Jenny Whitham and Margaret Carter

This was one of the first 'celebrity' cookbooks we owned. It was a little yellow hardback book. Certainly not one of the current standardised sized books that are produced in the 'celebrity cookbook' genre today. We particularly loved his recipe for Chilli con Carne which I think tells you the age of this book, it's a real ’70s Classic.

This book was given to Margaret by her mother when she complained to her mother that in married life she now had to cook. Being brought up in South America and the Bahamas, Margaret's early life did no include the necessity to cook. The kitchen was the domain of the kitchen maids! So this book was sent from Nassau to Margaret in the UK with blessings from her mother saying you will find instructions on how to cook Sunday lunch in here. Still Margaret's most hated meal to cook, she hates the balancing act of presenting so many different components to table at the right temperature.

Affectionately known in this household as The Robert Carrier Cookbook. I'm sure he wrote more but this is the only one we have. Our favourite dish from this book is the moussaka. The copy we have has particularly mucky pages around this recipe. It has been a useful reference book for classic dishes over the years.

This book is not quite so entertaining as her all time classic book of Household Management from which any paragraph can give amusing insight to a day and an age gone by but has been a useful resource for finding classic flavour combinations. Her recipe for Devilled Kidneys was the inspiration behind our Devilled Duck Pâté.

When we saw this book on the shelves at Sainsburys we had to buy it as at the time it's title reflected the products that were made by Patchwork and although the shelves in our kitchen only hold a few cookbooks and therefore we have to have a regular culling of unused books, this one has maintained its position.

This book sits close to our hearts because we bought it on holiday in Thailand. It was the first proper expensive holiday we enjoyed from the profits of running our food business and it was a delight to be faced with the beautiful fresh food that was created for our lunches there everyday. We went to this health resort hoping to find a fresh way of eating and to loose some weight. We succeeded in the former but not the later as there was far too much good yumminess to eat! It was obviously a very trendy place to go at the time as we were there with two celebs, Carol Voderman and Dale Winton, neither of whom we knew of before meeting them there as we are not avid TV watchers. We had been bumping in to them here and there at the resort for days chatting about this and that before, to our surprise, some other guests told us who they were.

This is the first of the many, many, many Jamie Oliver cookbooks from when Jamie truly was a breath of fresh air in his approach to cooking. The rest is history.

There is one dish in this book that stands out for us above all of the others and that is his braised Shin of Beef. It takes an age to prepare and results in a homely meal with an amazing depth of flavour that belies its complexity appearing to be a very simple dish. Again the mucky pages tell the story of often it has been prepared. One of the first times we cooked it was for my daughters 40th birthday when she came home for the weekend with some of her most select friends and colleagues, including her latest business partner, Stephen Fry. As regular diners at the Ivy we felt it was something simple but tasty that would go down a treat and it did.

This book was given to Margaret by her daughter after a conversation with her eyes rolling to the back of her head in despair as we told her about this new chef we were working with, a chap called Otyo-Lenghi. 'OMG' she said 'I love eating at his restaurant and cooking his food' 'Really?' We said, 'is he famous?' If you don't watch TV it takes quite a while for new food trends to reach North Wales which is something that was quite apparent when we first started selling pâté here back in 1982.

This book is a collection of recipes from some of the top hotel and restaurant chefs of the day. That day being the late ’80s early '90s. It's quite interesting to note who is still forefront in our minds and who is not. The names that stick out are Brian Turner, Shaun Hill, Alastair Little and Gary Rhodes. It's probably because, looking at the photographs of these chefs in the book, they had youth on their side as much as talent.