The April edition of Readings Monthly is now available online and in our shops, but if you haven't picked up a copy yet, below you can read Chris Gordon's column where she highlights some great cookbooks that are included in our month-long sale!
My household constantly talks about food. We talk about what we are going to eat at the next meal, how long it’ll take to make, or how long we must wait before we can eat it. Our kitchen table holds a pile of cookbooks on it, ready for use with pages marked. I have at least 50 cookbooks that tell me they have the very best recipe for Spaghetti Bolognese. And sometimes, as a family, we choose to travel from one continent of the world to another, all in a week of eating. (Presently we are using the excellent East by Meera Sodha, because it means we get to travel from China to India in one book.)
Everyone in my family reads cookbooks differently. I like the stories behind the recipe or those that have influenced it. My partner wants instructions given by experts. My offspring like the finished recipe pictures. Knowing the origins of recipes is essential to us all. Taking these various preferences and approaches as a starting point, below is a hint about the range of cookbooks included in our April cookbook promo.
Let’s look at ‘manual’ cookbooks first. Niki Segnit’s landmark bestseller The Flavour Thesaurus is a sensible (and delicious) way to explore mostly plant-based flavours and to bring each ingredient to life. Likewise, Samin Nosrat’s cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat explores the principles of good cooking, which she defines by the four pillars named in the title.
René Redzepi and David Zilber’s The Noma Guide to Fermentation takes us firmly by the hand, leading us through the streets of kimchi and sauerkraut, kombucha, shoyu, miso, lacto-ferments and vinegars. Jamie Oliver-trained London food writer Anna Jones is already known for her wondrous ways with vegetables, but she also offers us everything we need to know about getting quick and sustainable meals on the table (with minimal dishwashing) in One: Pot, Pan, Planet. My family will be forever grateful to Emelia Jackson and her brilliant First, Cream the Butter and Sugar cookbook for teaching baking with precision.
And can we even imagine a world without Yotam Ottolenghi? His fabulous first cookbook changed the way we cook as quickly as you can say ‘Women’s Weekly 50 ways with mince’. It brought into our kitchens bold flavours, tins of chickpeas, and white sesame seeds. This month we can all get or gift a copy of Ottolenghi Simple to anyone who has used their copy to death, or hasn’t yet jumped on this culinary train and wants an entry point to the Ottolenghi oeuvre (and that of his stable of collaborators).
I am drawn to ‘story’ cookbooks written by home cooks. These offerings provide me solace because they offer simple insights from the author and from others. For example, both Hetty McKinnon’s To Asia, with Love and Melbourne favourite Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s Ostro are known for their generous, uncomplicated and seasonal food, which pays homage to family and the influence of travel. (Busuttil Nishimura’s A Year of Simple Family Food gets all my ticks for that reason.) Similarly, the recipes in Alex Elliott-Howery and James Grant’s Cornersmith, represent a deliberate mindfulness type of cooking at home: making everything from scratch, avoiding processed foods, and pickling and preserving to reduce waste.
And let’s not forget Philoxenia: A Seat At My Table by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre’s Kon Karapanagiotidis and his mother, Sia, who share within it over 100 vegetarian and vegan recipes. My very favourite cookbooks, though, are the ones I take off the kitchen table to read in bed like I would a novel. Daniel and Luke Mancuso’s cookbook Yiayia Next Door was written with the Greek grandmother who started delivering home-cooked meals to them over the fence after they lost their beloved mother, Teresa, to domestic violence. Their cookbook will break your heart – and make you hungry.
At its core, a cookbook – filled with instructions, pictures and stories – is about the impulse and inspiration to gather and share a meal. And that is the reason why my kitchen table will always be covered with cookbooks.
All these cookbooks and more can be found in our April cookbook promo.
Explore the full range of titles included in the offer and find out more here! This offer is available online and in shops (except Readings Kids), on select items only and while stocks last, until Sunday 11 May.
