The Recipe Books That Have Been Off My Shelf Most This Year

And no, I won't be rainbow-organising them...

I read this Substack post in the week.

The Cookbooks That Made It Off the Shelf This Year

Yotam Ottolenghi was discussing the books he’s been using most in his test kitchen this year. It was a readable and useful piece, but what got me was that he said his shelves were organised by colour, “which makes things easy”.

(This is not Ottolenghi’s bookshelf by the way - you can see that in the link above).

The trend for organising shelves like a rainbow remains immensely Gram-able, but making things easy? Surely the opposite is true? If I organised my shelves by colour (see pic at the top for about a third of my collection), my beloved Sabrina Ghayour books would be all over the place, rather than in sensible and gratifying publication date order as they are now. I cannot see the point of rainbow ordering other than making an aesthetically pleasing photograph - unless you have an eidetic memory for book spines.

Many of my friends have stopped buying or have culled their recipe books over the last few years - why have them taking up valuable wall space when almost everything is available online? But, in my semi-Luddite fashion, I love the feel and heft of an actual book in my hands and on my cookery book stand. I take cookery books to read in bed. I subscribe to an actual magazine (Delicious - and I have kept issues dating back to 2003 when it first started). I have written before about the brilliant website subscription Eat Your Books, methodically and brilliantly run by two women and a small team of volunteers, where you sign up, spend some time listing all the cookbooks and magazines you own, and it creates your own personal database where you can search by recipe, author or ingredient to find what you need - it only gives you the page number and the ingredients though, not amounts or method, so it sends you back to the real book. I love cooking from real books, and hate cooking from my phone. There's nothing worse than frantically and ineffectually dabbing at a screen with greasy or floury hands because it's gone black while you actually did some cooking prep, or scrolling through pages of adverts and bumph to find the actual method on a blog.

So, in the spirit of Ottolenghi, in honour of International Women’s Day, and in unrepentently un-rainbow-ordered fashion, I’m going to share with you five newish books, by women, which have not seen much shelf action over the past year, as they’ve been on constant rotation in my kitchen.

1. Greekish by Georgina Hayden

I love everything Georgina Hayden writes, from her first book, Stirring Slowly, which was written as a therapeutic process after the stillbirth of her first child, to the seasonal fruit and veg recipe series she used to do for Waitrose magazine. This book won the delicious magazine Book of the Year 2025. It’s an immensely accessible collection of recipes inspired by her Greek Cypriot family, but with a Brit twist. I particularly like her use of halloumi in everything, both savoury and sweet, and the different marinade recipes for kebabs, but you could cook any dish from this book and people would love you (ditto Stirring Slowly, for that matter). Great for family meals and weekday suppers.

2. Everyday Pressure Cooking by Catherine Phipps

I bought this when I accidentally bought a pressure cooker. Or perhaps I should say, incidentally bought one. My husband and I had been looking into getting an air fryer for some time, and I ended up going for an Instant Pot Duo Crisp in the Black Friday sale. It’s basically a pressure cooker that comes with an air fryer lid. My husband loves the air fryer and uses it every week. But since buying Catherine's book, I’ve used the pressure cooker function more than any other. I can remember my mother's stove top pressure cooker from my childhood and how scary it was with all its rattling and hissing. But the Instant Pot is almost silent, very easy to programme, and you can literally walk away from it and let it do its thing. Catherine writes in a friendly, authoritative and comforting way which makes the whole process simpler still. I have made some beautiful curries, a lamb and chickpea stew redolent with spices, a “risottoified” Persian soup, and, most recently, Korean inspired vegetables and black beans which cooked in 2 minutes but tasted like they’d been gently braised for an hour. If you have a pressure cooker or are thinking of getting one, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. (She also has a brilliant Substack called, naturally, Catherine Is Under Pressure).

3. The Secret of Cooking by Bee Wilson

Another brilliant recipe-book-as-therapy that is greater than the sum of its parts. Written when Bee went through an unexpected and painful divorce, and was cooking just for herself for the first time in years, it is a treasure trove of techniques and tips to make life easier and less stressful in the kitchen, without cutting corners or resorting to convenience food. I have made her orange and cardamom shortbread squares more times than I can count since I bought this book, and her Ten Minute Cashew Noodle Salad with its joyous, zingy peanut and ginger dressing is an absolute life saver to the time-poor. If there's someone in your life who would love to be able to cook more meals from scratch but lacks confidence, or if you just want to get better at cooking yourself, this is the book for you.

4. A Table Full of Love by Skye McAlpine

Another writer with a Substack presence, although notably more glam and curated than mine or Catherine's. You can see from my photo how loved this book has been since I was given it at a delicious magazine reader panel day at the magazine’s headquarters in London. I carried it and an extremely heavy Nordic bakeware strawberry tin home with me on the train back to Sussex. I am sad to say that the bakeware has never been out of the cupboard (I think I need to buy the non-stick release spray first before I get my courage up to try) but I have never for a second regretted touting this book home. Its sub-heading is “Recipes to Comfort, Seduce, Celebrate (and Everything Else in Between)” which sums it up perfectly. This evening I am making her recipe for Soul-Soothing Roast Chicken, and in flicking through the pages I have been drawn, yet again, to her Decadently Dark No Churn Chocolate Ice-cream, which contains a secret ingredient no-one tasting it would be able to guess - it's Bovril! Her recipe for Effortless Melanzane Parmigiana, where the aubergine is oven baked in long strips rather than fried, is another favourite on repeat. Reading the book is like being with an excitable, glamorous friend who always knows the right thing to wear and the right thing to say, but makes you feel inspired rather than intimidated. One of the loveliest things is that each recipe is prefaced with instructions for how to store and/or present it if you were going to deliver it as a gift for someone else. That's emblematic of the generosity of spirit embodied in this book.

5. Roast Figs Sugar Snow by Diana Henry

This one got a(nother) re-release recently - it was published in 2005, but my copy dates from 2014. I love everything Diana writes about food. My mother used to keep the Stella magazines from the Saturday Telegraph for me purely for her column. She researches deeply but wears that research lightly, and her recipes are always achievable and successful. She has an Instagram presence (although this has been curtailed somewhat by a series of serious illnessness over the post-Covid years) and, whenever I’ve cooked and posted a photo of one of her recipes, has liked and commented on it, which is such a compliment. This book is about food that we like to cook and eat in the winter months, mainly influenced by flavours from Northern climes. I am entranced by her recipe Hot Lightning (hete bliksem) a Dutch combination of potatoes, apples, pears, bacon and butter - my mouth is watering at the mere thought of it. If you wake up thinking about what you're going to cook that day, or plan dinner while you're eating lunch, Diana is the food writer for you. My other favourites of hers are A Bird in the Hand (all chicken dishes), From The Oven To The Table and the sublime book of menus, How To Eat A Peach.

Are you a cookery book collector or have you downsized due to the world being online nowadays? Who are your favourite food writers? Which recipes do you go back to time and time again? Which recipes have inspired you this year? Let me know in the comments. I’m off to roast a chicken - and soothe my soul in the process.