In-depth cookery book reviews.
Vanessa Bolosier’s Sunshine Kitchen: Delicious Creole recipes from the heart of the Caribbean is a cookbook whose photos lift your soul every time you open it. Sea turquoises, sky blues and sunshine yellows predominate, punctuated with scotch bonnet reds and vivid jewel greens. Just flip through the book and you feel Vitamin D3-ed. Never has ... Read more »
Vietnamese: Simple Vietnamese Food to Cook at Home is the second book from food writer Uyen Luu, following on from her debut book, My Vietnamese Kitchen. In that first book Uyen related her personal story – including memories of younger years in Vietnam before her family moved to London, introduced readers to the culture and ... Read more »
Are you one of those people who skips straight to the last page of a whodunnit? Do you read a cookbook review in frustration and haste, skimming the background blurb to find out whether the book was any good or not? Did I love it, did I kinda like it, is it already in the ... Read more »
It’s interesting how one book can expose a huge gap in my food knowledge that I didn’t know I had. Amber & Rye is subtitled “A Baltic Food Journey – Estonia · Latvia · Lithuania”, and to my chagrin, I opened it with no idea at all what to expect. Zuza Zak helpfully prefaces the ... Read more »
Herb: A Cook’s Companion by Mark Diacono is not a standard cookbook. Best described as a marvellous marriage of two genres – gardening advice and how to enjoy herbs in your cooking – Herb is divided between salient advice on growing your own herbs (and handling store bought), and a selection of recipes that show ... Read more »
Alan Rosenthal is a chef, food writer and cookery teacher who has been cooking stews and one-pot meals at farmers’ markets across London since 2008. Foolproof One-Pot is Rosenthal’s third book following the success of “Stewed!” and “Ultimate One-Pot Dishes”. The book contains ‘60 simple and satisfying recipes’ that can all be cooked in a ... Read more »
The Levant is a region long known for the largesse of its hospitality. In The Lebanese Cookbook, Ghillie Başan explores the foods and traditions of a swathe of the Fertile Crescent that takes in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine. Başan spent many years living and working in the Middle East (as well as Europe, North ... Read more »
We’re brought up in the Western world with very definitive views on what comprises “comfort” and “easy” in food terms. A slice of bread slathered in butter, a biscuit with a cuppa, a slice of cake, a takeaway pizza loaded with anchovies and pineapple (yeah, sorry not sorry), a hot, crisp sugared doughnut from the ... Read more »
“With this book, I hope to build a bridge between Syrian culture and the rest of the world with food as common denominator. But even more, I hope that Sumac will present a positive image of my country, in spite of all of the unfortunate events now taking place in Syria.” So says author Anas ... Read more »
I have long had an interest in Sri Lankan cuisine. As a child, some family friends who had emigrated to the UK from Ceylon (as it was then) cooked Sri Lankan food for us when we visited them, as my mum cooked the food of her region of North India, when friends visited us. I’ve ... Read more »
The Place of Onions, in old Lille. After last night’s rainstorm the intense sticky heat has broken and today is cool, breezy, fresh… I love it! A drop of… [more]
We went to Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire at The Void this morning, an amazing VR experience where we got to be Rebel Alliance members going undercover as… [more]