International Cookbooks

Six of the very best from 2024

Bethlehem by Fadi Kattan

Fadi Kattan wrote Bethlehem and sent it to publishers Hardie Grant in 2023, just before the terrible crimes of October 7th and the subsequent warfare, persecution, deprivation of clean water and starvation carried out against the civilian Palestinian community.

Bethlehem – published this year – now stands as a vital record of a magnificent food culture, made all the more painful as you read about market stalls, artisans and local foods and ways of life that have been devastated, possibly irreversibly.

The book follows a narrative thread, describing the culture of food in the city of Bethlehem, writing from the revered city where Kattan ran a restaurant (now closed). Part of the narrative is about family, and part about the people who create and distribute the beautiful ingredients and traditions of Palestine: the olives, the Dead Sea salt, the spices, the breads, as well as the local customs: breakfast with his father; Christmas with his grandmother; lunches and visits with friends.

The recipes in the book are pure and simple. When he spoke at this year’s Food On The Edge, Fadi kicked back at recipes like beetroot hummus. You won’t find that here, rather there is Hummous Mutabal Bil Tahinia. This is the original, placed alongside recipes for Palestinian bread, breakfasts, soups, kebabs – every one of which you’ll want to cook.

On the morning Fadi spoke in Galway, a vegetable grower, Yousef Abu Rabee, who was instrumental in trying to establish food sovereignty for the Palestinians, was killed by a drone attack. He was twenty-four years old. Fadi’s book, documenting the food culture of this region, could not be more important.

Bethlehem is published by Hardie Grant.

Tucking In by Sophie Wyburd

“Please DO NOT ask to have chicken in your pasta”, says the menu in Bar Italia, Dublin’s longstanding Roman Ristorante, echoing the words of luminary Italian writer Marcella Hazan. Classic Italian cooking doesn’t make that pairing.

We wondered, then, just what Marcella would make of Sophie Wyburd’s (cheesy) polenta with chicken - not just chicken - curried chicken! The answer? Marcella would declare that Sophie’s polenta with curried chicken is The Bomb! Because the dish is sheer killer, no filler. This girl can break the rules any way she wants to.

Sophie Wyburd made her name heading up the food team at Mob, that guerilla food writing adventure that shook up the food establishment with insta-ready food springing from your phone and inviting you to subscribe for the recipe, rather than buy the book.

Sophie is a quintessentially modern cook and writer, and Tucking In is a Manifesto For Moderns. The book explores all the tropes of modern recipe writing, the ingredients are global, the techniques are up-to-the-minute, so burgers are smashed, gnocchi is paired with chipotle, prawns with Manchego, carrots with tamarind, noodles with gochujang. It’s all cooked using modern techniques too - tray baked, layered over yogurt on small plates, grazing plattered.

And it is absolutely great. Her roast chicken employs a sensational technique. Her duck and lentils is a winner. The Sweet Stuff in the final chapter is all clever and decorative. Because of its iconoclasm and rule breaking, Tucking In is something of a contemporary classic.

Tucking In is published by Ebury Press.

Upstairs Delicatessen by Dwight Garner

There is a convention amongst the culture supplements of the weekend newspapers where contributors are invited to imagine who they would invite to their ideal dinner party. Most people resort to famous historical figures, regardless of their appetites, their ability to make conversation, or their table manners. Most of these dinner party guests sound like the guests from hell.

Far better then, when your novel is finally published and you are asked to name your guests, to say that your ideal dinner party guest would be: Dwight Garner.

Mr Garner is still living, earns his bread as lead book reviewer of The New York Times, and is the author of The Upstairs Delicatessen. The book draws together the strings that have held his life and work together: reading, eating, and drinking. He excels at all three occupations.

The Upstairs Delicatessen is a blast. It’s as desirable as a glass of cool premier cru Chablis, as enlivening as a negroni, and as engrossing as a dish of veal sweetbreads.

