Spring star book
Nandên: Recipes from my Kurdish Kitchen by Pary Baban
Because the Kurdish people are spread across several national boundaries, their food tends to get lumped in with that of the Turkish, Iranian, Syrian and other communities with which they coexist. Indeed, when Pary Baban opened her first London restaurant she was told by a fellow Kurd she was “brave” to advertise it as Kurdish, given how few people would be familiar with the concept. “If I don’t do it,” she recalls saying then, “and you don’t do it, then who will do it, and when will we put our food on the map?” For those who can’t make it to Nandine (which, like Nandên, means kitchen in Kurdish) in Camberwell to learn from her own hands, this book serves as an admirable guide through a world of slow-cooked lamb and vegetable stews, fluffy breads and cooling yoghurt soups, as well as a wealth of stories from her childhood surrounded by the peaks of Iraqi Kurdistan. Driven out by Saddam Hussein’s government in the 1980s, she and her family fled east into the hills, staying with relatives, farmers, shepherds and foragers, in mountain villages – a journey that ignited Baban’s interest in recording her people’s traditions at a time when it seemed they could easily be lost for good. She began scribbling down their recipes in notebooks: and almost 40 years of cooking later, Nandên is the very fine end result.
Nandên by Pary Baban (Ryland, Peters & Small, £25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Beans by Ali Honour
You can’t fail to have noticed that pulses are having a bit of a moment – but if you’re one of the third of British adults whose sole consumption comes in the form of baked beans, then you need this colourful little book in your life. Slim enough to slip in your shopping bag, the collection ranges from classic bean burgers, dips and falafels to the more fancy likes of lentil salads with burrata, and confit butter beans with garlic and herbs. Plus, there’s a frankly startling-sounding black bean baked alaska, which just has to be tried. Pea podka is first on my list, though.
Beans by Ali Honour (Blasta Books, £15). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
The Racine Effect: Classic French Recipes from a Lifetime in the Kitchen by Henry Harris
Simon Hopkinson, who gave Harris his first job in the kitchen, writes in the introduction to his protege’s first book in 20 years that the most important quality in a cook is a “natural greedy interest in food”. Harris, he says, had – and still has – this love “in spades … and, what is more, he can write about it all very well, too”. Having failed more times than I’ve succeeded to get a table at Racine, his glorious hymn to the gutsy bouchons of Lyon, I was delighted to find I can now at least attempt to recreate his sensational celeriac remoulade salad at home. As well as the classics confit duck and creme caramel, andouillettes and strawberries in Beaujolais, Harris has included recipes from his four decades in food, which turn this from a mere restaurant tie-in to a rich culinary memoir. There are the buttered kippers his dad ate every day for a week when he was born, the Thai crab omelettes he fell in love with on his first trip to Bangkok with his wife, a family favourite of chilli chicken wings, and an intriguingly bizarre beer and prune trifle. If you love food as much as Harris, you will love this book – I guarantee.
The Racine Effect: Classic French Recipes from a Lifetime in the Kitchen by Henry Harris (Quadrille, £40). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Weeknight Vegetarian by Joe Woodhouse
Although I’m an omnivore, unlike Joe, his new book reflects exactly how I like to eat at home in the week, when meat is rarely on the menu – in fact, just a few pages in and I went online to order some of the roasted beans he recommends as a garnish for his take on bhel puri. Full of quick, practical but elegant recipes for filling lunchboxes and family tea tables, advice on encouraging nervous eaters, and batch cooking, the flavours are big, bold but not overcomplicated. Charred leeks with broken eggs, capers and dill, and roasted onion soup with olive rosemary croutons reflect his cheffing past in kitchens at the Towpath Cafe and Vanilla Black, while pea-sotto, and crispy noodle omelette feel like the kind of dishes he probably cooks on a Tuesday evening. Not just for vegetarians, in short.
Weeknight Vegetarian by Joe Woodhouse (Kyle Books, £26). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Mexican Soul: A New Style of Cooking by Santiago Lastra
Mexican cuisine is recognised by Unesco as part of the “intangible heritage of humanity” for its complex cultural significance – yet in the UK we still struggle to move past its (admittedly delicious) street food. Santiago Lastra, whose first London restaurant KOL was awarded a Michelin star barely a year after opening, has set out to create a manifesto for what he calls Mexican soul cooking, imbued with the spirit of what that country eats daily (no “genre-defying” bone marrow sourdough tacos here), but using ingredients easily available to a British audience: a granny smith and gooseberry salsa verde, quesadillas using poppadoms rather than corn masa and so on. It’s a genuinely exciting mix of cheffy-looking but accessible dishes such as cured sea bass and rhubarb ceviche or pistachio guacamole, and more homely favourites like molten, spicy choriqueso and tinga pulled chicken stew. Perhaps even more helpful is the introduction covering regional cuisines, popular cooking methods and key flavours, and how these translate abroad. Lastra is a true ambassador for Mexico, and this book is your passport there.
