Sarah Beattie

Everyone should have a primer, a basic reference book. Over the years I have used many from Mum's Good Housekeeping Step by Cookery, through The Fanny Farmer Junior Cook Book (!), The Joy of Cooking & a generic Hamlyn book but Leith's is now the one I use to check back on basic ratios in classic recipes

I inherited two cookery books from my father but I 've just realised that I never saw him cook. This little book, beautifully illustrated with quirky (appropriately) Dad-joke drawings, was published in 1955. It claims, "As far as the publishers can ascertain, there is no other book dealing exclusively and fully in this manner with curries". It IS of its time and it does have faults BUT it has a real charm and some very good, straightforward recipes

My father inculcated a love of Indian food in us from an early age. As an 18yr old conscript, towards the end of the war, he'd been sent to India. He'd learnt Urdu and when he took us to the Pakistani restaurant at Expo'67 in Montreal that was the "open sesame" to the kitchens for me. I was not quite 8 years but I vividly remember the magical things I witnessed: plumes of naked flames, sizzling and bubbling, puris that puffed like cumulus clouds, deft folding and flipping of samosas, real silver leaf fluttering onto creamy puddings and the scents of spices and herbs! Heady formative stuff: I needed to teach myself some of this alchemy. After I'd graduated from Harvey Day, I moved on to Jack Santa Maria. I know nothing about its author - unlike Madhur Jaffrey's lovely biographical introductions and asides to her recipes, Santa Maria gives us tales of Sadhus and travellers - he is absent. This is not normally my favourite sort of cookbook but I love the range and diversity so much that I had to track down a second copy of this book when I lost it.

In 1991 when I was talking to a publishing director about my first book, he asked about my favourite cookery books. Without hesitation, I said Food in England. It's the second book I had from my dad and I love it because of its social history, its chronicling of the past. It refutes completely the idea that the British have never been a nation of cooks. I love the detail, the vignettes of lives lived in other ways and the recipes of those lives.

The subtitle for this book is 10000 Years of Food in Britain. It's a brilliant, informative readable sweep of history through the food we ate. There are fascinating recipes - many that I'd never cook but nonetheless am intrigued by and others that merit revival.

When I submitted my first ever synopsis to the rather intimidating doyenne of food editors, Jill Norman, she rejected it and said she thought I'd borrowed a soup recipe from Jane Grigson. I was upset, at that point I'd not read Grigson. What an omission! Now I have and time has passed, I can be flattered that Ms Norman thought my recipe an equal to Grigson's. I finally started on her canon with this book, a compilation from her magazine features. I found it in a secondhand book shop and its direct style and enthusiasm for peoples and places is wonderfully engaging

A classic, a book I return to often. I have a beautiful hardback edition, updated by David in 1987 with fabulous historical illustrations. It doesn't worry me that there are no pictures of the dishes and that the recipes are sometimes, if not incomplete, well, maybe under-explained for the novice cook. It feels like you're trusted to understand. Its compass is remarkable.

Before there was Ottolenghi, there was Claudia Roden and there was Ghillie Basan. I love the clarity of this book, the fabulous photographs by Jonathan Basan, the informative text and recipes, classified and arranged by the main ingredients in the region.

Another married pair, this book also has the sense of place and delight in the otherness of travel with a palpable desire to share their discoveries

For a food writer who has been vegetarian for four decades this year, there aren't many meat-free books on this list. This is the second. First published in 1972, I got my copy in '79. I don't use it any more but it WAS influential. All vegetarian books I'd read up 'til then seemed to divorce meat-free cooking from its roots, feeling a need to reinvent eating. Anna Thomas didn't. Her heritage sang through. I felt a kindred spirit.