There are some sensational books out that would make fantastic Christmas presents.
If you missed Nigel Slater's absolutely essential early cookery books first time around, you have a treat in store. Penguin is republishing Real Cooking and The 30-Minute Cook (£12.99 each), Real Fast Food , and Real Fast Puddings (£8.99 each). They're no-nonsense, often hilarious, quick and delicious.
Ditto, if you missed Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray's original River Cafe cookbooks, they've reissued four pocket-book versions of them (Ebury, £8.99 each) - Pasta and Ravioli ; Fish and Shellfish; Salads and Vegetables; Puddings, Cakes and Ice Creams . Good, clear, large-type format, but the small books are slightly awkward to use while cooking unless you've got one of those Perspex-covered bookstands.
Several books combine food or local history with recipes, illustrated by fabulous photography. Caprice chef/proprietor Mark Hix's British Regional Food (Quadrille, £25) is the perfect cook's tour of the country, from Kent's garden of England with fruit recipes to tripe and wild boar in the north accompanied by Jason Lowe's stunningly moving pictures.
Sarah Woodward's The Food of France (Kyle Cathie, £25) is a carefully researched collection of regional recipes that make you want to jump straight on the ferry. Easy dishes from garlic soup of the Basque region to prawns with pastis from Provence (try saying that when you're drunk).
The amazing Fuchsia Dunlop has brought out another book from China - the Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (Ebury, £25) - a gloriously red-covered book with recipes from the Hunan province. Dunlop is a world authority on Chinese cooking, and learned Cantonese in order to research her first book. Her approach is a happy mixture of scholarly and gluttonous, and the recipes aren't too complicated. Try chairman Mao's favourite red-braised pork.
Nobu Matsuhisa and his chef Mark Edwards have produced Nobu West (Quadrille, £30) - an excellent collection of recipes that are easy to do and source but will dazzle guests.
Cheerful and colourful, Bulbul Mankani's The Bollywood Cookbook perfectly captures the flavour of Indian movies (Kyle Cathie, £18.99). Stars share their favourite recipes, which are pretty straightforward. The only trouble is you get completely distracted looking at the pictures.
I love the food at Peter Gordon's restaurant, the Providores, so it follows I'm a great fan of his book Vegetables (Quadrille, £18.99) - delicious combinations like spinach and cottage cheese fritters, or salsify and anchovy gratin with oysters. Yum, yum, yum.
In 1985, when he launched cuisine naturelle - haute cuisine without the fat and alcohol - Anton Mosimann caused a stir, albeit a highly successful one. And when you meet him, this trim, energetic man is a perfect advertisement for his regime. Now he's brought out Mosimann's Fresh (HarperCollins, £25) - with fantastic pictures by Dan Jones - for the Noughties, with delicious dishes from pork with Chinese leaves to pumpkin gnocchi. And, of course, his famous bread and butter pudding.
Tom Parker Bowles is an unashamed pig. The Year of Eating Dangerously (Ebury, £15.99) starts with elvers in Gloucestershire, then rambles in entertaining novel form via silk-worm pupae in Korea, anything and everything in China, to Nashville as a barbecue judge in the Kansas City Barbeque Society. Hilarious.
Another food-obsessed boy is Sam Stern who, with the help of his mother, published his first cookbook last year. His new book - Real Food (Walker Books, £9.99) is a perfect collection of simple, yummy recipes by a teenager for teenagers - ingeniously presented like an address book, divided into 5,10,15,20 and 30-minute times.
Trish Hilferty's Gastropub Classics (Absolute, £20) is a hearty selection of great combinations - Snails, Bacon and Laverbread on Duck Fat Toast, Ham and Parsley Terrine, Baked Custard and Quince. Some really quirky, good things.
Tamasin Day-Lewis is a true country cook - hearty, sensible, easily prepared dishes with mouth-watering photos, scattered with homely shots of Tamasin among the pigs or at the Aga. Tamasin's Kitchen Classics (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20) is one of those books you pick up to do one recipe and get side-tracked to do a couple more. One of the best compliments you can give a cookbook.
Skye Gyngell is the cook who put Petersham Nurseries on the map and enraged the Twickenham neighbours with the ensuing onslaught of four-wheel-drive customers. A Year in My Kitchen (Quadrille, £25) is a collection of the dishes that caused the furore, from a plate of mezze to a panade of slow-cooked onions with Gruyere. There's a useful front section on flavoured oils, mayonnaise bases and vinaigrettes.
Blissful actor Morgan Freeman has rallied his friends - Orlando Bloom, Tom Hanks, Ben Affleck, Alicia Keys to name a few - to produce a collection of recipes in aid of the Grenada Relief Fund - Caribbean Cooking for a Cause (Rodale, £20). I'm truly not a fan of traditional recipes such as plantain and conch, but there are some good alternatives in here, such as Jamaican curried tofu or a plain lentil salad from St Barth's.
The book for advanced and serious cooks is Essence , recipes from Le Champignon Sauvage by gifted Cheltenham chef, David Everitt-Matthias (Absolute press, £25). These are quite complicated dishes with extra flourishes like caramelisation and emulsions.
