Delia Smith first published her recipe ‘My Classic Christmas Cake’ 40 years ago. The cake re-appeared in 1990 in Delia Smith’s Christmas, and now pops up again unchanged in Delia’s Happy Christmas (Ebury, £25). Though some of her newer recipes reflect changes that have crept up on us in the past 19 years (year-round salmon and the ubiquitous cupcake), her best Christmas recipes are the recycled ones. Since Delia’s How to Cook (1998), the first book where she dropped the Smith, beautiful photography by the world’s best photographers (Petrina Tinslay in this case) has made up for the lack of personality in her writing. But this is a useful as well as beautiful book, a great Christmas or wedding present, and as we have to tackle eight days of Christmas cooking soon, we may as well buckle down to it ‘with calm control’, as Delia suggests.

Calm control are not the watchwords of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Every Day (Bloomsbury, £25), but there is a vivid sense of lively, muddly family life, with his ten-year-old son knocking up pancakes for breakfast from scratch, simple suppers made mostly from vegetables or cheap cuts of meat, and lunchbox meals conjured up from leftovers — all with an eye to the health of the planet. The photography strikes the only dull note in a useful book, but luckily the bland images are perked up with jolly, childlike graffiti.

The graffiti in Ad Hoc at Home by Thomas Keller (Norton, £40), the Californian chef of the French Laundry in the Napa Valley, who has collected a roomful of best chef and best restaurant awards, illuminate what Keller calls ‘light-bulb moments’: where he passes on techniques that raise the game of a keen home cook. His recipes are for simple soups and stews, roasts and puddings, but he brings them to new heights of flavour and texture not by elaborating them in a cheffy way, but by showing us how to cook them perfectly. His leek bread pudding — crunchy cubes of brioche and leek in a cheese custard — is an example of how he makes simple vegetables sublime.

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