso; French onion soup supercharged with smen and miso; waste bread miso and a Panettone Negroni you can make using it.

There’s also a ‘Fermenting Frequently Asked Questions’ section that’s extremely instructive for those afraid to give it a go. The best way to get going? Veggie lacto-ferments like sauerkraut and kimchi, which require minimal ingredients and equipment. Drain dispels the myth that you can’t cook with fermented food (even dead microbes killed in cooking can be beneficial for health, acting as prebiotics), explains the difference between pickling and fermentation, and offers guidance on how to avoid going wrong.

The overall story Drain tells is one of ancient origins – fermentation is ‘ancient and already everywhere’ – crossing cultural boundaries and offering real power in the fight against food waste. His ambition is clear: he wants to see fermentation taught in schools, stripped of its mystique and made accessible. But he’s also humble. ‘The microbial world is vast,’ he writes, ‘and what we don’t know is far greater than what we do.’

Joel Hart

Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef by Slutty Cheff

£14, Bloomsbury

It’s been an astronomical rise to fame over the past two years for Slutty Cheff. In 2023, a satirical Instagram post describing a day in Thomas Straker’s kitchen (Straker had recently been embroiled in a social media scandal) went viral. Within weeks, the anonymous poster, a woman in her 20s working in London’s restaurant industry, had a column in Vogue. Two years on she has released a memoir.

Those familiar with Slutty Cheff will know what to expect: a brutally honest and thrillingly smutty portrayal of the restaurant world – part Anthony Bourdain, part Jilly Cooper. Tart, unsurprisingly, is a romp. Drugs are constant, sex is everywhere. Chefs, unfortunately, can still be perverts (but most are nice). If not exactly a revelation, it is instructive to learn things haven’t changed all that much since Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.

Cheff is a good writer. A kiss with a woman is described as ‘like eating panna cotta for the first time’. Making mac and cheese for a staff meal, the grated cheddar is ‘initially frigid and hesitant but soon it loses its inhibitions and stretches its legs to spread itself across the white sheet of butter, flour and milk.’

My favourite parts involved food rather than sex. Restaurant-industry bitching (critics and media are particularly targeted) and descriptions of cooking and eating around London were intriguing.

But sex is omnipresent and the carnal metaphors can sometimes be drawn out: not everything tastes like sex and an extended analogy of making a fish soup being akin to an orgasm is a little forced. At times, Tart feels a bit 50 Shades of Le Creuset – but it’s always fun.

Tomé Morrissy-Swan

Around the Table, 52 Essays on Food & Life by Diana Henry

£18, Mitchell Beazley

My copy of Diana Henry’s first book, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, is one of my most splattered cookbooks. The 11 books that followed were each avidly snapped up, such is her status in the world of food writing.

This, her latest, isn’t a cookbook per se but the 52 short essays of food-related musings, cherry-picked from previous publications, will undoubtedly get you cooking – and laughing. The theme, a look at how and what we eat and how ingredients spread across the world, is a constant fascination for Henry.

We read about a cooking lesson in a cottage in rural France that changed her life at the age of 15 (spoiler alert: it involved a salad dressing prepared by her pen pal Clothilde); a rickety train trip through orange groves during a school trip to Mallorca that left her fascinated with the fruit ever since (she enjoys oranges best served simply as segments ‘bathed in light, citrus syrups flavoured with lime and cardamom, orange flower water, mint, rosemary, and even tarragon’); we learn that her favourite smell is the Provence garrigue, ‘especially in the morning because it’s softer, promising hot weather and herb-marinated chops for lunch’; and we are reminded how a plate of spaghetti carbonara enjoyed in a quiet trattoria in Rome shows just how good something ordinary and inexpensive can be.

Italy features heavily in the book. She credits a childhood trip to her local Italian ice-cream parlour in a Northern Irish seaside town for instilling a love of the country even before she’d been. And when she did visit, it changed her forever. ‘Your first hour in Naples makes you wonder what drug you’ve been slipped. It’s both frightening and exhilarating,’ she writes in ‘After the Passeggiata’.

In ‘The Streets of San Francisco’, we learn why The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook by legendary Californian chef Alice Waters never leaves Henry’s bedside and how her discovery of Japanese food, precipitated by a trip to Mayfair restaurant Umu, ‘was like being a reasonably good painter who suddenly finds a whole school of artists whose work is breathtaking.’ This is a joy from start to finish.

