Festive feasts and perfect puddings
Gifts the green-fingered will dig and books that will stir the heart of every cook...CONSTANCE CRAIG SMITH selects the best
OTTOLENGHI SIMPLE by Yotam Ottolenghi (Ebury, €32.99)
THANKS to his restaurants and bestselling cookbooks,
Yotam Ottolenghi has brought colourful, exotically flavoured
Middle Eastern food firmly into the mainstream. Yet even confident home cooks are frequently intimidated by his complex recipes and use of hard- to- find ingredients.
In his seventh book, Simple, he promises to mend his ways, with recipes that are less complicated, but still distinctively Ottolenghi.
Some are quick to make, others can be prepared ahead, while a number contain ten ingredients or fewer (which, by his standards, is a startlingly small number).
There are still some unfamiliar ingredients, but the dishes are fairly straightforward and bursting with all his trademark flavour.
From the spiced ‘shepherd’s pie’ with butterbean crust, to the sweet-and-salty cheesecake with cherries, Simple is crammed with food you can’t wait to eat. PRUE: MY ALL-TIME FAVOURITE RECIPES by Prue Leith (Bluebird, €28)
THIS i s, amazingly, Prue
Leith’s f i rst cookbook in
25 years. It took being a judge on TV’s The Great British
Bake Off to remind her of the thrill of ‘inventing recipes and returning to old favourites’.
She acknowledges that a number of her dishes are ‘inspired’ by fellow chefs and Bake Off contestants, while others hark firmly back to her South African roots.
The colourful recipes are enlivened by chatty anecdotes about memorable meals with her family and friends.
As with Delia Smith, you know Prue’s recipes are guaranteed to work. Her almond, cauliflower and garlic party soup is a creamy triumph and the bobotie — a South African cross between shepherd’s pie and moussaka — is the perfect cold-weather dish.
And, as you would expect, there are great cakes — including a devil’s food cake, which is simply ‘ the best chocolate cake I’ve ever eaten’.
HOW TO EAT: THE PLEASURES AND PRINCIPLES OF GOOD FOOD by Nigella Lawson (Vintage, €28) FIRST published in 1998 and now reissued, this is Nigella’s first and best cookery book, written in just six weeks.
Crammed with lots of useful information — the five pages on achieving perfect pastry are a revelation — it has no illustrations, but contains some of her most famous recipes, including the notorious ham braised in Coca-Cola.
How To Eat is a nostalgic reminder of a less
health- conscious era: Nigella has a weakness for anything sticky or gooey and never stints on cream or butter. Interspersed with the recipes are her musings on life and family and her spot- on observations. Avoid defrosted strawberries, she cautions, as they have the texture of ‘soft, cold slugs’.
This is a book to be read cover to cover, like a novel.
Buy yourself two copies: one for reading and one for use in the kitchen. HONEY & CO: AT HOME — MIDDLE EASTERN RECIPES FROM OUR KITCHEN by Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich (Pavilion, €36.40) TEL AVIV became a hot foodie destination in 2018, making this book by the Israeli owners of London eaterie Honey & Co very much on-trend.
Reproducing many of the restaurant’s best-loved recipes, At Home is divided into sections such as For Friends, For A Crowd and For Us Two.
The recipes are suffused with fennel, saffron, pistachios and sensuous flavours of the Middle East.
There are aubergines and pomegranates aplenty and lashings of tahini — most spectacularly in the sumptuous tahini cake with lemon and white chocolate.
This i s hearty comfort f ood with a sophisticated edge, engagingly presented by a husband-and-wife team who truly relish their food. BAKING THREE INGREDIENT by Sarah Rainey (Michael Joseph, €18.20) WITH so many cookery books requiring a larder full of exotic ingredients, this paperback, with its promise to make baking ‘as un- scary as it gets’, comes as a breath of fresh air.
Thanks to lots of ingenious shortcuts, the recipes really do work.
The crustless spinach quiche is genius, as are the gooey, moreish Nutella brownies.
You can even knock up several types of three-ingredient bread and there are some dishes worthy of a dinner party, such as the sophisticated pain au chocolat pudding and a gluten-free honey cake.
