The best cookery books of 2013

Nigel Slater’s books lead the field in cookery book design, but his latest, Eat: The
Little Book of Fast Food
(Fourth Estate, £26, Spectator Bookshop, £20), is the most beautiful yet. The size of a large paperback and twice as thick, the single word Eat is embossed in black on a mustard-yellow cloth cover. The book is very easy to use. In the front is a list of recipes, organised by main ingredient; in the back a good index.

The chapters are grouped by cooking method, and the recipes written in shortened form, with ingredients in bold type in the body of the text. Beside many of the recipes a section entitled ‘A Few Thoughts’ gives alternative ways of cooking, or adding to, the dish in question — which expands the recipes until you can no longer count them. You could cook from this book for years, needing no other, and the dishes are so delicious you might not even want another.

Though Slater rhapsodises about a chunky sandwich of roast vegetables and garlic mayonnaise, eaten in the hand, Eat also contains more sophisticated offerings, suitable for dinner parties (remember them?). Well, they are alive and thriving in north London, where James Ramsden runs his supper club, The Secret Larder, feeding 20 people a week in a small coffee shop. His book Do-Ahead Dinners (Pavilion, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £15.50) is about the sort of practical entertaining which leaves the host or hostess able to talk to their guests instead of being stuck red-faced and panicking in the kitchen.

Ramsden’s menus can be prepared well in advance, with a few last-minute twiddles. He makes it all very simple and includeseverything from cocktails and pre-dinner snacks to sweet things to have after pudding. The photography is beautiful, and though he favours casual meals served on scrubbed planks with the roasting tin on the table, his recipes and meal plans will translate to Spectator readers’ mahogany boards and gleaming silver candelabra.