Fiona Sims

Repast: The Story of Food by Jenny Linford

£23, Thames and Hudson

Remarkably, Jenny Linford has had no fewer than three books published this year but Repast, which has been published by art publisher Thames & Hudson in conjunction with the British Museum, is not only the most handsome but the most enthralling.

It traces the history of growing, catching and cooking food from pre-historic to (comparatively) modern times through objects in the Museum’s collection. We learn about hunting, fishing and foraging through items such as elaborately decorated 12th century hunting horns and fish hooks from the late ice age, some 14,000 years ago. It seems a shame that it wasn’t accompanied by an exhibition.

There are spotlights on individual ingredients that have been used over the centuries, such as honey, rice, sugar, salt, spices and chocolate. You constantly come across things you don’t know, such as that nutmeg was so prized in the early 18th century that it would be stored in its own engraved silver box. Club Oenologique readers will especially appreciate the chapter on alcohol, including, of course, wine. Who knew that wine coolers dated back to 560 to 540 BCE and drinking straws even longer to 2600 BCE?

There is a fascinating chapter on the provision and representation of food offerings for the dead, a tradition not only observed in Mexico but in China and ancient Egypt, and others on feasting and fasting. Another section covers the evolution of recipes such as bread and soups and what hospitality has consisted of over the ages in different cultures.

It’s a bit of a backhanded compliment to call something a coffee table book but it absolutely is a book you want to leave out for family and friends to dip into. A fabulous gift for anyone interested in food.

Fiona Beckett

BiBi: The Cookbook by Chet Sharma

£34, Phaidon Press

Bibi, the Punjabi word for grandmother, captures Chet Sharma’s goal of honouring the matriarchal lineage behind his cooking. The subtitle of this book, ‘stories from my Bibi’, is a statement of devotion. Sharma spent much of his childhood with two grandmothers, both remarkable pure-vegetable cooks with distinct sensibilities. His reverence runs deep.

Sharma worked at The Ledbury, Mugaritz, Moor Hall – studying European fine dining across Europe – before returning to his grandmothers’ cuisine. Initially sobered by his own shortcomings, he spent three years at JKS, including opening Brigadiers, before landing on a concept with business partner Karam Sethi that is BiBi in Mayfair. The pandemic reshaped it into 31 covers of ‘fine-casual’ cooking – a term Sharma hates but struggles to replace.

Sharma is refreshingly candid, describing his food as ‘a little odd,’ and himself as ‘an egotistical narcissist.’ But with these caveats in mind, what nobody can ever say – he hopes – is that what he does isn’t considered.

This sentiment permeates the book’s architecture. It opens with essentials – pastes, masalas, oils, pickles, breads, and rice – before moving through The Streets, The Garden, The Sea, The Pasture, and Desserts. But this isn’t just a recipe collection. The Pasture section, featuring raw beef pepper fry, hogget haleem, and ex-dairy goat galouti kebab, is preceded by an essay on meat ethics, shaped by Sharma’s vegetarian upbringing and his respect for animals and flavour. Poignant stories interweave the recipes throughout, showing how sourcing and sustainability inform every decision, and how gratitude and memory shape the food.

In the saturated world of restaurant cookbooks, BiBi: The Cookbook smartly stands out. It convincingly traces how Sharma’s academic career was less a calling than life happening to him, and how cheffing became the arena where he could take control of his own destiny. ‘I want my own legacy to be as a high-calibre chef who understood the science,’ he writes, ‘rather than a scientist who knew his way around a barbecue.’

Joel Hart

Without Reservation by Jeremy King

£20, Fourth Estate

If you love the London dining scene, then you’ll love this. Without Reservation is a gripping behind-the-scenes dive into an exhilarating world that can teach everyone a thing or two.

Jeremy King, the revered restaurateur who brought us Le Caprice in the ‘80s, The Ivy in the ‘90s, The Wolseley in the 2000s and now presides over Arlington and The Park, shares his wisdom and wit, showing us how good manners and some empathy benefit us all.

The ultimate memoir on the British hospitality industry, it spans how to speak to a waiter (‘always look them in the eyes’) to fears over the weight-loss drug Ozempic that’s currently re-shaping menus (‘It’s as frightening as Thalidomide’), while candidly documenting King’s dramatic loss of the Corbin & King restaurants.

