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
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.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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.
-
Political cartoons for October 27Cartoons Monday's political cartoons include improving national monuments, the NBA gambling scandal, and the AI energy vampire
-
Donald Trump’s week in Asia: can he shift power away from China?Today's Big Question US president’s whirlwind week of diplomacy aims to bolster economic ties and de-escalate trade war with China
-
The Icelandic women’s strike 50 years onIn The Spotlight The nation is ‘still no paradise’ for women, say campaigners
-
8 of the best horror comedy films of all timeThe Week Recommends From parodies to ‘requels,’ these movies will make you laugh and scream at the same time
-
Roasted squash and apple soup recipeThe Week Recommends Autumnal soup is full of warming and hearty flavours
-
The 5 best TV shows about the mobThe Week Recommends From the show that launched TV’s golden age to a Batman spin-off, viewers can’t get enough of these magnificent mobsters
-
6 well-crafted log homesFeature Featuring a floor-to-ceiling rock fireplace in Montana and a Tulikivi stove in New York
-
Dry skin, begone! 8 products to keep your skin supple while traveling.The Week Recommends Say goodbye to dry and hello to hydration
-
Film reviews: A House of Dynamite, After the Hunt, and It Was Just an AccidentFeature A nuclear missile bears down on a U.S. city, a sexual misconduct allegation rocks an elite university campus, and a victim of government terror pursues vengeance
-
Book reviews: ‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ and ‘Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It’Feature Gertrude Stein’s untold story and Jane Leavy’s playbook on how to save baseball
-
Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into ArtFeature Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through Dec. 7
