Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra

The big bold flavours and intriguing spice blends paired with often very ordinary vegetables made me sit up and take notice.

Sri's recipes always work - and they taste delicious! In this book she has collected dishes from all over her native Indonesia and brought them to life with her appealing narrative.

Well-researched, well-written and beautifully photographed, this book is the best introduction to Filipino food.

I own many books on Indian food and cooking, but this is the one that most inspires me to reach for my spices and get out my pots.

Subtle but sumptuous food with fascinating cultural perspective. Lovingly written and published at a time when few people knew much about Persian food.

Even superlatives fall short when describing Claudia Roden's work. This is simply a wonderful book that demands to be read and cooked from in equal measures.

Nevin's recipes are easy to follow and her calm prose provides intriguing snippets of historical and cultural information.

What Shirley Corriher doesn't know about baking is simply not worth knowing. She explains about chemical processes and reactions in such a chatty and easy way that you hardly realise how much information you have actually absorbed. Then she provides recipes to illustrate her points.

This is the book that showed me that there was more to baking than just producing a bread, cake or biscuit. And it made me want to tell stories about these things too, to bring baked goods to life for people.

It may not be the trendiest of foods at present, but when it reaches that stage, you'll be happy to have read this gem of a book, which is well-written, clearly laid out and illustrated with the author's own line drawings.