Tamasin Day-Lewis

The first cookery book I ever owned. Irish ingredients and simple, traditional recipes, and I was fascinated by the idea of kidneys cooked inside potatoes.

I taught myself to cook when at Cambridge by working my way through this, along with Jane Grigson's other books and those of Elizabeth David.

Along with Jane Grigson's works, Elizabeth David's were formative during my time at Cambridge.

This was, of its era, the best way of learning to cook food that tasted as good as it did you good when we were all hippies wanting brown flour and rice and on our vegetarian warpaths.

Joyce was one of the inheritors of the great George Perry-Smith who had The Hole in the Wall in Bath and later Riverside, one of the first restaurants with rooms, in Helford in Cornwall. His partner Joyce had the eponymous Carved Angel at Dartmouth. Simon Hopkinson was also under George's culinary wing.

After my first dinner at Tante Claire in Royal Hospital Road I discovered a level of cooking that I hadn't known existed, but with Pierre, it was rooted in the countryside of his childhood, the terroir, the seasons, all the things I believe in.

Wholly unpretentious local recipes, and a life in food/food in life feel.

A great scholar-cook like Jane Grigson and Claudia Roden. It's never just about the recipes.

Despite the fact that I hate cheffy cookbooks and think that chef's food belongs in restaurants, Blanc is a great enabler, technique-wise, and instructs the more advanced cook with precision over the classics and élan.

Like MFK Fisher, Gray is interested in everything that is tangential to food, life, the place of the table in our lives, context, friendships and, most importantly, good prose. I want to read the best writing in a food book or there is simply no point, food-writing is not an ancillary thing.