The best books to reignite your love of food and cooking in 2024

Beyond a treatise on all things food, this may well be one of the best-written books about cooking you’ve never heard of. Ostensibly a cookbook for the recipe “lamb for eight persons four times”, (although the back 60 or so pages reveal further recipes) The Supper of the Lamb is more an encyclopaedic and theological text concerning all things that nourish one’s soul: from the delicious to the divine.

Touching on a breadth of topics, from festal and ferial cooking to the magnificent virtues of an onion, Capon’s work is rapturous – no surprise, as the author was also an Episcopalian priest. Expect some tolerable religiosity and to read around two thirds of the book before the flagship recipe is fully unveiled. This is a witty, revealing and self aware text that is sure to go down well with anyone curious about cooking.

When it comes to offering sustenance for the stomach or the soul, MFK Fisher’s work tends to fall into the latter category. It’s rare for an author to have a name so synonymous with exceptional food writing, but such was Fisher’s assured prowess in this domain, there isn’t a text of hers that fails to stir one’s emotions.

Love in a Dish, and other pieces is the ideal jumping off point for anyone seeking enrichment – her collection of culinarily-inclined personal essays include G is for Gluttony and Two Kitchens in Provence as well as a personal favourite: I Was Really Very Hungry. It’s a book so effortlessly digestible, not to mention passionately written, even the most ravenous of readers will find themselves returning to its pages time and again.

Published in 2003, this book is a pure celebration of the simplicity of Italian cooking. The collection of some 250+ recipes speaks to a philosophy of quiet sophistication, unfussy preparation and, importantly, flavour. The idea of an Italian kitchen not having these straightforward recipes in their repertoire seems jarring; the ease and accessibility of the book makes the entire collection essential for anyone looking to get their hand back in the game.

Dishes such as the cotechino lentils; duck with tomatoes; and gnudi bianci will slowly reignite any missing spark from a home kitchen in need of a reset.

This is a title steeped in a certain playfulness. It doesn’t take anything too seriously and that’s exactly what is called for when the home cook or professional eater requires a little lift. Including such irreverent chapters as ‘How to stage a bacchanalian orgy’ and ‘What foods make us fart’, Stefan Gates’s 2006 book is both lighthearted and brilliantly put together, answering the questions about food frankly no one has ever asked before. It’s as essential as it is pointless and the result is something impossible to put down.

Samin Nosrat has distilled the essence of all great cooking – indeed, what makes food great – into four simple and digestible categories: salt, fat, acid, heat. These four categorise all consumable flavour in such a straightforward way, it’ll reignite the waning passions of any home cook.

The first 200 or so pages of Nosrat’s work are theoretical: they cover (in some significant detail) the basis of her approach and how combinations of salt, fat, acid and heat affect food. The following 250 pages offer a plentiful recipe resource that will quite simply make you a better home cook. Take a weekend and savour this one, you’ll not regret it.

Raymond Blanc opened the pioneering two Michelin-starred Le Manoir aux Quat Saisons more than 40 years ago, but this pleasingly usable cookbook focuses not on highfalutin technique or complex fine dining recipes, but instead hearty French country fare that any home cook can (and should) undertake.

Throughout the text, stars denote simplicity and the vast majority of the recipes come listed with a one out of three ranking, confirming the overwhelming usefulness of the cookbook. Dishes such as îles flottantes, comte souffle and navarin of lamb stud the pages of this book like cloves stud an onion stewing in a pot of simmering milk.

If anyone has fallen out of love with food or cooking, Blanc’s unerring passion, combined with the satisfaction of the finished French fare, is a sure-fire remedy.

First published more than 100 years ago, Agnes Jekyll’s fabulous collection of short essays in cookery are at once romantic and practical. There’s a curt functionality to both the prose and the contents within Kitchen Essays. The book transports you headfirst into Jekyll’s world: one whereby only the women of the household – or perhaps the valet de chambre – are the cooks, and you, dear reader, really are expected to know a good deal of French.

Chapters such as ‘Their first dinner party’ and ‘Food for artists and speakers’ provide more robust recipe-led instruction, whilst others such as ‘Of good taste in food’ might be a little less forthcoming on that front. Highly historic, highly witty and highly worthwhile, it’s a collection of joyful narratives.

Aside from the title of this book being a recent food-forward buzz-phrase, its story represents a wider national issue in how Britons consume food. Compared with Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Smoking, the text will encourage the reader to eat in a certain way throughout, while slowly dismantling any preconceived notions around the relationship between food and health (thought sugar was bad? Think again).

An understanding of ultra processed foods will guide readers towards logical, peer-reviewed conclusions on its harms, and the flip side of that coin is a kind of food-led enlightenment on eating and living better. For anyone who cares about eating, it’s an essential, un-put-downable read.

Few cookbooks are as personal as Loyal’s debut. There’s a tension his book deftly handles – one doubtlessly experienced by all those with Indian parentage who are raised in Britain – through the virtues of the recipes contained within it.

It speaks to a duality of citizenry: both Indian and British. Coconut crab crumpets, kasundi keema lasagne rolls, and tikka tempura scampi with lime leaf aioli are among the most pleasing in the book, while the pistachio and sumac madeleines with rose milk jam are a must. They say the reason we always have room for dessert after a meal is that main courses go to one’s stomach, while puddings go to the heart: these madeleines are deliciously, inescapably heart-bound.