It’s all here- recipes from the sublime to the quite frankly ridiculous. Although many of the titles might serve to send even the keenest of cooks straight to the cooking sherry, the methods themselves break the complex dishes down into achievable component parts. Cheffy, sure, but at least not impossibly so. Few guests could fail to be impressed that you’re feeding them Ballotine of rabbit stuffed with Alba truffles and porcini with fontina fondue and canderli- not least by the fact you can say it all in one breath.

With the current trend for quirky cookery books offering an esoteric range of recipes from celebrity chefs, restaurateurs and bloggers, Mary Berry’s Complete Cookbook plays the role of wise mother to their naughty children. It won’t set you up as a here today, gone tomorrow pop-up or supper club host but it will make your repertoire much more varied – and your life a lot easier, as Joanna Biddolph discovered.

Once you get the Chinese bug from this book it’s hard to stop. You’ll find yourself using it every night. It’s not often a cookbook is this good, this simple and this well produced for the money and it knocks many a posher production into a cocked hat. Well done our Ken and well done My Kitchen Table.

Author of 8 books and a long term food writer, stylise and food enthusiast, Joyce’s latest offering Skinny Meals in Heels is the lighter but equally sophisticated younger sister to her original book Meals In Heels.

Forget the scare stories and cuddle up to an oyster or six, it’s one of life’s greatest eating pleasures and an example of how simple can so often be the very best. Lift the lid on a briny bivalve and tip it into your mouth, bite gently to release the flavour and then swallow. No, Stephen Fry did not say that, although he might.

Garrett Oliver has gone where no man has gone before. He has formalised the world’s most informal drink. This is not a coffee table book or a gift idea for Uncle Kevin who loves his lager. This is a serious book about a serious business

Big, bold and British, the new cookbook from the Hawksmoor is a joyous celebration of all that’s good about food.

With 160 recipes gathered into 55 recipe sets, the pages on cooking met all my needs, plenty of variety and plenty of multi-cultural flavours as befits a bird that is globally ubiquitous. Mulligatwany with Onion Flatbread, Crispy Roast Chicken with Watercress Vinaigrette, and Jerk Thighs with Jamaican Peas are just a few that spring from the page.

We often hear that recipe books are dead and that everyone goes online to find recipes now. Well this book is a counter-argument to that, offering you something beyond mere information, but instead a tangible sensory experience too, a feast for the eyes, a tactile treat and something to curl up in a chair with. Just make sure it’s a strong chair.

Ignore the hideous photographs, and self-indulgent waffle, and you might find some recipes you’ll want to cook again and again in this astonishingly big book, suggests Joanna Biddolph.