The best cookbooks to buy for last-minute Christmas presents

I intended to write this post about a month ago when most normal people do their Christmas shopping but hey, it’s suddenly December 22nd and only two shopping days to Christmas. There are however those who leave their shopping until the VERY last minute (I did most of mine at the weekend) and for you this guide may solve all your Christmas present dilemmas in one go.

The good news is that 2015 has been a bumper year for cookbooks so there should be a suitable title for everyone you know

For keen bakers

I hasten to say I’m not a baker which is maybe why the unorthodox but brilliant Honey & Co The Baking Book appeals, not least because its recipes work. I also like The Violet (I nearly wrote Violent) Bakery Cookbook by Claire Ptak. Chocolate croissant bread pudding anyone? Yup, I thought so.

For the adventurous cook

Mamushka
No need for any extra endorsement from me, this book has swept the board in almost all the 2015 book selections - and rightly. Its author, Olia Hercules, is as charming on the page as she is in person sharing family recipes (from the Ukraine) you almost certainly won’t have tried before. I’ve cooked about 4 or 5 dishes from it and all have been delicious.

Those who appreciate an encyclopaedic approach to food will love The Nordic Cookbook, the 768 page magnum opus from Magnus Nilsson of Faviken. It’s the Scandi equivalent of the Larousse Gastronomique - and frankly a bargain at £29.95 (or even less from you-know-who). Meatball obsessives will be in heaven.

If you follow Maunika Gowardhan’s mouthwatering instagram feed @cookinacurry you’ll know how good her food looks and sounds. Indian Kitchen: the secrets of Indian Home Cooking tells you exactly how to make it. Ideal for curry fanatics

And if you’ve always wanted to get your head round bibimbap, kimchi and other Korean specialities Jordan Bourke and Rejina Pyo’s Our Korean Kitchen will get you off to a cracking start.

For Hibernophiles
At least that’s the term for someone who love Ireland and all things Irish according to Wikipedia. If you know someone who falls into that category buy them Trish Deseine’s Home, a beautifully produced book that combines luscious photography with lyrical writing and some lovely recipes including this one for baked apple with porter cake crumbs and whisky custard

For the cash-strapped (or anyone who has been cleaned out by a visit to the dentist recently. *Speaks from bitter experience*.)

The Cornershop Cookbook probably wins the prize for the most delightfully left-field book of the year though I suspect not everyone has such generously stocked local shops as the authors. Good for an ambitious student cook. And given chicken is also not that expensive one of your loved ones (can't believe I'm using that term) may appreciate a copy of either A Bird in the Hand from Sunday Telegraph Cookery writer Diana Henry or Catherine Phipps Chicken: I’d say Phipps for the more cerebral cook who likes to get her/his head around techniques like making chicken brittle and Henry for the friend or family member who wants more colourful inspiration (the photography, as always with her books, is as inviting as the text).

For celebrity chef groupies
As ever there’s a book from all the big names this Christmas, from which I’d pick out four

Nopi
Even someone who has all Ottolenghi’s other books will want this one written with his head chef Ramael Scully. It looks utterly beautiful with its gleaming gold page edges too.

Simply Nigella
Nigella has come under fire for some of the recipes in her new TV series but who can complain about chicken traybake with bitter orange and fennel or tamarind-marinated bavette? A book to read as well as to cook from - Nigella on vintage form

More health-conscious friends may appreciate Gizzi Erskine’s Gizzi’s Healthy Appetite (loads of lovely recipes in this one) and Jamie Oliver's Jamie’s Everyday Super Food both written by chefs who actually enjoy their food and have retained a sense of balance about what constitutes healthy eating. (Even the clean eating brigade couldn’t complain about Jamie’s 100 calorie snack bowls. Though they probably will.)

If you’ve a chef-obsessed friend they’ll also love Carrie Solomon and Adrian Moore’s Inside Chefs’ Fridges, a compulsive read I suspect many will keep in the bathroom, infuriating family members by locking themselves in and pouring over it for hours. (You won’t be surprised Fergus Henderson has Fernet Branca in his. Fridge, not bathroom, obviously. Though possibly that too ...)

For cooks who like to read in bed

Five Quarters by Rachel Roddy
My other favourite book this year from one of the best young writers around. Very much in the Elizabeth David/Jane Grigson mould, you don't even need to cook from it to be able to taste the food and ingredients of her adopted Rome

And finally food geeks (and infographic fans) will love Laura Rowe’s Taste which gets over basic food science and culinary tips in a jazzy, snazzy way. A fun book for older, food-conscious teens.

