The best cookbooks of 2024: 12 of the year’s standout recipe guides for every kind of cook

Wonderfully evocative, Fadi Kattan’s Bethlehem conjures up the people and places of Palestine–a picture painted of a community that simultaneously honours its past while looking to the future. It’s particularly heart-wrenching in the current climate but also emphasises the importance of preserving ancient recipes handed down through generations, to ensure their presence at tables for millennia more. Chapters are neatly split into seasons and recipes range from purslane salad to beautiful kofta wrapped in vine leaves. Aside from the food, which is bright and beautiful, the accompanying anecdotes and powerful photography impart a healthy dose of armchair travel.

Author: Fadi Kattan

RRP: £28

Roberta Hall-McCarron owns three of Edinburgh’s best restaurants—The Little Chartroom, Elenore, and Ardfern. In each, she displays an unwavering allegiance to Scottish produce, and her inaugural cookbook builds on these foundations to demonstrate to readers just how wonderful seasonal cooking can be when you embrace locally sourced ingredients. With over 100 recipes that range from simple snacks to intricate mains and desserts, The Changing Tides offers keen cooks a peek behind the curtain at what it takes to deliver food worthy of putting on a professional pass. Comfort food comes in the form of haggis sausage rolls, chocolate fudge cake with malty chocolate custard, mallard rillettes and whole roast partridge. At the end of each chapter, you’ll find a dinner party menu, as well as intricate step-by-steps, such as how to correctly shuck an oyster.

Author: Roberta Hall-McCarron

RRP: £25

Now well-versed in the formula of a winning cookbook, Anna Jones’ fifth book proves her popularity at the most basic of levels. And people love her recipes because they’re clearly and clearly written. They work every time and go to show that vegetarian food can be as exciting and as nuanced as any other culinary style. With Easy Wins she’s condensed down her knowledge into wonderfully punchy chapters that focus on twelve key ingredients which can be used cleverly to transform recipes with just one flavour profile. These ingredients range from olive oil and lemon to tomatoes and capers and might be featured in recipes such as a tray-baked lemon dal with pickled green chillies, sesame ramen noodles or easy peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies.

Author: Anna Jones

RRP: £28

As one of the great food writers of our time, Tim Haywards's engaging, witty style brings his tome firmly into the realms of a bedtime read. While there are recipes–which span everything from classics like steak Diane and how to cook a piece of chateaubriand perfectly to a Louisiana remoulade​​–there are also technical skills tutorials, history notes, cow maps, anecdotes and cheerful questioning of red meat’s place in our society and how we might get it right sustainably-speaking. With a nerdy obsession for getting things absolutely right, Hayward’s book is thoroughly researched and reassuringly tested within an inch of its life. As Jay Rayer points out, it’s less a recipe book and more a cookery bible.

Author: Tim Hayward

RRP: £28

Kitty Coles has a cult following thanks to her inspirational yet accessible cooking style that feels achievable but impressive for the everyday home cook. Here she demonstrates her intrinsic talent for understanding where food fits into busy modern lives with her core recipes like roast chicken, mayonnaise, or even pickles that can be made and mastered and then turned into a million different things in the aftermath. A food stylist by trade, Kitty’s book is beautifully shot and brings to life her culinary reach that comes from living between the UK, Ireland and Mallorca. This is the rare kind of cookbook that might just make it off your shelf to become a sticky-paged faithful favourite.

Author: Kitty Coles

RRP: £22

Loved by the art and fashion set, Café Cecilia opened in 2021 to a blaze of positive press. At its helm was Max Rocha, whose dad and sister are John and Simone Rocha respectively. With a love of cooking spurred by his mum and his granny (who the cafe is named after), Max finally took the plunge and shouldered the challenge of getting himself up to speed in the kitchen in order to change his professional path. He landed experience with legends like Skye Gyngell of Spring and Ruthie Rogers of The River Café before opening his own spot to critical acclaim. Café Cecilia maintained its momentum thanks to Max’s clever comforting cooking loosely based on Irish flavours. He’s a chef who doesn’t follow trends but instead puts up food that people instantly connect with thanks to its simplicity. His cookbook is written to the same blueprint with recipes like Guinness bread, smoked mackerel pate or pork with colcannon.

