Make it an applefest this Christmas — the best of the year’s cookbooks

If it were not for a banker with a hangover, we would not have Eggs Benedict. Or so one of the creation stories goes. One morning in 1894 Lemuel Benedict walked in to the Waldorf Hotel, New York, feeling a bit rough. He asked the Maître D’, Oscar Tschirky, for hot buttered toast, bacon, two poached eggs and — crucially — a ‘pitcher’ of hollandaise sauce.

This story is recounted in Signature Dishes that Matter (Phaidon, £35), a chronology of 200 or so inventions, from gelato (ice cream) in 1686 to Claude Bosi’s ‘duck jelly’ in 2017. Put together by seven food critics with global knowledge, this is a truly gorgeous book to own and to give to that friend or relative who dines out like a collector. It is designed to look like a slab of blue marble, and each of the signature dishes inside is illustrated clearly but gently in colour by the artist Adriano Rampazzo and its story told.

Some of the choices are questionable — I will never understand the twisted concepts of some internationally acclaimed chefs who process rather than cook food, using additives that cannot be found in the home kitchen. Fortunately, these are outnumbered in the book by entries rooted in simple, rustic combinations — brilliant ideas that have influenced generations in both home and professional kitchens. Tarte Tatin, Caesar Salad, Peking Duck and Omelette Arnold Bennet are among the obvious history-makers, but recipes from the likes of Fergus Henderson, Nobu Matsuhisa, the River Café and Magnus Nilsson are newly relevant and influential.

Good books about food normally make you hungry, but Dishoom: From Bombay With Love by Shamil Thakrar, Kavi Thakrar and Naved Nasir (Bloomsbury, £26) had the secondary effect of making me want to buy an air ticket.