This engagingly written book would make an ideal present for children who love messing around in the kitchen, or anyone who fancies cooking something tasty with minimum fuss. THE GREEN ROASTING TIN: VEGAN AND VEGETARIAN ONE DISH DINNERS by Rukmini Iyer (Square Peg €23.80) WITH a steep rise in the number of vegetarians, vegans and ‘flexitarians’ (occasional meat- eaters), many of us are looking for dishes that are so tasty, you don’t even notice the lack of meat.
Writer and food stylist Rukmini Iyer certainly knows how to make her one-dish recipes look good, but The Green Roasting Tin is much more than prettily arranged vegetables, pulses and herbs.
Divided into vegan or vegetarian recipes, each section is handily labelled Quick (less than 30 minutes in the oven), Medium (up to 45 minutes), or Slow (an hour or longer).There are plenty of punchy flavours here and the beauty of this kind of cooking is that it requires so little preparation. As Rukmini says: ‘Chop, kick back and let the oven do the work.’ THE CURRY GUY EASY by Dan Toombs (Quadrille, €18.19)
WHEN he moved to Britain, American- born
Dan Toombs became so obsessed with Indian food, he persuaded his wife and children to eat nothing but curries for a year.
This follow- up to last year’s bestselling The Curry Guy has 100 recipes billed as ‘fuss-free’. This isn’t necessarily authentic Indian food, he stresses, but what he calls British Indian Restaurant food — the sort we know and love from curry houses and takeaways.
The base curry sauce and four classic curry sauces — tikka masala, korma, jalfrezi and phaal — can all be whipped up in 20 minutes.
Once you’ve mastered these, dishes such as prawn masala curry or lamb keema saag balti take less than half-an-hour to cook.
Accessible and fun, this is a book for those who want to recreate that takeaway taste in their own homes. A TABLE IN VENICE: RECIPES FROM MY HOME by Skye McAlpine (Bloomsbury, €36.40) SKYE McALPINE moved to Venice when she was six and has never really left.
Today, she divides her time between London and the Italian city, where she lives in a pink house overlooking a sleepy canal.
Part cookery book, part travel guide, this stylish offering also features her beautifully atmospheric photographs of Venice.
Starting with a selection of breakfast pastries, she meanders through the Rialto Market for vegetables, pauses for an aperitif known as Lo Spritz, samples the fish and seafood available from the Venetian lagoon and pops into la pasticceria — the pastry shop — for dessert.
Who could fail to be seduced by this leisurely Venetian lifestyle?
Just imagine feasting on lemon risotto, a dish served by the nuns at Skye’s convent school, before finishing off with a chocolate and meringue concoction known as Kisses In A Gondola. HOW TO EAT A PEACH by Diana Henry (Mitchell Beazley, €35) THE prize for the most beautiful cover of the year must surely go to this book. It’s soft, it’s fuzzy, it’s tactile . . . in fact, it feels just like a peach.
Inspired by the notebook of menus that Diana Henry has been keeping since she was 16, it draws on the best of Italian, Spanish, Middle Eastern and British cuisine.
It’s divided into menus for different occasions: when it’s too hot to cook, an elegant summer dinner, a lunch to soothe.
Diana is particularly good at suggesting alternatives to some of the more esoteric ingredients and is also refreshingly honest about the effort i nvolved i n some of the recipes.
‘This isn’t quick or easy,’ she warns of the Seville orange tart, ‘but it’s glorious’.
The recipes are superb but, above all, Diana writes like a dream. JAMIE COOKS ITALY by Jamie Oliver (Michael Joseph, €20.29) HOW does Jamie Oliver do it? Cookery books (more than 20), restaurants, TV s hows, healthy- eating campaigns, five children . . . and he’s still only 43.
Jamie Cooks Italy is his second book about Italian cuisine, but then, he is totally besotted with the country and obviously had lots of fun whizzing around talking to cheery nonne (grannies) about their culinary secrets.
Food is described in Jamie’s trademark cheeky chappy style — panissa, f or instance, a hearty rice and bean dish from northern Italy, is ‘risotto’s frumpy but very, very tasty cousin’.
In among the whopping 140 recipes, there are a few that sound suspiciously inauthentic, such as baked risotto pie and sweet and sour rabbit, but, from the Tuscan sausage soup to the Amalfi lemon tart, this book is infused with real, in-depth knowledge of Italian food.
Bravo, Jamie.