Author: Max Rocha

RRP: £34.95

Well-loved Meera Soda has been writing vegan recipes for The Guardian for years, and it’s her deftness with full-throttle flavours and powerful spicing that keeps her at the forefront of the plant-based food movement. Dinner celebrates hearty vegetarian mains with Asian flavours, like a baked butter paneer or marbled egg omelette with a nam pla sauce. Playing second fiddle to the mains are desserts and sides, to help you create full menus. The recipes are split up in a few ways, to allow for easy navigation. The simplest format of all are the chapters that run with titles like ‘one pot’, ‘quick’, and ‘bung in the oven’ for a selection process that handily centres around time or energy available at any one time.

Author: Meera Soda

RRP: £27

British-Israeli Ottolenghi has penned an impressive total of twelve cookbooks, making him a man who hardly requires an introduction. This time he’s honing in on comfort food and has collaborated with team members to come up with a sort of ultimate showcase of perenially popular recipes with the Ottolenghi signature twist, which takes things to another level through big, bright flavours. Hearty bowls of caramelised onion orecchiette with hazelnuts and crispy sage is perfect for family food while a cheesy bread soup with savoy cabbage and cavolo nero makes batch cooking infinitely more interesting. As ever, Ottolenghi isn’t afraid to borrow flavours from across the world, bringing them into his fold with his unique ability to mix ingredients in a balanced way. Think a puttanesca-style salmon traybake or a shakshuka with sambal.

Author: Yotam Ottolenghi

RRP: £30

The Camberwell Arms in London has become legendary in foodie circles for serving up some of the capital’s most cherished Sunday lunches. This classic British boozer has been so celebrated thanks to Mike Davies’ cooking which uplifts pub grubs to a level that treads the line between respecting the essence of recipes and elevating them to a new, wonderful height. In his book, you’ll find cleverly designed seasonal menus which take you from shopping lists and pre-preppable elements to on-the-day cooking and finishing touches. You can expect a full spectrum of cooking, including both meat and vegetarian dishes, like how to cook a rib of beef and how to make a pumpkin, celeriac, potato and gorgonzola gratin with a winter green salad.

Author: Mike Davies

RRP: £30

For those with aspirations of cheffy escapades in the kitchen, Paul Ainsworth’s cookbook affords a peek behind the scenes at just what it takes to elevate food from standard home cooking to something extra special. Mercifully there aren’t never-ending shopping lists or overly complex skills required, but instead lovely, simple techniques that you can use flexibly across your repertoire. It’s sort of an entry-level manual that anyone can use to create food that gets close to the quality of his famed Cornish restaurants. Chapters are split into sections like sharers, land, and sea, and there’s even a whole section dedicated to custard for the sweet toothed. Favourite recipes include a honey-glazed duck inspired by Chinese takeaway and Cornish cod and mussel piperade with pesto mayonnaise.

Author: Paul Ainsworth

RRP: £26

Pure sunshine in literary form, Greekish is a bounding adventure through Greece’s wonderful culinary history, all with a unique twist. The ish in Greekish has allowed Georgina to have fun with her recipes, tweaking things here and there or coming up with amalgamations of her favourite ingredients. The joy here is that you’ll find familiar flavours but in new formats, keeping things comforting and exciting all at once. Smaller bites include spiced honey calamari or herby skordalia garlic dip while the ‘everyday hero’ section presents wonderful family fare like Spanakrisotto. Thanks to notes on gluten-free, vegetarian and kid-friendly cooking, this has something that will appeal to most people.

Author: Georgina Hayden

RRP: £26

Legendary ocakbasi Mangal II is an integral part of Dalston’s food fabric. It’s the creation of the Dirik brothers who took over from their father to push the boundaries of Turkish cuisine, bringing their restaurant bang up-to-date while maintaining its authenticity. Here, in their first cookbook, they take readers on a journey through essays and stories that reflect on their upbringing and cultural heritage. These are peppered with recognisable recipes like baklava and pide as well as recipes that have a more personal spin, seen in desserts such as the pair’s tahini tart.

Author: Ferhat and Sertaç Dirik

RRP: £34.95