My Cookbook Collection: The Ones That Survived the Cull
I used to own around a thousand cookbooks. I’m down to about 150 now, and I thought picking a handful to recommend would be easy. It wasn’t — so this is the first in what will likely become a series. Nothing here is new or recently published; these are simply the books and writers I truly love and keep coming back to.
The favourites I never let go of
Anything by Diana Henry earns a permanent place on my shelf, but A Bird in the Hand gets particular use, since chicken is such a staple in my kitchen. Rick Stein is another author I’ve kept in full — including his earliest, enormous volumes — though his Indian cookbook is the one I return to most for genuinely authentic recipes. The Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventureis a favourite too, alongside their very first book, Food Tour of Britain, which combines sophisticated recipes with excellent chef-level tips if you can track it down.
The everyday-useful ones
For anyone who wants to cook ahead, Jane Lovett’s Get Ahead Cook is a longstanding go-to. Alan Rosenthal’s Foolproof One Pot is the book that first got me following him — brilliant for one-pot dishes, which we’ve leaned on a lot in our cookalongs. Marcus Wareing’s New Classics is full of reliably lovely recipes, and for pressure cooking specifically, Catherine Phipps’s Modern Pressure Cooking is unmatched — she’s the reason I got into pressure cooking in the first place. Ed Smith’s On the Side is a brilliant reference for side dishes, and I couldn’t leave out Nigel Slater — his vegetable-focused writing and Kitchen Diaries are essential reading if you grow your own.
The educational, encyclopedia-style ones
Niki Segnit’s The Flavour Thesaurus is a wonderful gift for a serious foodie, mapping out how different flavours work together. The Book of Schmaltz is a niche love of mine, given how evangelical I am about using chicken fat. Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (recently updated, and the basis for the Netflix series) is another firm favourite, alongside Raymond Blanc’s Kitchen Secrets — a book packed with genuine insight from a chef I’ve been lucky enough to meet more than once, including a memorable visit to my own supper club. And for the more scientifically minded, J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab is a heavyweight but brilliant reference.
The classics
Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories is a book I’ve cooked almost entirely through, loved equally by chefs and home cooks — its follow-up, Second Helpings, is organised by ingredient, perfect for using up whatever’s in the fridge. The Prawn Cocktail Years is another Hopkinson favourite. No serious collection is complete without Elizabeth David — I have a compilation of Mediterranean Food, French Country Cooking and Summer Cooking, and there’s something wonderful about returning to a recipe written decades ago and stripping away everything modern cooking has added since. For Italian cooking, Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is the one I reach for most.
The ones I love to gift
Felicity Cloake’s Perfect and Perfect Too — built on her Guardian column testing and refining classic recipes — are wonderful books for beginners; I gave both to our former supper club waitress when she left home to set her up in the kitchen. And for something more unusual, Edward de Pomiane’s French Cooking in 10 Minutes, first published in the 1920s, is less a recipe book and more a beautiful meditation on hosting and the ritual of the table — I’ve gifted it to several of the keen cooks in my life.
That’s the collection, for now — more to come, since I’ve barely scratched the surface.