My cookbooks - Hawksmoor at Home, Richard Turner and Huw Gott

Hawksmoor was a regular haunt of mine when I worked in London. It still ranks as one of the best steakhouses I've ever visited and I always make a point of going there when I get back to the big smoke.

My go to dishes were always the lobster starter followed by the 55 day D rump steak with sides of mushrooms, chips and creamed spinach. I'd always kick off my meal with a negroni and to this day any time I cook a steak, I have to have a negroni. To finish it would always be a shared chocolate sundae as I was too stuffed to eat a whole one myself. The menu may have slightly changed but it is still the same high quality produce. 

The book covers recipes many of the dishes on their menu from starter to dessert but also goes into great detail about meat and respecting the animal from which it came from. It also celebrates the fact that we should care about what goes on our plates and how it got there. That if possible, you should look to sourcing your meat from local farmers and butchers and stop buying intensively reared supermarket meat which is often imported.
You also get to learn the basics of cooking a good steak, the various cuts and what they are best suited to. I also like the fact there are some cocktail recipes in the book as well. It's a simple enough concept for the book but gives you a decent repertoire for dishes to accompany your steak and many other recipes based around traditional English fare.

Now that I don't live or work in London anymore, I do have a piece of Hawksmoor in my own home.

My Cookbooks - Real Irish Cookery, Mary Caherty

This is the first ever cookbook that I purchased and it is now well over 30 years old. I remember buying it in a bookshop in a neighbouring town for 50 whole Irish pence. I think the main reason I purchased it was because it was a tiny little cookbook. The cover is pretty faded now after all these years but it still remains one of my most treasured cookbooks. 

Growing up I wasn't allowed to help much with the cooking or baking in our kitchen, I merely watched from the sidelines and took mental notes. My family like many families back then were very much from the 1950's school of cooking, and when it came to savoury it had to be boiled, grilled or roasted well before it ever made it to the table. 

The book however does give you an insight into real old school traditional Irish cooking and also regional dishes. So while you may think that Irish recipes were traditionally soda bread, bacon and cabbage you'll be proved very much wrong with this book. There are many recipes celebrating, trout, salmon, shellfish, goose, duck venison and offal to name but a few.

It's a very much no nonsense book, just basic recipes and no pictures. Despite having bought it all those years ago because it looked ''cute'', I have cooked quite a few recipes from it, especially when I started at university and had no idea how to cook. I think subconsciously this book probably lit a culinary fire that burned slowly for many years before really taking off. I love this book for it's simplicity but the recipes are wonderful and give you an idea that there is more to Irish cooking and that traditionally we had a richer culinary heritage than most people think. 

My Cookbooks - Christmas Chronicles Nigel Slater

Dear Nige has had a place in my culinary heart for many years now. I was introduced to his books about 20 years ago and fell in love with his joy of food and the way he embraces the most simple ingredients. 

One of his earliest books "Real Food" was one of the cookbooks that pushed me further in a culinary sense and gave me an insight into the fact that there was more to food than just a basic repertoire. I had just graduated from university and got my first job, so after years of abject student poverty, I finally had some cash to spend on food (and cookbooks!). It was also a stepping stone to many more cookbooks too.

I couldn't just single out one of his books but would have to include all of them, but for today and given that it's December, Christmas Chronicles seems to be an apt choice to focus on. 
Christmas Chronicles is perhaps one of his best books to date, a seasonal book in the true sense that it documents the daily and weekly activities that are part and parcel of his Christmas preparation as well as harking back to childhood memories. It brought back a lot of memories for me of the activities in my childhood that took place leading up to Christmas such as baking the Christmas cake and feeding it, preparing the pudding, choosing the Christmas tree and visiting Christmas markets. 

The recipes themselves are pretty simple but it is the pure celebration of ingredients and food and encourages the reader to allow themselves to indulge. With all of Nigel Slater's books it is not just the recipe but his prose that is a joy to read, he really knows how to engage the reader. You have the added bonus of great recipes paired with great writing. It is one of those books that you want to read curled up in front of the fire with a some mulled wine or an indulgent hot chocolate.

My Cookbooks - Nose to Tail by Fergus Henderson

If you are a true appreciator of food and a fan of nose to tail then this iconic tome is one you should have in your cookbook library. Fergus Henderson is the proprietor of St John restaurants in London which specialise in Nose to Tail and down to earth seasonal ingredients.

 It is also another of my favourite restaurants in London. Their Bread and Wine restaurant was just around the corner from where I used to work in London, it used to be my Monday evening treat to go there. I always had to finish my meal with some freshly baked madeleines accompanied by a glass of Madeira, or if I was too full take some home and have them for breakfast the next morning.