Garner is a man of many voices, both his own, and the voices of all those he has read and remembered in the course of a long career. Best of all, he is surprising. 

Writing about American diners, for instance, he recalls the words of the Black scholar Henry Louis Gates: “White people couldn’t cook; everybody knew that. Which made it a puzzle why such an important part of the civil rights movement had to do with integrating restaurants and lunch counters.”

Boom! Garner drops jewels like this to describe every aspect of eating and drinking, quotes which are illuminating, pin-point sharp, and funny. And he has read everything, and everyone, whilst living a busy and much-travelled life. 

The result, then, is just like the best dinner party guest: droll; wise; smart; hip; cool. And, of course, he would have brought a very good bottle to the party. The Upstairs Delicatessen is a book for those with a healthy, happy appetite: a book to savour, then to savour again.

The Upstairs Delicatessen is published by Macmillan

More Daily Veg by Joe Woodhouse

“I tend to stick a pack of beans or pulses on to soak before going to bed, then decide in the morning what to turn them into.”

There speaks a real cook, an instinctive cook, and that sort of thinking explains why Joe Woodhouse’s More Daily Veg is such a fine book. The recipes seem simple, but they are deeply thought through: Joe has been thinking about them since the night before, planning, assessing, before heading off into the dreamworld.

More Daily Veg is the successor to Your Daily Veg, and is part of a rich crop of titles which have given vegetables, pulses and grains proper and belated respect in 2024. Joe Woodhouse’s particular gift is his ability to make his food seem abidingly easy, whether he is essaying a mushroom burger or biang biang noodles. He is helped by a near-lifetime of practice, having decided to become a vegetarian at age ten. What is interesting, however, Is the fact that as a professional cook he has had to cook meat, but he simply doesn’t eat it. “I’ve never tasted the traditional Bolognese that I make.” he reveals, by way of introducing a scrummy lentil bolognese, but one senses that he is searching for the umami hit that meat gifts to a dish, but is simply going to find another way of creating it.

And find it he does, through 200 pages of enticing and rewarding dishes. Special mention for the final chapter on Beans, Pulses & Seeds, which shows a progressive way forward for those who wish to reduce meat. “Dried beans and pulses in all their forms are things of wonder.” he writes, and More Daily Veg has a true sense of wonder and appreciation on every page.

More Daily Veg is published by Kyle Books.

Comfort by Yotam Ottolenghi

Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookery books work best when he has a partner – a muse, a foil, a repetiteur – to work with. Whether with Sami Tamimi, Ixta Belfrage, Tara Wigley, Noor Murad or others on the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen team, the boss really thrives with the to and fro of another pair of hands to bring together the magic.

With Comfort, he goes big on the collab, with OTK veterans Tara Wigley, Verena Lochmuller and Helen Goh all supplying ideas by the cartload, and getting proper credit on the title page with their names in bold along with Yotam. The result is, unsurprisingly, one of the best Ottolenghi books, a deep dive into contemporary cooking practices that has thrills on just about every single page. Mushroom and kimchi mapo tofu? Stroganoff meatballs? One-pot chicken with orzo and porcini? Well, yes please to all these, and to all of the fizzy ideas that occupy the 320 pages.

The recipes in Comfort succeed because they are so right on the nose, a smorgasbord of the way we eat today – pancakes; fritters; traybakes; dals; pies; pastry; chocolate mousse with orange caramel. The foods cross borders, then criss-cross those borders, but nothing is ever out of place, nothing is gratuitous, and the seemingly wild eclecticism is always tightly controlled, whilst being pleasingly indulgent: there is half a pack of butter in the roasted miso cabbage, and another half pack in the fine cumin and coriander flatbreads. And actually there is another half pack in the super tomato and aubergine one-pot baked pasta. Butter is having a moment in Comfort!