The book is littered with tales involving a dazzling cast of characters who had a profound effect on his restaurants, from Princess Diana, with her favourite table at Le Caprice, to artist Lucien Freud, who couldn’t get enough of The Wolseley’s grand café persona. King also reveals his most influential restaurant experiences, including a perfect plate of cheese eaten at chef Simon Hopkinson’s former South Kensington restaurant Hilaire in 1983, sun-ripened Italian tomatoes at Alastair Little’s eponymous Soho restaurant (since closed) in 1985 and New York restaurant JAMS for its brilliantly simple roasted corn-fed chicken and French fries.

Above all, it’s the life lessons learnt in the industry that will doubtlessly resonate the most. ‘I see hospitality as a state of mind, a genuine altruism, kindness, empathy and generosity that transcends the mechanics of serving food and drink, and the design of the room.’ Roll on the opening of Simpson’s in the Strand early next year, one of the last grande dame restaurants in London and King’s biggest yet.

Fiona Sims

Good Things by Samin Nosrat

£20, Ebury Press

Samin Nosrat’s first book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, about the science of cooking was such a runaway success when it was published in 2017 that it might seem surprising it’s taken eight years to produce a follow up. Nosrat is candid about the reasons – the pandemic, the loss of close friends and a bout of clinical depression ‘swallowed her whole’.

Luckily for us she found her way through and this fabulous collection of her ‘most useful and beloved everyday recipes’ is the result. For a chef who once dismissed recipes there’s an irony, she realises, but given the desire to share the passion for food she’s rediscovered, she’s not letting that worry her.

Being Nosrat, of course, this book isn’t just recipes but tips, techniques and underlying philosophy. It’s divided into sections – condiments and toppings, store cupboard meals, recipes based on seasonal produce – small nibbles and big sharing meals. The section on seasonal produce – mainly vegetables – is almost a book in itself.

The recipes given plenty of attention thus far – the book has rightly received a lot of publicity – seem to be the dressings, including the addictive creamy sesame-ginger dressing that she says kicked off the whole project. The creamy lemon-miso dressing runs it a close second.

Nosrat’s superpower is to combine ingredients – in delicious ways – that’ve never been combined before. ‘Forever popcorn’ dusted with nutritional yeast is so good, apparently, that it’s photographed next to her bedside. Miso and labneh onion dip. Cardamom ghee. I want to make them all.

One caveat. Nosrat’s ‘everyday’ may not be your everyday. She is a chef after all. Although most of the recipes are relatively straightforward, creamy spinach lasagne involves three pages of instructions on top of a further three pages on how to make fresh lasagne sheets. The book is possibly not for the novices among your acquaintances but for confident cooks stuck in a rut, it’s perfect.

Fiona Beckett

Silk Roads by Anna Ansari

£21, DK

Iranian-American writer Anna Ansari’s Silk Roads is as much a journey through memory and migration as it is a cookbook. Beautiful vintage photography punctuates the pages, as does her burning desire to dispel myths and fill knowledge-gaps by sharing the food and cultures of Georgia, Uyghur, Uzbekistan, China and especially her Azeri-Iranian heritage – proudly ethnic Turkic, distinct from Persian traditions yet richly interwoven with adopted Persian flavours. ‘There is so much more to the Silk Roads than what people imagine, romanticise, Orientalise or fear,’ she writes.

The cookbook itself is organised for both curiosity and practicality: cold salads, soups and stews, ferments and pickles, eggs, vegetables and tofu, quadrupeds, fish and fowl, rice, noodles, dumplings and bread, and sweet treats. This structure highlights the vastness and connections of the Silk Roads at a glance. For example, in the ‘dumplings and bread’ section, Central Asian manti and kao baozi sit alongside Georgian chvishtari and Azeri gutab, while recipes are deeply researched and intertwined with anecdotes. It highlights the beauty of traditional recipes, but there are playful twists like ‘Risotto alla Bukharese’.

Ansari’s essays offer rich storytelling that is at once personal and historically grounded. Before the ‘the quadrupeds, fish, and fowl section’ section, she journeys from a childhood spent on a dairy farm that gave her a high tolerance for gore, to witnessing a pig being killed in northern Yunnan province in China, to the story of the Iranian nomadic Qashqai herders and their fat-tailed, Karakul sheeps (that her dad ate as a child). All of this to frame the privilege of being able to choose our meat carefully.

She is drawn to the poetic. The introduction begins with the unforgettable line, ‘It all started with a melon.’ Through her thoughtful and engaging prose, Ansari has crafted more than a book brimming with magical-sounding recipes – though it certainly is that. Silk Roads is also an imagined geography, a story of connectivity beyond borders, and ultimately, a meditation on personhood and becoming.

Joel Hart