Pull up a chair. This season's most appealing cookbooks are as much fun to read as they are to cook from.
Cook This Now by Melissa Clark:Reading Clark is like having a friend in the kitchen. The book is arranged by season, and dishes such as white-bean stew with rosemary, garlic and farro are followed by chatty notes about what kinds of beans to use, what to do if you can't find farro and how to change the stew into a soup. The summery crushed new potatoes and pea salad with mustard-seed dressing is a hit in my house.
Know a culture through its dishes
The Food of Spain by Claudia Roden: The first recipe doesn't appear until page 125. Roden grew up in Cairo, the descendant of Spanish Jews who were expelled in 1492. After writing A Book of Middle Eastern Food, she has turned her attention to Spain, telling the story of a complex and fascinating country through its cuisine, which was strongly influenced by the Jews and the Arabs who left centuries ago. Recipes such as lamb stew with honey and a whole chapter on tapas will send you straight to the kitchen.
Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese: When Reese lost her job as Entertainment Weekly's book critic, she was looking for ways to save money. Could she economise in the kitchen by making things she would, under normal circumstances, buy: baguettes, meat, ginger ale? She started experimenting and realised that home-made Nutella is actually more expensive than store-bought, and "skinning hazelnuts is maddening". Bagels, on the other hand, aren't very hard to make, and they taste better than anything you can buy.
Veggie delights
Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi: This book is bristling with more purple sticky-notes than any other on my shelf. Broccoli and Gorgonzola pie. Caramelised fennel with goat cheese. Chickpea, tomato and bread soup. I, unfortunately, have never been much of a vegetable lover, but (meat-eating) London chef Ottolenghi has written a veggie cookbook full of unexpected flavour combinations and lush photographs. The cover shot of eggplant with buttermilk sauce topped with plump red pomegranate seeds will entice any carnivore.
Ruhlman's Twenty by Michael Ruhlman: "Thinking in the kitchen is underrated," says Ruhlman, who has worked with Thomas Keller, the notorious kitchen brainiac, on his cookbooks. In chapters on 20 ingredients or techniques, he gives advice to help us think better while cooking, along with tips such as this: "If you don't have home-made stock, use water rather than open a can of broth." That's what real chefs would do, he says. Also, the many useful photos show how to slice onions and what they'll look like at all stages while caramelising, among other things.
