Allan Jenkins

A declaration of interest: I have edited Nigel Slater's work in the Observer for 16 years, the first to see the weekly column that has made him the country's best loved cookery writer. But before that I collected his recipes, tore them out, and still have many stuck between other book's pages. This though is my favourite. The purest pleasure to read. Open it on any page. Effortless. The most gifted writer of his brilliant generation.

For me the best food writer alive, the last of the peerless three, with Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. This is everything a cookbook should be, a conjuring of a culture through its history and cooking. Immaculately researched, wonderfully written, vigorously tested, a book to be read in bed but kept in the kitchen.

Finest of the third wave of food writers, Dunlop shares her knowledge and travelling lightly. Simply told and shared, this is Chinese cooking as it should be, everyday food as eaten at home by the people and places she introduces. An immensely useful, evocative book. Also a pleasure to read.

The oldest most stained, most used book I have, its cover and spine long gone. A book to trust from the days when I didn't know how or why to poach a fish, boil a crab or roast a goose for Christmas. It has never let me down (though one small caveat: I prefer the recipes and look of older editions with illustrations than the new photo-led pages that try too hard to keep up). One to buy from Abe. Look from around 1980.

Twenty-five years old now, the book that launched a thousand careers and inspired many of the cooks I admire to want to be chefs, if only at first to look and cook like him, have a shot at a supermodel girlfriend. To be treasured less for the recipes than the attitude and images but still an important book.

It might seem strange not to nominate Roast Chicken and Other Stories, if only for the pork belly and the rice pudding, but the cookbook perhaps dearest to my heart is Simon Hopkinson's Week In, Week Out, the collection of his columns for the Independent. I was his editor when most were written but it is not sentiment that drives my choice. These are bold, brilliant, confident recipes written by a gifted cook at the height of his powers for people who maybe had none of these same qualities in the kitchen. Often overlooked, perhaps his finest work.

I have an embarrassing amount of copies of this book in its many editions, though the best loved is the earliest of the Penguin paperbacks. This was the book that changed me, made me (and millions of others) want to know and to cook more. Hers are the only recipes I still won't change and adapt to the Observer Style Guide. She is Elizabeth David, for god's sake. Never been bettered.

This was the most difficult to choose. There had to be a Grigson. But which? English food? Fish Cookery. The fruit or vegetable Books? In the end, I chose the one that gives me the most joy (and maybe her): Good Things. Even the title make me relax, breathe easy. I am in good hands. A book to treasure until it falls apart. Which reminds me ­ I need a new old one.

I am in a bit of a panic, I can't find my copy. I have lent it to someone and I don't remember who and it seems they have forgotten. All Olney's books are brilliant. I chaired a panel that declared his French Menu Cookbook the best of all time. But for my own taste, this edges the others. As much about good eating as cooking (obviously), now where the hell is mine?

Maybe my most useful cookbook, acquired 30 years ago, almost by accident. Kept in the kitchen of a wooden beach house on the Danish coast, there as much to inspire as to slavishly follow recipes when I have cycled back from the harbour, or my fishing-crazy neighbour drops off something from his nets. Amazon tells me used copies are available from £0.01p. Go on, splash out, spoil yourself.