Books of the Year

The Best Of 2025

Here are some of the books that we’ve loved reading in 2025.

The Irish Kitchen Andrew Montgomery, Cherie Denham, Kitty Corrigan (Montgomery Press)

Handsome photography and recipe books about Irish food and the Irish landscape have a distinguished publishing pedigree.

Mike Bunn’s 1991 book, Ireland, The Taste and The Country, was a ground-breaking beginning from the great photographer, whilst Christopher Hirsheimer’s photography in Colman Andrews’ The Country Cooking of Ireland was a sumptuous visual bouquet, and a book of commendable authority.

Trish Deseine’s Home, Recipes from Ireland, was 2015’s glorious blockbuster, with rapturous photography by Deirdre Rooney, and then in 2023 another Northern Irish writer, Cherie Denham, collaborated with the photographer Andrew Montgomery, together producing The Irish Bakery and enjoying enormous success with a book that managed to be both ancient and modern.

Denham and Montgomery are back, in 2025, with The Irish Kitchen and whilst the format stays the same – exuberant, traditional recipes by Cherie; essays on food characters by Kitty Corrigan; Andrew behind the lens – the book takes a major leap forward in its aesthetic and tactility.

Andrew Montgomery’s work here is simply outstanding, the granularity of the photography often breathtaking in its ability to capture the moment, with the ingredients leaping off the page. There is a photograph of Murphy’s of Dingle ice cream on page 310 that would almost make you lose your mind, whilst the crackling crust on the traditional batch loaves photographed on page 99 would make you get up in the middle of the night just to have a slice of it.

In his preface, Montgomery explains that it all began in 1991, when he spent a week cycling around the Dingle Peninsula. “That week, my life changed” he writes, and the rapture experienced by the 21-year-old Montgomery is everywhere evident thirty years later in the glorious images that make The Irish Kitchen a benchmark work.

The Japanese Pantry Emiko Davies (Smith Street Books)

Emiko Davies has caught the wave as the cook who can make Japanese food seem simple both to understand and to execute. Her book Gohan walked us through Japanese home cooking. Her new book, The Japanese Pantry, walks us through the pantry of key Japanese ingredients and shows exactly how to make the most of them. She picks seven key ingredients, but her focus is in particular on just three: soy sauce; miso; and sake. The three are all fermented foods that derive from the mould known as koji, so they are not just foods, but also superfoods that make us feel wonderful. Ms Davies’ background – brought up in Australia and China by a Japanese mother, college in America, then moved to Florence where she has lived for the last 20 years running a cookery school and natural wine bar whilst writing books – means she can cover all the bases. Her style is assured, wise and confident, and her dishes will surprise people who expect austerity from Japanese cooking: these dishes are lip smackin’ creations.

Mexican Table Thomasina Miers (Quadrille)

Tommi Miers is a phenom.

She runs a chain of London restaurants – Wahaca – prized for their excellent Mexican food and their defining sustainability ethos. She writes regularly for The Guardian, helped set up Chefs in Schools back in 2017, campaigns on behalf of environmental issues, has a gaggle of kids, and every few years she finds the time to write a new cookbook, when she isn’t too busy collecting gongs and honours.

Her latest book is a smasher. Tommi brought her family back to live in Mexico for a full six months, and the result is Mexican Table, a paean to the country and the cuisine she loves. But, as you might expect, she has the chops to bring her own riffs to Mexican themes, so the knockout dish on page 189 of smoky ancho chicken with sticky onions, whipped tahini and pomegranate seems all wrong – tahini? pomegranate molasses? – and yet by the time the dish is finished this portmanteau of flavours have wedded with each other in sheer bliss.

She divides the book into sections according to the dominant player – citrus; eggs; beans; chocolate; cinnamon – and daringly leaves out corn and avocado. No matter: you could cook from Mexican Table for a lifetime and never exhaust these thrilling riffs and extemporisations on one of the world’s greatest cuisines. Sheer brilliance.

Abundance Mark Diacono (Quadrille)

Mark Diacono works hard – actually, he works very hard – so when he wants to cook something, he doesn’t want to faff about and waste time. He wants a result.

So, when we had ripe quinces in the garden, we fell upon his recipe in Abundance for Japanese quince jelly with star anise and white pepper, not least because it starts like this: “Chop the quince into quarters; and in half again for larger fruit. Place in a large pan, just cover with water and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 40 minutes or so until soft.”

This is radical stuff, because the world is full of recipes for quince that insist you must peel and core the fruit before proceeding. Mark Diacono doesn’t have time for that malarkey and, so, we did as we were told. The result was a jelly for The Gods.

Result.

Abundance is subtitled: Eating and Living with the Seasons. It spans January 1st to December 30th. At every point of each day and each recipe, Diacono is looking to make connections, and to make us laugh.

Writing about gorse flower pina colada, and thereby writing about the Rupert Holmes song Escape, known popularly as “The Pina Colada Song” – one of the most monstrous insults ever visited on innocent music – Diacono describes the song as “a piece of cheese larger than anything you will find in Wallace’s fridge.”

Pina Colada. Rupert Holmes. Wallace and Gromit. Gorse flowers.

