Find the perfect Christmas gift for the cooking enthusiast in your life with our collection of books for serious cooks. From a love letter to pasta to a food memoir from Stanley Tucci, these are cookbooks to widen their kitchen skill set, broaden their repertoire and inspire their next accomplished home-cooked meal.
An A-Z of Pasta
Guardian columnist and best-selling cookbook author, Rachel Roddy’s unrivalled love letter to pasta explores 50 favourite shapes, organised alphabetically from alfabeto to ziti. Alongside fascinating insights into the history behind each shape and charming stories from Rachel’s life and travels in Italy, she suggests recipes for the best sauces to match them to, as well as failsafe instructions for making and shaping pasta from scratch. It’s the perfect gift for any food lover on your Christmas list this year, whether they love to make their own pasta, can’t get enough of Italian cuisine, enjoy learning the history behind food or simply love to broaden their repertoire with inspiring and dependable recipes.
Med
30 years after the publication of her first Mediterranean cookbook, revered food writer Claudia Roden returns to this diverse region to bring us new recipes, fresh perspectives and untold stories. With stunning food and travel photography and plenty of inspiration for recipes across the seasons, any cookery enthusiast would be delighted to find Med under the tree this Christmas.
From the Veg Patch
Kitchen gardening expert Kathy Slack takes us through a year at the veg patch with growing tips and recipes for 10 of her favourite vegetables. From early autumn tomato salads to spring pea gnocchi, high summer courgette fritters to winter kale quiche, Kathy makes her home-grown vegetables the rightful stars of each recipe, centring flavours and textures around their innate properties and possibilities. From the Veg Patch is therefore a resource both for learning to grow your own vegetables and for making the most of the fruits (and vegetables) of your labour.
Weekly Provisions
Weekly Provisions is all about the joy and pleasure of creating beautiful, seasonal food, without wasting a crumb. Divided into chapters according to season, and then sub-divided into menus, its novel approach to cooking is based on the idea of cooking one feast-style meal and then repurposing the leftovers into new dishes to enjoy throughout the week. Both the focus on seasonality and the invitation to broaden the potential of each dish will appeal to many different cooks, from budget-conscious cooks to meticulous meal planners, leftover lovers to cooks that love to make a feast.
Taste
Delving into memories of his childhood and revisiting cherished times with friends and family in his own words, treasured actor Stanley Tucci explores how food has often been a meaningful centre-point of these interactions. Alongside the likes of anecdotes about Meryl Streep and tales of his courtship of his wife, Felicity Blunt, he includes a number of unmissable recipes, from the Negroni that became an internet sensation, to his family’s cherished tomato sauce.
Ottolenghi FLAVOUR
The third instalment in Ottolenghi’s bestselling, multi-award-winning Plenty series, comes Ottolenghi FLAVOUR. It is the ultimate guide to cooking veg; divided into three parts, each dedicated to a fundamental element of flavour: Process, Pairing, and Produce. This is for any serious cooks who love to experiment with big-hitter, big-flavour dishes, whether they eat meat or not.
Falastin
For anyone who loved Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem they’ll love this Palestinian cookbook. A love letter to Palestine, its history, its future, its people and their voices, Falastin, is a beautiful collection of stories and recipes, celebrating Palestinian producers, cooks, chefs and even seed savers. As Sami and Tara travel through Bethlehem and East Jerusalem to Nablus, Jenin, Haifa, Akka, Nazareth, Galilee and across the West Bank, they collect the distinct recipes of each region and share them with beautiful photography to recreate at home.
