Three books from chefs of some favourite cheap London restaurants are all good in their own way: Leon: Ingredients and Recipes by Allegra McEvedy (Conran Octopus, £20) for its salads and gutsy stews, Ottolenghi: The Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi (Ebury, £20) for its spicy flavours and great cakes, as if a Middle Eastern café had joined up with a New York bakery, and Today’s Special by Antony Demetre (Quadrille, £20) for classic French bistro style of cooking.

In The Gastropub Cookbook: A Second Helping (Mitchell Beazley, £20) Diana Henry has obtained recipes from some outstanding young British chefs who have escaped the mad working hours and the even madder head chefs of London hothouse kitchens, bought pubs in the country and are cooking brilliantly with local ingredients. This is a guide to keep in the car as well as a recipe book.

There are no recipes in Entertaining à la Carte by Peyton Skipwith (Mainstone Press, £90) but this beautiful book gives a vivid idea of how we used to eat, charting the 50-year collaboration, starting in 1932, between the artist, Edward Bawden, and Fortnum & Mason. The book reproduces Bawden’s fantastical illustrations for a series of booklets the store sent out to its customers: a calf leaps from its bed after spoonfuls of rich, strong stockbroker jelly, seahorses direct serried ranks of sardines into their tins and doe-eyed maidens float above picnic hampers. One of Fortnum’s specialities was sending tinned food to the outposts of Empire. One of my father’s friends in the colonial service sent for a Fortnum’s tinned stilton to celebrate Christmas in the steamy Gold Coast. After months of waiting, the precious cheese arrived and instructions were given to the houseboy to wrap it in a starched table napkin and present it to the guests at the end of dinner. The moment arrived and the napkin was found to contain a pile of pale, cheesy crumbs. The concerned houseboy explained that when he had opened the tin he found that the cheese had gone bad — half of it was blue. So he had spent his boiling hot free afternoon painstakingly picking out the blue bits and throwing them away. That was saintly.

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