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Claudia Roden at home in north London
Claudia Roden: ‘Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson inspired me hugely.’ Photograph: Pal Hansen/Observer
Claudia Roden: ‘Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson inspired me hugely.’ Photograph: Pal Hansen/Observer

The best cookbooks of all time, as chosen by the experts

This article is more than 8 years old

Prue Leith has said that cookery books are obsolete – but these chefs and food writers beg to differ. Raymond Blanc, Claudia Roden and others reveal the essential books every cook should own

Writer and chef Prue Leith made waves last week when she said that contemporary cookbooks are now destined almost exclusively for the coffee table: we drool over them, then either order takeaway or Google our way into the kitchen. “We don’t need cookbooks,” she said, “except to feed the internet.” Do cookbooks still have a place in today’s kitchens? We asked some cooks and chefs to share their favourites.

Raymond Blanc

Cooking in 10 minutes by Edouard De Pomiane

I am completely self-taught, so cookbooks have always been a wonderful way to learn; to discover new techniques. They are very important. The French writer and scientist Édouard de Pomiane has always been a big inspiration for me. A good teacher, a philosopher and a very happy cook, he studied at L’Institut Pasteur in Paris, and was an expert in nutrition and the medical value of food. He is my hero. I love the way he writes – infused with such warmth, common sense and a delightful sense of humour. His Cooking in Ten Minutes achieved great notoriety when it was originally published in 1930. For me, it is the most beautiful book of cuisine ever, cooking with speed and purity. He was a visionary, definitely ahead of his time; he saw that life was speeding up. He starts the book by saying that people are going to think him a fool for saying good food can be cooked in 10 minutes, when everyone knows it can’t. But his recipes proved that it could. His philosophy was about quality – even if you have only 10-20 minutes to eat, you can still eat well. It is a book full of wisdom that has been reprinted many times, with millions of copies sold, which goes a long way to say how important simplicity is. He has influenced me enormously.

Jack Monroe

Kitchen by Nigella Lawson

One of the first things I did when I found myself living on a low budget was to borrow books from friends and the library and adapt all the recipes to cheap ingredients. I’d substitute tinned potatoes for baby potatoes, sunflower oil for olive … It’s how I taught myself to cook the classics. I had a handful of books I turned to constantly: Kitchen by Nigella Lawson, For the Love of Food by Denis Cotter, Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Menu, Economy Gastronomy by Allegra McEvedy and the Abel & Cole cookbook, but Nigella’s Kitchen is the book that I value most. It is homely, comforting, soulful, irreverent. I absolutely love it. I haven’t ever found a point on which I really differ with her. In the early days, while I agreed with her emphasis on good ingredients, I couldn’t afford them. That made me feel so guilty, stripping her recipes and replacing them with basic, low-budget versions, but I’ve spoken to her about it since and she is very forgiving. Kitchen is my sticky, thumbed-through book; it’s still the one I go to for quick and easy comfort food, for cakes and bakes and sweets and treats. Whenever I want something good at the end of a difficult day, I delve into it and read and read and read – it doesn’t get old. I’ve read it from cover to cover; it is my mentor in the kitchen, my old faithful friend. Her pasta alla genovese recipe is one I particularly love. In a world where we’re constantly told to reduce our carb intake, there is something deeply satisfying about having Nigella say: take a plate of pasta, and cover it with masses of potatoes and cheese.

Jeremy Lee

French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David

Cookbooks have always been important to me. As a wee lad, I remember my mother in the kitchen with a fag and a cup of coffee, sitting on her perch as usual, leafing through her cookbooks. She had very elegant fingers, and whenever the fingers stopped turning pages and started tapping on the page, I’d know the recipe had been found. Now I have so many of my own, it’s bewildering. It’s difficult to pick a favourite, as it’s more about who I need what from: Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Marcella Hazan, Anissa Helou, Alice Waters … together they have built up this extraordinary body of knowledge and intellect; it is excellent research you can be assured of. It has always been the writing that mattered most.

