Lisa Haseldine

The best cookbooks to give this Christmas

Gifts to satisfy home cooks of all budgets, palates and abilities

  • From Spectator Life
(Alamy)

I love a good cookbook. In an age where endless variations on any recipe are no more than a few clicks away on the internet, there is still a certain magic to buying, or receiving, a physical, curated collection. 

Cookbooks can teach you something in a way that individual online recipes can’t. Whether exploring a new cuisine or trying a new technique, cooking from a cookbook means you can build up a whole repertoire of dishes and hone new skills. I love that you can annotate the pages, and it doesn’t matter if they get mucky (I find you can always tell the best recipes in a book by how dog-eared and food-splattered the pages are). 

You can always tell the best recipes in a book by how dog-eared and food-splattered the pages are

Cookbooks impart culinary knowledge in a satisfyingly old-school way. You can learn which flavour combinations work and which don’t.

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