50 to try: Foodie books

From celebrity recipes to bargain dishes, we’ve found the top 50 cookbooks to try this winter Discuss this article

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'The Foodie Handbook'

Pim Techamuanvivit
Pim Techamuanvivit – usually just called ‘Pim’ – is one of the world’s most successful food bloggers, for her site ‘Chez Pim’ (chezpim.typepad.com). Its success seems down to several factors. She was one of the first, and at the time, one of the best. She uses lush photography – her own. And I suspect most importantly, her blog is very aspirational. Barely a week goes by when she’s not jetting off to a far-off city to dine in the very best restaurants, or court favour with culinary legends. How does she do it? Her blog infers that after moving from Thailand to the US she made a fortune working in Silicon Valley, which then allowed her to pursue a career in food writing. On the back of the perceived glamour of her lifestyle and the traffic to her blog, this British book was commissioned. The style of the writing is didactic: if you want to do it properly, you have to do it her way. Except we’re not talking about baking soufflés; in Pim world, being a ‘foodie’ is a competitive sport (and you’re left in no doubt who number one is). She covers topics such as ‘How not to be a wine geek’ and ‘Fifty things every foodie should do’.

'The Iraqi Cookbook'

Lamees Ibrahim
The very word ‘Iraq’ is so politically charged that even when it appears in the title of a cookery book it’s an attention-grabber. This is not the first book on the subject to be published in English, but previous works are rare. The author is a Baghdad-trained medical doctor who now lives in London. The book started out as a project to collect cherished recipes for her children, but ended up being collated on a grander scale. Ibrahim says that the book was written for Iraq’s diaspora population, but the recipes are wide-ranging enough to interest food-lovers of all stripes. There are classic Iraqi dishes such as hareesah, a spiced wheat and lamb dish traditionally eaten by Shi’ite Muslims on the tenth day of the sacred month of Muharram, and qoozi, whole roast lamb stuffed with saffron and rosewater-scented rice, which is served at important family celebrations.Recipes for stuffed vegetables recall the cooking of the western Mediterranean, while rice dishes (‘pilaou’), similar to those found throughout the Middle East and beyond, abound, highlighting Iraq’s importance as a long-standing cultural crossroads.

'Serendip'

Peter Kuruvita
London is home to one of the largest Sri Lankan populations beyond the shores of their country, yet there are few notable restaurants serving the food of what was once Ceylon in the capital. Many Londoners of Sri Lankan heritage agree that restaurant food just can’t approach home cooking for quality, yet there have been few good books in English showing the keen amateur how to create Sri Lankan dishes – until now. The author of this beautifully produced book is chef at the Flying Fish Restaurant in Sydney, but was born in London. The recipes are largely family creations, including dishes from his Sinhalese grandmother’s kitchen, which are some of the best in the book, including a chicken curry thickened with desiccated coconut and ground rice, and the ‘beginners’ curry’ known as kiri hoddy. The ‘On the Road’ chapter includes classic ‘short eats’ such as fish cutlets and mutton rolls.

'An Edible History of Humanity'

Tom Standage
Tom Standage is business editor of The Economist. As you’d expect, his writing style is therefore crisp, clear, and... economical. Which is no bad thing when you’re trying to view recorded history through the huge prism of world food history. This has been done before by others, from early luminaries such as Margaret Visser to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, who have all had their particular approaches, yet it seems there is room for yet another. This book is necessarily derivative, but to his credit Standage details his sources carefully. The result is a summary, covering diverse subjects from the well known, such as the shift to agriculture from hunter-gathering, to the topics less documented by food writers. For example, Napoleon’s reliance on fast and light food logistics being responsible for both his military successes and failures was news to me. Along the way Standage covers the disaster ensuing from farm collectivisation under Mao, gives a very succinct and clear explanation of the so-called ‘triangular trade’ and slavery in the Americas, and how the spice trade was responsible for the wealth and decline of the major trading ports of the early modern period.

'River Cottage Handbook No.5: Edible Seashore'

John Wright
The sheer number of these River Cottage-branded books might suggest they are being churned out, yet they’re all surprisingly good. This volume is particularly notable because it’s small enough to use as a field guide, is easy to use and is engagingly written. We used it on a trip to Norfolk to gather foraged plants we’d not tried before, including alexanders. The necessary caveats are all still there – for example, hemlock (fatally poisonous) is easily mistaken for other umbellifers, including alexanders. With the help of the book, we lived to tell the tale. The many pages on collecting mussels, razor clams, crabs and the like are also eminently practical, and types of net are discussed along with the rules and ethics of foraging. The recipes at the end seem a little superfluous, though they did presumably come in useful when The Guardian printed excerpts a few weeks ago, along with suitably luscious photography. A perfect, and beautiful, book for beginners or intermediate-level shore-foragers.