Chris J L Young

Quite literally a life-changing book for me, this. In late 2008, I went on a course at Schumacher College run by this book’s author. By the end of the week, I was saying: “I didn’t know that they were doing that to my loaf!” I took my signed tome home and became a convert. As a result, when the charity Sustain advertised for a volunteer to run its Real Bread Campaign, co-founded with Whitley and launched just days after the course, I went along one lunch break, had a chat, went back to my office and quit my job. I’ve been there ever since. Oh, and as this is about cookbooks – yes, it has some killer recipes in it.

A masterclass in how to turn a recipe book into entertaining bedtime reading. “Poulet Roti: That's roast chicken, numbnuts! And if you can't properly roast a damn chicken then you are one helpless, hopeless, sorry-ass bivalve in an apron. Take that apron off, wrap it around your neck, and hang yourself. You do not deserve to wear the proud garment of generations of hardworking, dedicated cooks. Turn in those clogs, too.”

I’m not sure if there’s anything more a home cook really needs to know about meat.

Not only is this a mine of variations on classic English bread recipes, it is also a fascinating historical guide. Though it took far too long for the nation to listen, Elizabeth David was perhaps the most prominent champions for Real Bread during the depths of the ‘white sliced years’.

Picked up on one of a handful of trips I have made to Kerala, this is a very user-friendly introductory guide to the state’s food. It was brilliant to be able to come home and bash out something approximating the delicious egg roast and porotta I’d enjoyed more or less every breakfast, and the thorans that had accompanied almost every other meal on a banana leaf there. Vijayan Kannampilly’s The Essential Kerala Cookbook is a great companion to it.

Not counting the likes of The Best Way, an Edwardian thing I’d picked up for pence at a jumble sale, this was the first cookery book I bought. Though I’d been doing something like cooking since I was about 14, and fed myself well through university, this was the book that started taking me beyond a small set of stock dishes and random experimentation.

This is just such a comprehensive guide, led by someone who clearly has a broad, deep knowledge, understanding and passion for the food of his adopted home.

Since the late 1950s, Elizabeth David had been mainly championing the widescreen flavours of recipes from the continent over the limited palette of heavily-processed supermarket products. Then along came Jane Grigson to point out that, though since the Industrial Revolution we had forgotten more and more of it, England has its own brilliant national and regional cuisine.

Dare I say this is a challenger to Larousse? It certainly has more than enough to keep a keen amateur cook like me going. Also, unlike that French bible, it acknowledges there are many brilliant dishes offered by other cuisines…

Granted, he was bluff old cove, whose writing is smattered with now politically incorrect sentiments that betray his Edwardian upbringing. At the same time, he was advocating free-range chicken over half a century ago and tells a damn good yarn whilst teaching you to catch, prep and cook fish, game, meat and more.