The second book in the complete nose to tail is a collection of all the books (Nose to Tail and Beyond Nose to Tail) in the St John library, and is written in collaboration with Justin Gellatly who is a former baker with St John and now runs the Bread Ahead bakery in London.

What I love most is the simplicity of how each recipe is detailed, so matter of fact, there are no presumptions. So you would guess from the titles that it includes many recipes that include the whole beast, there is no waste in this book where the animal is concerned. The recipes themselves are a celebration, simply outlined, no complications other than some of the recipes requiring more time than others. It's not all meat in the book there are many fish dishes,  vegetable side dishes and desserts too, one of my favourites is the madeleines recipe which is in the complete nose to tail.

The iconic roast marrowbone with parsley salad dish

Many cookbooks tend to ignore the main ingredient and dress up a dish in a manner that detracts, this book does not. Often simplicity can be more of a celebration of an ingredient showcasing the animal or dessert and encouraging the reader to enjoy.

I was very lucky to meet Fergus himself in 2017 at a lunch in Rijks in Amsterdam, he certainly lived up to expectations.

My Cookbooks - Ices and Ice creams, Agnes B Marshall

Been making a lot of ice creams and sorbets lately, so naturally I wanted to expand my collection of books on the subject. This book by Agnes B. Marshall is one of the earliest known ice cream books, published in 1885. To this day she is still hailed by chefs such as Heston Blumenthal and he has featured tributes to some of her dishes on his earlier menus at the Fat Duck. I was lucky to try his ''Mrs Marshall's Margaret coronet" when I first ate there many years ago, I still have the menu. 

I love historical cookbooks anything about the history of food, chefs and cooks through the ages. Mrs Marshall was ahead of her time in the Victorian era, as she was one of the original entrepreneurs and ran her own cookery school. 

Do not expect a modern version of recipes with measurements in metric and imperial and simple methods. There is a lot of cross referencing between recipes but it is a great little read especially when you can see that many recipes are still around after all these years.

My Cookbooks - Leiths cookery bible, Prue Leith and Caroline Waldegrave

This cookbook had to crop up sooner rather than later as it formed the basis for most of my professional chef diploma at Leith's School of Food and wine in London. Many of the recipes had to be committed to memory for exams and 14 years later I can still recall them without having to consult the book. It is one of the cookbooks that I still consult on a regular basis for inspiration and research.

The book follows the classics and the basics for traditional French cooking as did the course. When we began the course, the premise was to teach us as if we had never been in a kitchen in our lives. On that basis the book suits all levels of cooks from beginner to old hand in the kitchen. You can also guarantee the recipes will have been tested by at least 90 students on a yearly basis. 

You may be wondering, why a picture of the inside title page? As this was one of our reference books for the course, it was carted back and forth to class on a daily basis, so did suffer some wear and tear in that year. The dust jacket was torn and the spine has been repaired several times with gaffer tape, but it's still holding together. 

My Cookbooks - A Passion for Thai cooking, Sompon and Elizabeth Nabnian

I have always loved Thai food, while the dishes may be simple the complexity lies in the flavour combinations and getting the right balance between hot, sour, salt and sweet. I travelled around Thailand many years ago and was lucky to do a course at the Chiang Mai Cookery School run by the authors Sompon and Elizabeth Nabnian. Sompon also had a Thai cookery programme on the Food Network channel too which I was a big fan of.

The book has influenced my cooking  I still make my own pastes from scratch as it tastes so much better. Many of the pages are now stained with ingredients as I use it so much. To this day I still have to look up the paste ingredients just to check I haven't missed anything despite the fact I have been making them for 14 years. 

You will find classics such as Thai Green curry with chicken and Red curry with duck, satay, fish cakes and pad Thai. From there you can build up a bigger repertoire for traditional recipes. The book also goes through the basic Thai store-cupboard ingredients which thankfully now can be found in the supermarkets.

If you're looking for a book that will give you a good basis for Thai cooking then this is a good start.

My Cookbooks - The Ballymaloe Cookbook, Myrtle Allen

As many of you might have come to know I may have one or two cookbooks. I thought it might be nice to share with you on a weekly basis what I have in my collection. 

This is considered one of the classic Irish cookbooks from the late Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe House. She was a chef who championed the Irish food movement and who encouraged us to eat local and seasonal before it became fashionable to do so. This is the 50th anniversary edition and many of the recipes still stand the test of time, while some of the recipes will now seem a tad dated. There are also some wonderful anecdotes about her experiences as a chef at home in Ireland and abroad.

You'd be surprised to know out of all the cookbooks I have in my collection I only have a mere four which are Irish cuisine related. Something I think I should rectify. I suppose having lived longer out of Ireland than having lived there now (it's 25 years since I moved), my influences are more international than regional.