There were many other good books published this year (Richard Turner’s Hog and Claire Thompson’s Five O’Clock Apron on feeding small kids among them) but if I don’t stop now you’ll never get to the shops in time, will you?

And let’s hope someone buys one of these for you.

Disclosure: most of these books were sent to me as review copies.

Book of the month: Mamushka by Olia Hercules

How often do you find a recipe book that offers a genuinely original selection of recipes inspired by a cooking tradition you’re not even aware of? For those whose shelves are bulging with Italian and middle-eastern cookbooks, Mamushka, by the talented young chef and food stylist Olia Hercules, offers a window into a different culinary world.

Hercules (it sounds weird to use that name of such a strikingly pretty young woman, so let’s call her Olia) focuses on the food of what her publisher astutely dubs the ‘wild east’ - her native Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

She wrote the book, she says, to dispel the myths about her country - for one thing that it’s not cold and bleak but temperate - only an hour by air from Turkey. “Our winters are mild, our summers long and hot and our food a cornucopia of colour and flavour.”

The current conflict in the Ukraine prompted her to document family recipes, she was scared might be lost. “This is the stuff of my childhood, a life that I want to share with you… to give the messy geo-political mosaic a human face."

Divided into foods that are typical of the region including soups, some astonishing stuffed breads, dumplings, jams and pickles (there’s a great section on fermenting…) the book is packed with recipes you simply can’t wait to make.

She writes simply but so evocatively. "We grew up eating seasonally, as happily there was no alternative. I remember the aroma of the first prickly cucumber in May, my mother chopping it straight over the chipped enamel bowl then adding the tomatoes radishes and a whole bunch of chopped dill, all well seasoned and lightly dressed with smetana - the silkiest of soured creams. My favourite part of the meal was dipping a piece of bread into the pool of pink-stained leftover dressing speckled with dill fronds and watching the pink seep into the bread." (The moment I read that I had to make the recipe and even though I used yoghurt rather than smetana it was truly delicious as you can see from the somewhat messy photo above.)

Other recipes I tried over the same weekend were equally successfuL: a Georgian kidney bean salad fragrant with herbs, improved, I suspect, by using some excellent dried borlotti beans I'd brought back from Austria rather than a can and Azerbaijani chicken with prunes and walnuts - an exotic riff on roast chicken (I substituted brown breadcrumbs for some of the walnuts as I didn't have quite enough and cooked the bird a little longer than Olia suggested) perfectly matched with her Armenian roasted vegetables (the Armenian element being roast cabbage and dill). And I took advantage of the gooseberry season to make her gooseberry and strawberry conserve, a sharp, bright-tasting jam that brings out the best of both fruits.

I can’t wait to make her ‘Ukrainian narcotics’ - pork belly cured with salt and garlic, frozen then served from the freezer in wafer-thin slices, fermented tomatoes 'mindblowing' according to Olia), a celebratory dish of Azerbaijani rice and fruity lamb and practically everything in the bread section though I’m not sure I’ll ever achieve the gossamer-thin texture of the irresistibly beautiful Moldovan giant cheese twist. (One of the things I most like about the book is the mixture of very simple recipes with more challanging ones. And its practicality: Olia always suggests substitutes for hard-to-find ingredients.)

Sometimes I have to do a cull of my cookbooks to avoid them taking over the flat but this is definitely a keeper.

Mamushka by Olia Hercules is published by Mitchell Beazley at £25. If you want to try Olia’s food before you buy the book she is cooking at Carousel from July 28th to Saturday 1st August 2015. You can book here

A Change of Appetite - but what if your beloved doesn't want to change?

I can’t tell you how excited I was about A Change of Appetite. To the extent that, impatient with the review copy not having arrived I dragged myself on a fruitless visit to Waitrose to buy it then drove down to Bristol City centre. On a Saturday afternoon. (Locals will know this how insane this is.)

The only thing I didn’t allow for is that my husband might not want to change his appetite too . . .

Back to the beginning. Change of Appetite is award-winning author Diana Henry’s eighth book. They’ve all won ridiculous numbers of awards so much so that you look at a shortlist and think 'Not Diana Henry again!' But dammit, she deserves it.

The reason she keeps on winning is that in addition to coming up with brilliant recipes she’s also a fine writer with the knack of making it sound like she’s talking to you but also of infusing her recipes with such passion and poetry that you just can’t wait to get into the kitchen and try them.

Past books include the inspiring Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, Salt Sugar Smoke and Food from Plenty but in this book she’s decided to focus on healthy food. And this is where the problems started. My husband has not the faintest interest in eating more healthily or of departing from his normal register of bourgeois French and Italian cooking.

