Cookbooks

As long as we're talking gifts for the kitchen....

A pleasure to read for anyone who enjoys cooking, but an especially good choice for anyone eager but inexperienced, someone needing only a bit of help to just get on with it: Nigel Slater's Appetite. Gets right to the heart of it, encouraging improvisation, constructing simple dishes around a few quality ingredients, and puts to rest the idea of cooking as joyless-following-of-recipes. Nigel's a fantastic writer. Disastrously boring on TV, he should never have been allowed to step away from the keyboard. This is his best work.

For meat-eaters: The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fairly LongName, and Fergus Henderson's much-revered Nose-To-Tail Eating. Hugh's Meat Book is an engrossing read, from the philosophy of meat to the introductions to different animals and cuts to treatments of different cooking methods. I often forget it also includes some recipes, which are superfluous if you've absorbed the, ahem, meat of the book. Fergus's meat book is a much shorter book that is a delight even if you never cook anything from it. Although you should! I had the pleasure of eating at his restaurant in 2002 and the roast bone marrow starter is still an all-time dining highlight for me.

For reference: normally I don't like books of recipes, but The Joy of Cooking should be obligatory, at least in American kitchens. The recent revisions are mostly unfortunate, what with horribly misguided and ill-informed attempts to inject psuedo-healthiness into the enterprise. But no matter, still very handy to have at hand. Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques by, unsurprisingly, Jacques Pepin, is a compiled reissue of two of his earliest books from the 70s, documenting basic methods and techniques. Despite the black & white photos, an excellent reference for anyone who cooks a lot, or wants to.