The most important book though, by a long stretch, is Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. It’s where she is at her happiest, her most delightful. She was a francophile, and you can tell. My mum read it incessantly – it was always there, in the pile of books by her side. I don’t remember it ever not being there. As a chef I went to work at Bibendum with Simon Hopkinson, and Elizabeth David used to come and eat there. When I found out that Simon knew her I nearly fainted. Reading cookbooks is like watching films – reading them for pleasure is one thing, but when you study them to see how they are made, it’s a revelation. So rediscovering these books as a chef was huge: David’s cuisine may look simple, but it sure ain’t. It’s masterful. Her recipe for boeuf bourguignon is extraordinary. I cooked it for my mother’s 50th birthday, got her thumbs up and was very proud. My mum and I are both avid collectors of this book – every time time we saw one we’d get it, paperbacks, battered hardbacks … I have never actually counted how many I own, but I suspect it’s a fair few.

Claudia Roden

Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book

I started collecting recipes from refugees who had been expelled from Egypt and left in such haste. It was a labour of love, a great need to record a heritage; I didn’t really think I would go on to write about food. The people who were writing about food at the time – it was 1956 – were Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. David had written about Mediterranean food. I was enthralled to find that she mentioned a few Egyptian dishes. She was writing so beautifully, adding such value to the recipes – it made it feel as though it all really mattered. Both she and Grigson were scholarly and literary, and inspired me hugely. Grigson was an even bigger influence because of the way she put what she called “background” to a recipe. I cooked from her books and David’s … they taught me so much. Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book is a favourite I still go back to. It is a remarkable work of reference. She really explained so much about the history, literary and other cultural references for each fruit or vegetable, as well as giving a lot of technical information on how to use it. Take quince, for example – she taught me which knife to use for a fruit as hard as a quince and what to do about the downy skin – these small, technical details in her method were invaluable.

Karam Sethi

Tandoor: The Great Indian Barbeque by Ranjit Rai

I have at least 150 cookbooks. Cookbooks, particularly Jamie Oliver’s, are a part of what got me into cooking as a career. Something I’ve been returning to again and again recently, while developing the menu for Hoppers, is The Complete Asian Cookbook Series: Sri Lanka & The Philippines, by Charmaine Soloman, who has written extensively on Asian cooking, and Sri Lankan food in particular. My favourite book is Ranjit Rai’s Tandoor: The Great Indian Barbecue – tandoori cooking at home made easy. The recipes are authentic; it’s innovative and easy to follow; the photography is top class and paints a perfect picture of the food – it’s the complete package. I came across it 10 years ago and I keep going back. It encompasses the modern and more rustic recipes. The recipes that particularly stand out are the dozen or so different chicken tikka preparations, the classic and the rare and the innovative. I don’t usually follow a recipe from a book word for word. Usually I use it for inspiration, to experiment with and reinterpret. Rai’s recipes work well, but as meat and veg in the UK is so different to that available in India (meat is often more tender in the UK), his recipes do have to be adapted accordingly.

Rachel Roddy

Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book

Cookbooks always have been a part of my life. My mother was a great cookbook lover: I grew up with Claudia Roden, Simon Hopkinson, Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David and Madhur Jaffrey. Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book is the one I’ve loved and used the most, by a long way. Even now, when I am so immersed in Italian food – of which she was not a specialist – her recipes are still extremely useful; they work. It’s the beauty of her language: her eloquence and her considered recipe writing. I go to her to remind myself about plain English and choosing good words – she cuts all the crap. I have learned from her, more than anyone, about how to write a recipe. The Vegetable Book is very big and fat, like an encyclopedia, with a lovely long essay at the beginning. It is scholarly and poetic and practical. So many recipes are important to me: the ratatouille, the hummus, huge green beans and braised fennel, the tomato sauce. The fennel with breadcrumbs and butter is a delicious dish, the kind I eat a lot. She was such a good cook. I still remember the day I bought my own copy. My mum had an old edition, without any pictures, just a painting on the cover. It was a Penguin, thin, soft pages, almost falling apart … It’s a book that has been around all my life.

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