That’s some weird free association going on there, and Mark lets it rip with his customary brilliance on every single page. Let’s call it culinary synaesthesia, and Abundance is full of this magical stuff. You can expect to read it all in one sitting, then to occupy the kitchen for a month cooking Mark’s wicked stuff.

Around the Table Diana Henry (Mitchell Beazley)

If you come from Northern Ireland and someone describes your writing as “Heaneyesque” you might reckon that they are taking the piss.

There is, after all, only one Seamus Heaney, and anyone who wants to write like Seamus is always going to be a wannabee and nothing more.

And, yet, there is a Heaneyesque edge to the way Diana Henry writes, and Diana Henry is from Northern Ireland.

It’s a working out of language, seeing how words fall on the page, then fall together. It’s a way of granting the right word its proper place, and never settling for standard grammar.

To be honest, it’s a way of being bolshie with the King’s English, of being respectfully confident that you can do your own thing, thanks very much. You could call it Ulster-Scots-English. It’s a canny wee mongrel style of writing.

Diana Henry could do this right from the start of her food writing career. Her debut, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons is not just one of the best recipe books, it is one of the best written books about food, eating, and hunger, the hunger for life, for experience, for adventure.

Right from the get-go, Diana turned it up to 11, and she’s kept it there for almost 3 decades. She worked out the language she needed to tell her story, and let the words fall, and fall together. Round the Table, her new collection of 52 short essays culled from her books, is a darling thing. If she had written about anything other than food, she would own every literary award under the sun.

Messy Aoife McElwain (Blasta Books)

People who love to cook don’t understand people who don’t love to cook, and people who don’t love to cook often don’t understand why they don’t love to cook.

Aoife McElwain’s debut cookbook, Messy, explains to both parties, the cooks and the don’t-cooks, why this is so, and what can be done about it. Those who love to cook need to get their head around the fact that many people find the act of cooking beyond difficult. If you struggle to follow precise instructions and are prone to distraction, then cooking is next-to-impossible. It demands hellish levels of concentration, and lots of folk get sidelined long before they can ever get dinner on the table.

Ms McElwain walks us through the maze of complications, our very own Oliver Burkeman with the counselling and the apron and a spatula in hand.

Some people won’t cook because they are terrified of failure. Some are perfectionists who dread the idea that something will turn out wrong. Others have ADHD and find sustained concentration impossible. Some cook to please other people, and in so doing cannot please themselves, self-critical to a fault.

Messy prises apart these messy symptoms, and comes out with the best piece of advice any cookery book will ever give you: “Your best is good enough, even when it’s not great.”

Bravo! In an age of perfectionist tv cooking shows and Michelin-starred culinary authoritarianism, that sentence droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.

If you can’t understand people who don’t like to cook, Messy will open your eyes. If you don’t like to cook, Messy will take your hand and put a spatula in it and switch on the stove. Either way, something delicious this way comes.

Ferment Kenji Morimoto (One Boat)

“As a child, I was in charge of making pickles” writes Kenji Morimoto in his fun, approachable guide to getting the real goodness out of the stuff we eat everyday. A Japanese-American dude from Chicago who lived in Mumbai, New York, Hong Kong and now lives in London, Kenji has eaten ferments everywhere, and shows us how to progress from the major ferments – kimchi; miso; lactofermentation and so on – right through to creating the ferment and getting it on the plate every day. So, add miso to your hummus, make your trad moussaka into a nasu dengaku moussaka, and real men most certainly will eat bacon, leek and kimchi quiche. Ferment is a real smart book, and it will get the good fermented stuff on to your table and into your gut before you even know it.

Sceal Charlotte Leonard-Kane and Shane Palmer (Quadrille)

Shane and Charlotte’s debut is the baking book for the breadheads, who will fall upon its tranche of secrets and techniques in their quest to emulate the success of County Wicklow’s cult bakery.

The breadheads will not blanche at the many caveats with which Shane prefaces his baking recipes: “I need to emphasise that these cookies take 24 hours to make.”; “We start this chapter with a recipe for making croissants, one of the hardest bakes to master at home.”; “This recipe starts with instructions on how to make a compound butter with fresh elderflower.”

Scéal, then, is the book by purists for purists, and that is where its strength lies. If you have started on your baking pilgrimage, then this will raise you higher and, as such, the book is a major milestone in Irish baking.

Bakery books by Irish cooks and bakers concentrate on the domestic kitchen, with only a few exceptions where professional bakers collect their work. Scéal is the professional Irish bakery at top flight, and the book is as uncompromising as it has to be: if you want that magic, you have to do the work.

But Scéal is also important in showing how Shane and Charlotte have built a network of dedicated Irish suppliers to allow them to find their signature style. The book pays tribute to the millers and growers, and to the farmers who produce the butter and cream, from whose work so many of these brilliant creations flow: if you want to emulate those Kimchi and Coolea Cheese Bear Paws you ate in Greystones, then it is the Willems family’s brilliant West Cork cheese that is absolutely essential to the finished masterpiece.

The book itself is an elegant and restrained production, the photography by Shantanu Starick and styling by Kitty Coles and Cissy Difford. Scéal is the Irish baking, for the 21st century.

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