Jay Rayner shares his favourite books

The writer and broadcaster chooses his top five food books. His first cookbook, "Nights Out At Home" – with recipes for favourite dishes collected over his 25 years as a restaurant critic – is out this week.

Roast Chicken and Other Stories

Simon Hopkinson with Lindsey Bareham, 1994

As I discovered when I came to write my own, good cookbooks aren’t just about great recipes. They are about tone, about the sense of a trustworthy, non-judgemental hand on your shoulder. Hopkinson’s book, arranged by ingredient, and beautifully illustrated rather than full of shiny photography, gets that just right.

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The Food of Sichuan

Fuchsia Dunlop, 2019

Dunlop has done more than almost anyone to widen our understanding of the breadth of Chinese food. This book, first published in 2001 and now reissued and updated, demystifies everything. With Dunlop as your guide, an eye-widening and delicious world of chillies, Sichuan peppercorns and fermented bean pastes opens up before you.

Motherland: A Jamaican Cookbook

Melissa Thompson, 2022

Caribbean food has, for too long, been either ignored or characterised as monolithic and merely about a couple of familiar dishes such as jerk or rice and peas. Both are in this magnificent volume, which focuses on Jamaica – but there is so much more. Plus, there’s a deft narrative which moves it into the anthropology column.

Heartburn

Nora Ephron, 1983

Simply the funniest, smartest food-based novel ever written, by the co-writer of "When Harry Met Sally". It’s a true classic. Treat yourself. You’ll never look at a key lime pie in the same way again.

Do Yourself a Flavour

Fliss Freeborn, 2023

If you’re waving off a new student this year, this is the cookbook to give them. Too many student cookbooks are written by people for whom university life is a distant memory. Freeborn is not long graduated. More importantly, she is a brilliant writer full of wit, vigour and insight.