Dinner: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes
Meera Sodha, Fig Tree
Relief was the first emotion I felt on opening this book. Greed was the second. Dinner – Meera Sodha’s fourth recipe collection – opts out of the stress of hosting, focusing instead on the satisfaction of making one easy but delicious vegan or vegetarian dish for your evening meal. Finding herself in a state of overwhelm, Sodha realised she needed to scale down her idea of what cooking should be. The result is a joyous rundown of mostly one-pot or one-tray dinners, many of them Asian. It would make a great present for everyone from students finding their bearings to busy people wanting to eat more exciting midweek meals. Sodha’s recipes have a rare kind of magic: she somehow manages to conjure deliciousness without resorting to long ingredient lists or fancy techniques. The butter paneer cooked in the oven is already on permanent rotation in my house.
Flavorama: A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor
Arielle Johnson, Harvest
This is not so much a cookbook – although it does contain nearly a hundred recipes – as the book you need to make sense of everything you cook. American flavour scientist Arielle Johnson – who has worked with top chefs, notably René Redzepi of Noma in Copenhagen – has written the definitive primer on the science of taste and smell. If you want to know why a raspberry tastes of raspberry, what chemistry tells us about how to combine spices, or ways to use heat to create flavour, Johnson has all the answers. Her knowledge is prodigious but she wears it lightly and writes with such an infectious curiosity that the information slips down as easily as a glass of her panela-coconut iced coffee. If you loved The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit or On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, this is one for you. Complete with delightful illustrations drawn by the author herself.
Easy Wins: 12 Flavour Hits, 125 Delicious Recipes, 365 Days of Good Eating
Anna Jones, 4th Estate
It will come as no surprise to Anna Jones’s fans that she has produced another collection of stylish but easy vegetarian dishes, accompanied by gorgeous photography. What makes this one different is the way it’s organised around certain pantry and fridge staples, from lemons and garlic to tahini, mustard and capers. As someone who goes through jags of eating certain things, I loved this approach; it feels obsessional, in a good way. In the caper chapter, I felt I was being taken deep into the caper jar, with recipes not just for focaccia and cauliflower caponata cooked in the oven (a total hit for me) and brown butter potatoes with lime tartare sauce, but caper brine martini and even caper and chocolate ice-cream. The lemon chapter was another favourite in my house (a double lemon cake with streusel vanished in no time). As well as recipes, there are more general essays on cooking, such as an invaluable list of suggestions for how to echo the depth of flavour of meat or fish when cooking vegetarian food, for example by adding a touch of Marmite for deep savouriness or crispy capers (yes, them again!) in place of lardons.
Agak Agak: Everyday Recipes from Singapore
Shu Han Lee, Hardie Grant
In Singapore, “agak agak” is a colloquial phrase that loosely means to estimate. It’s what you say when cooking with constant adjustments of eye and intuition rather than exact measures. Shu Han Lee is a Singaporean-British recipe writer who tries to capture on the page how to cook with the senses, as her mother did. Singaporean food has been underrepresented in British cookbooks and it’s a delight to travel with Shu to the hawker stalls of her youth, discovering the Malay chicken soups she ate in primary school or the spicy prawn laksa noodles she used to eat with a friend while doing her maths homework. The recipes are simple yet superb, with brilliant sensory cues and great depth of flavour (try the chicken braised in tamarind). Certain cookbooks can make life feel one notch brighter and this – with its glorious hot pink cover and beautiful design – is one of them.
Make More With Less: Foolproof Recipes to Make Your Food Go Further
Kitty Coles, Hardie Grant
There is no shortage of food writers telling us to make better use of leftovers. This is that rare book that actually shows how to do it while eating deliciously. Coles invites us to develop less wasteful food routines. If you’ve bought a good loaf of bread, she shows you how to extract every morsel of goodness from it. The basic idea is that you make a big batch of something – “beans for the week”, say, or meatballs or crispy breadcrumbs – and then repurpose it for different meals. For example, you might take some of Coles’s vibrantly green herb sauce and stir it through pasta, turn it into a hearty soup or make it into a tart with vegetables. There’s something appealingly old-fashioned about Coles’s approach with its emphasis on the virtues of bechamel and potato cakes. I emerged from two weeks of cooking from it feeling calmer, more on top of the contents of my fridge and extremely well fed.
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