I tried four recipes all of which I could tell he’d made up his mind he wasn’t going to enjoy. (If this makes him sound like a fogey he isn’t - his taste in music and books for example is far more adventurous and electic than mine but, to coin a phrase, ‘he knows what he likes’.)

The first recipe I tried, burmese chilli fish with a hot and sour salad was infuriatingly the least successful of the four due to the fact that I used only about a third of the fish for the two of us (750g seemed like a lot of fish for four). Never a good idea to second guess the author. It made the turmeric which I’d only scaled down by half too dominant but I loved the bright zingy flavours of the hot and sour salad. My OH less so.

He also took against the fabulously sticky chicken and fennel with honey mustard and orange as being too sweet - my fault again for not making the accompanying black and white pilaf which contains bitter watercress to balance the honey's sweetness. An easy midweek dish, as Diana says. I thought it was really tasty. I imagine kids would too.

The other two thankfully went down better. A very simple and imaginative dish of purple sprouting broccoli, ricotta and parmesan with lemon (above) - a lovely way to serve PSB and an unusual and again very easy white fish, saffron and dill couscous pilaf (below) which I’ll definitely be making again (preferably when my OH is out).

Other recipes I’ve bookmarked are the Japanese rice bowl, Japanese ginger and garlic chicken with smashed cucumber, warm salad of pink grapefruit, prawns and toasted coconut and lamb scottadito with summer fregola (the recipes are divided up by season). Oh, and braised venison with beetroot and horseradish because I bought some great looking venison from the butcher we visited for the BBC Food & Farming awards the other day. I reckon even my OH would like that.

Although I’m in love with this book I have a couple of minor quibbles. One is that as with Ottolenghti (who is a fan) some recipes feature quite a lot of hard to source ingredients - although Diana always gives alternatives. Even in Bristol I had difficulty finding some of them and I was well-motivated to track them down. And it would be useful if some of the recipes had been for two - maybe the simpler ones. A lot of people wouldn't necessarily be sharing the dishes with friends and family and scaling down isn’t always easy.

As I’ve mentioned before I always think cookbooks have a target audience. The same book isn’t going to suit everybody. So here’s who I think it would appeal to - and who would possibly find it less useful

Buy A Change of Appetite if

* you genuinely want to give your cooking a healthy makeover and incorporate more fruit, vegetables and fish in your diet

* you're drawn to light bright flavours. If you’re an Ottolenghi fan you’ll love it

* you read cookbooks obsessively in bed. This will give hours of pleasure

* you're into food porn - the photos, by Laura Edwards, are quite glorious

Don’t buy it if

* you refuse to eat anything other than French bistro food

* you’re an inexperienced cook (while the recipes are not difficult they’re not really for beginners)

* you haven’t got a well-stocked store-cupboard or the budget to acquire extra ingredients and seasonings

But buy it for someone else . . .

A Change of Appetite is published by Mitchell Beazley at £25.

Flavour matching with Niki Segnit

The surprise publishing hit among food books last year was not the record selling Jamie’s 30-minute meals or even the new Nigella but an unillustrated book called The Flavour Thesaurus by an unknown author, Niki Segnit. The book catalogues nearly 1000 flavour combinations which are described in an endearingly quirky way. It’s erudite, original and funny

It took 44 year old Segnit, who used to be in advertising, three years to complete. She was inspired to cook by the dishes she ate at expense account lunches. “I remember having a goats cheese salad with raspberries and thinking it was the most sophisticated dish ever.” Curious about food to the point of geekiness she found there was nothing that taught you how to cook rather than to follow a recipe. “Following the instructions in a recipe is like parroting pre-formed sentences from a phrase book” she writes. “Forming an understanding of how flavours work together, on the other hand, is like learning the language.”

It might sound like the book all amateur cooks have been waiting for but surprisingly Segnit struggled to get it published. Eventually it was spotted by Heston Blumenthal’s editor at Bloomsbury. “It’s an approach that seems to appeal to men” said Segnit wryly.

Obviously the book couldn’t cover all conceivable ingredients so Segnit picked 99 of the ones she found most interesting, excluding carbohydrates except potatoes and common condiments such as salt and pepper on the grounds that they went with pretty well everything. There are references to wine dotted throughout - how Chardonnay contains the same flavour compounds as smoked fish and bell peppers the same compound 2-methoxy-3-isobutylpyrazine which is found in Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc.

Having had the book by my bedside for months it struck me that Segnit’s approach could equally well be applied to food and wine matching so I arranged to meet her in Kopapa, a New Zealand-style caf run by chef Peter Gordon and a bit of a flavour playground itself.

Although she played down her wine knowledge it turned out she’d done a wine course. “I took a course with the WSET. We had to shout out what the wines reminded us of - I enjoyed that."

