A choice of this year’s cook books

The revolving doors of the 1990s’ restaurant scene saw a cast of great characters, sadly now on the wane. One of the so-called ‘modern British’ movement’s greatest champions, Terence Conran, has departed; we have lost Alastair Little and Andrew Edmunds, and only last month Joyce Molyneux, of Carved Angel fame. Who? What? If you never ate in Little’s Frith Street restaurant, lapped Simon Hopkinson’s deliciousness at Bibendum or indeed revolved through the doors into Rowley Leigh’s Kensington Place, you will wonder what I am on about.

Call it a movement, a style – it laid down the marker for all that is good about eating in Britain today: the best, freshest, most carefully sourced ingredients, cooked simply. So accustomed are we to finding seasonal food in pubs and high street restaurants, it is easy to forget that at the outset of the 1990s there were only about four decent restaurants in London. Those modern British chefs changed their menus frequently, if not daily, and had produce delivered direct from farmers, fishermen and walled gardens. They nodded to Mediterranean ingredients and read Elizabeth David. They were more relaxed than those pursuing Michelin stars, and often cooked in full view of their customers. And they tended to wear a commis chef’s apron rather than chef’s whites. Among their greatest achievements was to put an end to French sneering (almost).

So it’s possible that Jeremy Lee’s Cooking Simply and Well, for One or Many (Fourth Estate, £30) may be the last truly ‘modern British’ cookbook. Lee is the head chef at Soho’s Quo Vadis, and was previously Conran’s favourite, cooking at the Blueprint Café for 16 years. His smoked eel sandwich is on the Quo Vadis menu every day. It also appears in this beautiful book, one for serious cooks to collect as well as a lovely read, with recipes (mostly simple) that are at home in a home, so to speak. Do not be alarmed by instructions such as using strawberries that have not been rained on the day before. He’s teasing you.

If Lee is a parent of better British food, Angela Hartnett is one of its offspring. True, she has earned many stars, but she has a great home-cooking background, having Italian grandparents. The Weekend Cook: Good Food for Real Life (Bloomsbury, £26) is the very useful book I have longed for her to write. It is as much a love letter to her neighbours, friends and, especially, her husband as it is a terrific collection of recipes for the non-cheffy food they eat together. You can put as much trust in Hartnett’s Scotch egg method as you can in her gnocchi and floating islands.

On the Himalayan Trail by Romy Gill (Hardie Grant, £27) has the essential ‘by gosh!’ factor. We may think we know all there is to know about South Asian cuisine, yet here we discover the cooking of Kashmir and Ladakh in a proper food travelogue that describes the regional cooking of remote places and tells a story passionately and visually. The meat recipes are perfect for now: fried spiced lamb ribs, lamb cooked in milk, meatballs stuffed with apricots, chicken cooked in yoghurt – all comforts for an austere autumn.

As is butter, which is feted by The Spectator’s food writer Olivia Potts in Butter: A Celebration (Headline, £26). This year the price of butter has risen alarmingly, prompting a slew of articles suggesting it is cheaper to make your own. I wrote one such, and it is – although only if you make it with the cheapest cream. In fact it’s a lovely process, easy to do, and Potts gives various homemade butter recipes, including one made with a combination of cream and crème fraîche, which is the best for baking, I find. Her hollandaise recipe is a triumph, as close to fail-safe as is possible for this tricky sauce; and there are other revelries, such as dal makhani and gorgeous monte cristos – fried sandwiches that combine French toast with croque monsieur.

In a year when families are reportedly becoming afraid to use their ovens owing to high energy costs, Catherine Phipps’s Modern Pressure Cooking (Hardie Grant, £26) could not be better timed. My stepmother had a pressure cooker, and we were terrified of its noisy jiggering, and equally horrified by the grey cabbage lingering inside it. But when you realise you can shave three-fifths off the cooking time of a beef ragu, for example, the pressure cooker is once again relevant. Phipps’s advice on how to use an electric one properly is gratifyingly authoritative – the skill is in cooking fast without burning. And pressure cooking is not all about oxtail stew. Recipes here include pasta and rice dishes, black bean tacos, stuffed peppers and roast aubergines with miso and honey. This is new generation cooking, truly worthwhile.

‘Nistisima’ means ‘lenten’, referring to fasting food in the Greek Orthodox Church. But in Georgina Hayden’s Nistisima: The Secret to Delicious Vegan Cooking from the Mediterranean and Beyond (Bloomsbury, £26) it turns out to be ‘accidental’ vegan cuisine, ideal for plant-only eaters and a rescue remedy for those who would like to feed vegan friends meals they’d be happy to eat themselves. That is, no meat mimickry; just nice food that happens to be made from plants. Hayden – who has Greek heritage, claims to adhere to fast days and recalls her family using almond milk before it was trendy – has dug up a wealth of delicious sounding Mediterranean plant-based recipes.

Dishes we’ve long taken for granted are explored in A Brief History of Pasta: Italian Food that Shaped the World by the food historian Luca Cesari (Profile Books, £16.99). The journey towards our concept of spaghetti Bolognese or lasagna, for instance, is told as a slowly evolving chronicle, backed up by documents and great research. Many pasta recipes which have become legendary are not actually eaten widely in Italy, but are the constructs of nostalgic migrants – particularly American classics such as fettuccine Alfredo, with its creamy, cheesy sauce, originally invented in a Roman restaurant populated by celebrities. And of course the pre-modern British thought spaghetti Bolognese an authentic Italian dish. It isn’t: spaghetti is a southern-made pasta, while meat sauces tend to come from the north. But we are now so knowledgeable about food culture that to see the words ‘Spaghetti Bolognese’ on a menu today has become almost offensive.