Turkish delights: the best of the year’s cookbooks

‘Recipes are like magic potions. They promise transformations,’ says Bee Wilson in her introduction to Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake (Faber, £12.99), a collection of classic authors’ recipes. You have to pray that tinned tomato soup will indeed be transformed into something nice-tasting, or that Noel Streatfeild’s filets de boeuf aux bananas will not be as revolting as it sounds. Not much hope of that, I’m afraid – but this is more of a book to enjoy reading without tasting.

Some of the writers confess to failing miserably in the food department. ‘I am a very bad cooker, as the children put it,’ warns Beryl Bainbridge, as she launches into a heartless recipe for violently boiled mince. Others cannot help but insert stylish metaphors, just as they would in their day job. Instructing us on how to boil the perfect egg, Vladimir Nabokov says you know when all has gone wrong if the egg cracks in the water and ‘starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium in an old-fashioned séance’.