Published by (Quadrille, £30)
The Caribbean Cookbook by Rawlston Williams
The past few years have seen a welcome crop of new guides to the incredibly diverse (and historically underappreciated in the UK) cooking of the Caribbean region. This, by the Saint Vincent-born-and-raised, Brooklyn-based restaurateur is another important contribution; a survey of each country’s cuisine, which also functions to highlight the things they all share, from ingredients like pickles and plantains to a determination by people to create plenty from little. The photography is as vivid and colourful as the recipes – the fiery sòs ti-malice that brightens any Haitian plate, the swimming pool-coloured blue curaçao drizzle that adds a citrus kick to desserts. This is not a book that makes concessions to the British supermarket shopper, though it has plenty of recipes that can be created from one. So if you’re unlikely to find the ingredients you need for a Bahamas conch broth, you’ll certainly find them for the smoked herring (kipper!) version from Martinique on the facing page. Best of all, for me, are the essays on subjects such as the Indian influence on preserving culture, and the role of soups, which make this a bible I know I will return to again and again.
The Caribbean Cookbook by Rawlston Williams (Phaidon, £39.95). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Peckish by Ed Smith
I must admit, as someone who consumes more eggs than chicken, I wasn’t expecting to be excited by yet another book devoted to the UK’s favourite meat – and yet such is the genius of this collection that I will put myself on the record as officially wowed. Of course, there are the usual classics here, an “actually good!” caesar salad and a roast, but also enough genuinely fresh ideas such as garlic butter meatballs with orzo (like mini kievs without the faff), fish sauce caramel wings and chicken liver mapo tofu to have me eating my words all the way to the butcher’s.
Peckish by Ed Smith (Quadrille, £22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Lebanon: A Culinary Celebration by Anissa Helou
Anissa Helou’s first book on the cuisine of her native Lebanon, published more than three decades ago, was a collection of her late mother’s recipes. This follow-up, for which she crisscrossed the tiny country with a photographer friend, celebrates its remarkable culinary diversity. As such, it’s as much of a pleasure to sit down and read as it is to cook from. Go with Helou into one-room bakeries high up in the mountains to watch bread being made, which she says can never be reproduced at home, yet is still fascinating to hear described . We learn that the city of Baalbek is famous for “Imperial Roman architecture at its apogee” as well as its irresistible hand pies. We discover that, although Lebanese salad dressing is traditionally heavy with lemon juice and garlic, she often tones it down when serving wine … Impeccably researched, beautifully written and gorgeously illustrated, this already feels like a classic.
Lebanon: A Culinary Celebration by Anissa Helou (Bloomsbury, £30). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
The Malay Cook: Everyday Malaysian Recipes from Grandma’s Kitchen to Mine by Ranie Saidi
Ranie Saidi was raised in Perak by his grandmother, a well-travelled army wife turned professional caterer whose journey in some ways mirrors his own. He moved from Malaysia to London after her death and began to cook at first for himself and then for supper club guests as a way to recreate the flavours of his homeland and his much-missed mentor. There are family stories here and stunning location photography but it is, he insists, first and foremost a book designed for everyday use – full of dishes that, once you understand the foundations of the cuisine, should be adapted to your own taste. More than half the recipes are vegetarian, many are one-pot and, without feeling like compromises, all are designed for ingredients readily available here in the UK, where he still lives. There’s a slow-roast leg of lamb based around Perakian rendang tuk, stir-fried noodles he learned from a street hawker in Penang, a curry puff pie, as well as a whole chapter of his beloved grandmother’s well-honed recipes, which feel like treasure indeed.
The Malay Cook: Everyday Malaysian Recipes from Grandma’s Kitchen to Mine by Ranie Saidi (Ryland, Peters & Small, £25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Storecupboard staple
New British Classics by Gary Rhodes
Gary Rhodes was described by Tom Kerridge as: “without a doubt one of the greatest British chefs who almost singlehandedly put British food on the world stage” when he died in 2019. His New British Classics book (published to accompany his 1999 television series of the same name) was sold as “the definitive book on British cookery for a new millennium”. What I love about it is the mix of good, plain classics – suet puddings and syllabubs, boiled bacon and bubble, plus more ambitious projects such as white pudding or rowan jelly – with Rhodes’ own creations, which he hoped would become classics of the future, like a deconstructed steak and oyster pie or a strawberry-rich “afternoon tea pudding”. Along with the excellent essays on national institutions, such as the picnic and the Sunday roast, it’s a rich and valuable snapshot of our food culture at the turn of the century, which to my mind hasn’t been bettered to this day.
