Jason Goodwin

My mum always felt this was the best cookbook she wrote, the product of years in deepest Dorset baking, bottling, pickling and preserving food.

Perhaps my favourite cookery book ever: discursive, erudite, amusing, delicious - it's a reflection on a near-vanished Mediterranean culture of poverty and community, fast and feast, without once becoming cloying or sentimental. As she follows her stonemason around quarries from Carrara to Naxos, she teaches you more about cuisine than fifty plump illustrated cookbooks together, and connects food to place, perfectly.

As much a culinary history of the Jews as a cookbook, this adds up gradually to a journey through vanished times and the places you dream about. It is thorough and fascinating, like all Roden’s books.

With a slightly furry cover and breezy, ballsy intros, this is a recipe book that will make you smile, crammed with amazing ideas picked up by Sally Butcher across the counter of her south London deli.

No subtitle: who needs a subtitle when Sophia Loren, the Neapolitan film star, offers to take you through her favourite recipes from Italy, and throws in her kitchen snaps to go with them?

On the title page, this quote: ‘Your English housewife must be of chaste thought, stout courage, patient, untyred, watchful, diligent, witty and pleasant...’ It is the Bible of English cookery, regional and historical.

The go-to book for clear and comprehensive Turkish recipes.

An adventure as much as a cookbook, this details Yasmin’s exploratory trips through Iran and the harvest of recipes she brings home. Persian love cake, anyone?

Nobody needs reminding that this book is a classic – they just need reminding to read it, again, now, for the economy of David’s prose and the crispness of her judgements.

The title says it all: the world’s favourite food, logically and even lyrically explained.