Sunshine on a plate: the year’s best cookbooks

In the dark days of a terrible winter, Elizabeth David began writing her first book, about Mediterranean food. The timing should have been wrong. People enduring post-war rationing would rather not think about sunlit shores and dishes of bright food, surely? But oh, how depressed, broke Britain lapped up A Book of Mediterranean Food when it was published in 1950. David’s prose and recipes ‘flew’ readers to Greece, Italy, the south of France and Egypt, stirring up an appetite for garlicky seafood stews, saffron-suffused pilaffs and artichokes dipped in anchoiade.

In an echo, 70 years on, I have found my thoughts wandering to places that currently cannot be visited except via their dishes. Suggestive cookbooks still bring the sun’s rays to our table without the need for breaking quarantine. ‘Welcome, we’ve been expecting you’ goes the subtitle to Cooking in Marfa (Phaidon, £35). Virginia Lebermann and Rocky Barnette tell the story of their highly unusual restaurant, in a town in the Chihuahuan desert which spans northern Mexico and west Texas.

Marfa, in Texas, is home to a community that thrives in a location where two contentious worlds collide. Lebermann writes:

There is a bubbling tension between the old and the new, the true local and the newcomers, the cultures of the past and the cultures of the present existing simultaneously.

Having set up an art foundation in the town, she and Burnette opened the Capri restaurant. The food is Tex-Mex, of course, but very artfully so. I was inspired first to try grilled avocado guacamole (a revelation), then got on to the very serious business of making real corn tortillas. Having procured an iron tortilla press from Lakeland and nixta-malised masa (specially ground maize flour) online during the spring lockdown, I spent a messy morning with my family manufacturing the airy, silky discs, then stuffing them with either grilled fish or meat, raw herbs and sour-hot salsa.