And there are clever riffs everywhere – charred green beans to enliven the Ligurian classic of pasta, spuds and pesto; za’atar on the roasted spuds; celeriac and cannellini bean mash for fish pie; a smart hummus with chickpeas and fennel. This is lovely grub, comforting whilst also challenging, and very much the way we eat today.

Comfort is published by Ebury Press.

If Max Rocha hadn’t made it into the cooking world, young Max might have followed his dad, John, into the fashion business. Because here is a dude who doesn’t so much cook his dishes as design his dishes.

His food brings to mind the old Coco Chanel truth: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” Max’s dishes in Cafe Cecilia have all they need, and absolutely nothing more. Nothing.

His plates remind you of the design work Johny Ive did for Apple: less is more, and even less is even more. A dish such as Boiled Eggs on Toast with Coolea actually looks less like a dish, and more like a piece of modern art: edgy, slightly ironic, very knowing.

Many food lovers will cook every single dish from the Cafe Cecilia Cook Book, not because the food is simple, but because it is food we like to eat – the very same factor that has made the restaurant such a booked-out success. Max’s cooking puts us in mind of another great cook who was also a most gifted designer: Maura Foley, of Kenmare’s Packies restaurant, in County Kerry. Like Maura, Max can mix simplicity and style, and plate it to look like it has never been cooked before. “Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance,” Coco Chanel also said, and Max Rocha understands that from his head to his toes.

Cafe Cecilia Cookbook is published by Phaidon

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Once upon a time, Delia Smith owned Christmas.

Her BBC specials, her BBC Christmas book, and her magazine articles mandated what you you did for Christmas.

Delia not only told you what to do, she even told you when to do it. In an extraordinary – actually, utterly extraordinary – chapter of the book Delia Smith’s Christmas, entitled The Last 36 Hours, she broke down December 24th and 25th into 15-minute segments, and at each time capsule she told you what you should be doing, with the day itself beginning at 7.45 am

7.45am! WTF!

Don’t forget to par-boil the potatoes at 12.45pm for 10 minutes!

But don’t worry! Because at 1.30pm “you are free for a few minutes to go and have a pre-lunch glass of champagne. You deserve it.”

Gee, thanks Delia.

Delia Smith’s Christmas is pure militarism in action. The book’s blurb said that “Christmas is the time when you most want everything to run smoothly – with Delia Smith’s Christmas at your side you can relax and enjoy it.”

Hahaha.

Abridged version from the Chapter headed The Last 36 Hours.

7.45am Pre-heat oven… Stuff the turkey… Now arrange two large sheets of foil across your roasting tin… season the bird with salt and pepper… place the turkey in preheated oven… make the bread sauce

8.55am Lower the oven temperature… Now take a break! At this point everything should be under control…It’s a good idea to arrange the coffee tray now too…

11.30am If you’re going to serve bacon rolls and/or chipolatas, now is the time…

11.45am Now is the time to finish off the bread sauce…

12 noon Fill a saucepan quite full with boiling water… Christmas pudding…

12.15pm The Rum Sauce, whose time has now come. Make as follows…

12.30pm Increase the oven temperature…

12.45pm After you’ve dealt with the turkey, par boil the potatoes…

1pm Now for the parsnips…

1.15pm Remove the turkey from the oven and increase the temperature… Make the giblet gravy…

1.30pm Turn the chipolatas and bacon rolls over…

1.45pm Pour boiling water over the sprouts…

2pm Lunch is served. Bon appetit!

And here is John Crace's response in The Guardian (from 16 years ago)

27 August: order Norfolk turkey from the internet-thingy

21 December: queue for five hours to collect from sorting office as you were out when Royal Mail tried to deliver

25 December 5.30am: get up to switch on oven while everyone else is still asleep.

7.30am: Put bird in oven while everyone else is still asleep.

10am: Prepare vegetables while everyone else is opening their presents.

12.30pm: Lay table while everyone else gets drunk.

2pm: Serve turkey.

3pm: Do the washing-up while everyone else has a kip. Enjoy!

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