“Clearly a lot of established pairings are cultural and came about for reasons that made sense at the time like the pairing of red wine and cheese. And alcohol and tannin clearly play a part but one I don’t fully understand.”

Once we started running through a selection of wines to see which flavours Segnit identified, you could immediately see the originality and distinctiveness of her approach. Not having a wine background she relies instead on memories of her past.

“This reminds me of walking in Cornwall on a hot summer evening when the sun has been out all day” she said of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. Pressed on specific aromas and flavours, she came up with gooseberry and elderflower, smokey, herbal, and, er, asparagus pee. So what would she pair with it? “I wouldn’t make a suggestion without researching it first” she said reprovingly (the entries in her books are peppered with conversations with chefs and food scientists). “I can imagine fresh mackerel bought straight from the fisherman’s hut and cooked on the beach . . . “ We tried the nearest thing on the menu a bruschetta of grilled sardines and roast tomatoes. Spot on.

Next up was a lush barrel-aged Chardonnay. “HMS Victory!” Segnit pronounced. “It’s like smelling the deck. And tropical fruit like mangoes . . . there’s a crab and mango combination Jean-Georges Vongerichten used to do, I remember. And coconut . . . Let’s try the laksa.” It proved a standout pairing neither of us would have predicted. We also tried the more classic partnership of chardonnay with scallops with a soy ginger beurre blanc (below) which Segnit said was the first time she’d actually enjoyed scallops. “Trying a food you don’t think you like with a different partner can change your view of it. That clearly works for wine too.”

Segnit also thought it might also be worth trying a Thai pork salad on the menu as she’d picked up the flavour of fish sauce in the wine but we much preferred a New Zealand Sauvignon with that. “It’s amazing how it keeps its personality and the Chardonnay changes” she said wonderingly.

The delicate strawberry flavour of an off-dry Chilean Carmenre/Caberet ros provoked thoughts of avocado.”There’s a grassy flavour in avocado that tastes like rolling in a meadow.” said Segnit. We tried it with a dish of cassava chips with avocado pure, chilli sauce and crme friche. “What’s interesting is how the dish makes the wine taste much nicer.”

In a Kiwi pinot noir Segnit found ‘cooked strawberry and a slightly unreal raspberry flavour like the kind they use in medicines. And there’s something quite meaty and savoury about it.” We went for a umami-rich dish of toast with bone marrow and parmesan spread which again worked well, the pinot picking up especially well on an accompanying beetroot pure.

And finally a Bordeaux blend from Hawkes Bay which caused us more problems because it wasn’t so much about flavour as tannin. “I remember my grandparents used to burn the bramble cuttings - this smells like blackberries with smoke on them.” We couldn’t go for Segnit’s suggested pairings of black pudding and game so settled for an oxtail risotto. It turned out to be less meaty than we’d imagined working better with a pinot noir.

The exercise proved - as such sessions do - that there’s always an element of surprise in food and wine matching whatever route you take to get there. “ It’s hard to call even when you have the combinations in your head” mused Segnit. I’d like to know more about the scientific side of wine matching - the sort of approach taken by sommelier Francois Chartier in ‘Taste Buds and Molecules’. He talks about how the best matches for lamb are reds from the Languedoc because they contain the aromatic compound thymol which is also found in lamb. And it would be interesting to explore the green pepper notes in Cabernet. I’d like to try that with pimientos de padron . . .

I’m sure she will.

The Flavour Thesaurus is published by Bloomsbury at £18.99. Thanks to Peter Gordon and Michael McGrath of Kopapa for hosting the tasting.

Niki Segnit’s top flavour combinations:

Green peppers and eggs
Segnit’s authority for this is a paper published by Dr Maria-Grazia Inventato, Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Eau Claire Wisconsin. ‘Peppers and Eggs: Red-blooded Males and Mother-Worship in Italian-American Crime Culture’. It is, she says, dependent on the softening of the pepper and the scrambling of the egg.

Strawberries and cinnamon
“Strawberries have a hint of candyfloss about them. Cinnamon loves sugar and fruit. Warmed together the pair give off a seductively seedy fug of the fairground.”

Aubergine and nutmeg
“Freshly grated nutmeg puts the ohh into aubergines. There should be a global chain selling cones of nutmeggy fried aubergine slices. Don’t be tempted to use ready-ground nutmeg - it has to be freshly grated to order.”

Apple and coriander seed
“When the floral perfume of coriander seeds is mixed with sharp fruity apple the result is quite apricot-like and especially delightful. Try them paired as an ice cream.”

This article was first published in the June 2011 issue of Decanter.