Turkish delights: the best of the year’s cookbooks

‘Recipes are like magic potions. They promise transformations,’ says Bee Wilson in her introduction to Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake (Faber, £12.99), a collection of classic authors’ recipes. You have to pray that tinned tomato soup will indeed be transformed into something nice-tasting, or that Noel Streatfeild’s filets de boeuf aux bananas will not be as revolting as it sounds. Not much hope of that, I’m afraid – but this is more of a book to enjoy reading without tasting.

Some of the writers confess to failing miserably in the food department. ‘I am a very bad cooker, as the children put it,’ warns Beryl Bainbridge, as she launches into a heartless recipe for violently boiled mince. Others cannot help but insert stylish metaphors, just as they would in their day job. Instructing us on how to boil the perfect egg, Vladimir Nabokov says you know when all has gone wrong if the egg cracks in the water and ‘starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium in an old-fashioned séance’. Delia could have done with that line. This is a conversation piece of a book, completely eccentric – a definite for the literary person’s Christmas stocking.

By chance, a dazzling self-published book has come my way and is already a treasure on my shelf. Jess Elliott Dennison’s Midweek Recipes (order from www.elliottsedinburgh.com) is ideal for busy food-lovers. A former restaurant owner, now a cookery teacher with a studio in Edinburgh, Dennison shares her simple recipes in the year’s prettiest book, illustrated with her own atmospheric photographs. She is a pickles enthusiast, using them to add ‘layers of texture, colour and acidity’ to many of her recipes. There are quick pickled onions and herbs to add punch to her recipe for fried halloumi; also fried herbs and capers to scatter over tomatoes on toast. Her chapter on homemade flatbreads with fulsome fillings is brilliant, and the section on cakes and sweet things practically perfect. This is a book about good eating habits, with large helpings of passion.

With unique access to centuries of the royals’ menu archive and their chefs, Tom Parker Bowles has compiled a very enjoyable book for royal watchers. In Cooking & the Crown: Royal Recipes from Queen Victoria to King Charles III (Octopus, £30),we are, thankfully, spared larks’ tongues and boar roasts in favour of recipes likely to have been enjoyed more routinely, ranging from family breakfasts to plates served at state banquets.

For many decades, royal cooking relied chiefly on French haute cuisine. There are remoulades and mousselines; aspics and consommés; dishes à la crème; bombes and soufflés. Much of this dates to when the royal kitchens were influenced by such star chefs as Auguste Escoffier and Marie-Antoine Carême. With successive reigns, however, the fuss becomes less, the number of courses served fewer and the ingredients more modest, until we eventually arrive at Queen Camilla’s relaxed, homely recipes.

Sebze: Vegetarian Recipes From My Turkish Kitchen by Ozlem Warren (Hardie Grant, £28) might inspire a bulk-buy of filo pastry in order to make the crisp, coiled cheese-stuffed treats and baklava described in this radiant, sunny book that would cheer any kitchen in these dark days. The recipes are joyfully festive, with pilafs and vegetable roasts ideal for any cook entertaining non-meat-eaters this Christmas. I love the regular use of walnuts in salads and dips for meze, plus the tangy pides (Turkish pizza) and pickles. I shall be cooking Kestaneli Ic Pilav, a multicoloured rice studded with chestnuts and apricots, baking a layered dish of potatoes with onions, tomatoes and olives and revisiting Imam Bayildi, the greatest stuffed aubergine recipe of all time.

Crisp, coiled cheese-stuffed treats and baklava would cheer any kitchen in these dark days

Jay Rayner’s Nights Out at Home (Fig Tree, £22) is a book that only a longstanding restaurant critic could have written, taking recipes from his favourite chefs and adapting them to home cooking. Rayner describes it as ‘my love letter to the places that have been the cornerstone of my working life for so long’. It’s a useful book, not least because Rayner has ‘reverse engineered’ recipes, either to make them easier or to upscale the numbers they serve. The Calabrian chef Francesco Mazzei’s ‘seafood fragola’ is a challenge to make for one, so has been adapted for four. Other treats include Michel Roux’s ultimate cheese toastie made with raclette, Montgomery cheddar and Ogleshield cheeses; there is Scott Hallsworth’s method for Nasu Dengaku (miso-glazed aubergine) and a lovely recipe for grilled leeks with pistachio Romanesco sauce. There’s plenty of text to read, too, with explanations of the whys and wherefores of every dish.

There are more recollections from Nigel Slater in A Thousand Feasts (Fourth Estate, £20). Slater is a diarist and dedicated note-keeper, always jotting about travelling, eating and cooking. Whether night-bathing in Japan, taking perilous car journeys in Goa, eating mulberries in Croatia or pottering around his own beloved garden in London, he makes you want to better your life.

The New Zealand-born Ben Shewry cooks at the acclaimed Attica restaurant in Melbourne, and his Uses for Obsession: A (Chef’s) Memoir (Murdoch Books, £17.99) is a book all cooks should read. It reminded me that the profession has come a long way from the alpha-male-dominated kitchens of the early 1990s when I first began taking a serious interest in food and the restaurant world. I only tried working in one restaurant ‘brigade’ in those years, momentarily thinking I might want to be a chef rather than a private cook catering in other people’s homes. It took me just a week to get the hell out. As the only woman in the team, I was ordered to carry the heaviest pans of boiling-hot stock while being constantly shouted at, ribbed and humiliated by hyped-up colleagues for my feminine weakness.

If only there had been more chefs like Shewry about then. The part of his story that gripped me most was about what he calls ‘the Book’. This is Anthony Bourdain’s much admired memoir Kitchen Confidential. How we loved the late New York chef’s tales of macho kitchen culture. To find anything wrong with the Book is considered sacrilege in the temple of chefdom. But Shewry bravely says that reading about ‘the truth of bro culture, overt sexualisation of women, glamorisation of excessive drinking and drug abuse and general poor behaviour in restaurants’ made him uncomfortable, and that it is time for restaurants and their kitchens to be a safe place for staff. If more restaurants were run by the likes of Shewry, we might get to eat more good food made by women.

I end with another memoir – a second by Stanley Tucci. What I Ate in One Year (Fig Tree, £20) is the perfect present for those who like a bit of a gossipy look into a Hollywood actor’s unusual life, beginning with Tucci’s time filming Robert Harris’s novel Conclave in Rome (with Ralph Fiennes, Isabella Rosselini and John Lithgow). But the fun is being transported into a huge, simmering pot of pasta meals as he guides us round the great restaurants of the city with his family and friends, each plateful sounding more delicious than the last. How does he remain so neatly trim? At least he plays a cardinal, and one can hide a lot under a crimson frock.