A choice of cookery books

Let’s start in the garden. This year cookery writers are as happy digging and planting as slicing and braising. Sarah Raven is a great gardener and, on the evidence of her latest book, Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook (Chatto & Windus, £35), she’s a good cook too. This is a book for a lifetime of cooking: there are more than 400 recipes based on fruit and vegetables. It is not vegetarian — she uses fish and meat too — but vegetables and fruit are to the fore. Raven’s recipes are simple, practical and enticing, and there isn’t one I don’t want to cook. The book is divided into two-month chunks and full of suggestions (snip off pea tendrils for salads, or leave a few beetroot in the ground to produce an early spring salad leaf) and tips on the most tasty varieties to grow. Her ten courgette recipes will sort out an impending green avalanche, and she has five good marrow recipes for when the wretched plants have triumphed.

The pictures of Raven picking salads in her weed-free garden or lunching under a flowery loggia are haute-boho heaven. It’s real bohemian and more ramshackle at the East London allotment of Sam and Sam Clark, whose restaurant, Moro, pioneered the cooking of Moorish Spain and Muslim North Africa. The couple are photographed griddling kebabs and sowing and picking produce with their neighbouring Turkish, West Indian and Cypriot plot-holders in front of brightly-painted, dilapidated sheds. The resulting book, Moro East (Ebury, £25), of recipes from the eastern Mediterranean, uses produce that can be grown in Britain, with a smattering of unusual ingredients like farika, the Lebanese toasted green wheat, or zaata, a Middle Eastern spice mix, that have to be sourced from ethnic shops. The recipes are easy and tempting, especially the grilled onion, pepper and lentil salad or roast pork loin with pomegranates.