On the morning that Wellington came out of level 4 lockdown in September, car after car drove out of the McDonald's drive-through in Newtown, passengers triumphantly waving bags of takeaway loot out the windows while drivers tooted with joy. Even as someone who loves to cook, I completely understood their happiness. Cooking (not to mention planning, shopping for ingredients and cleaning up afterwards) can be a hell of a chore. I'm convinced this is why cookbooks are so integral to happiness; part inspiration, part aspiration, they're the ultimate in useful distraction. If 2020 was the year we all remembered what it was like to feed ourselves, 2021 has been our chance to get better at it. Since none of us can be sure what 2022 will dish out, it's best to prepare to extend our culinary repertoires at home. Here are some great reads to help you do it.
1. HUNGRY
By Grace Dent (HarperCollins, $35)
This does start with a recipe of sorts, but not the sort you'd expect from the Guardian's wickedly clever restaurant reviewer.
In this food memoir, Grace Dent writes movingly of her working-class Carlisle childhood and her adventures in London media before circling back home where her father has dementia. It's both heart-rending and brutally funny (sample line: "Oh, Grace, he's not got dementia," her mother tells her. "He's just a dickhead".) There's lots of food to salivate over (or recoil from), making it an immensely satisfying read while you sob quietly in a deckchair.
Honourable mention: If you prefer food memoirs with recipes and A-list celebs, Stanley Tucci's Taste: My Life Through Food (Fig Tree, $45) is also delicious.
2. TO ASIA, WITH LOVE
By Hetty McKinnon (Penguin Random House, $40)
I can't decide whether I want to be Hetty McKinnon - an impossibly talented cook, writer and photographer - or just move in with her.
After winning fans with previous books inspired by her Sydney salad business, Arthur St Kitchen, To Asia, With Love is her modern vegetarian take on the Cantonese food she ate growing up. While it's loaded with fast, fabulous ideas for family-friendly eating, it's also an extended "thank you" note to her mother, a dedicated and inventive cook.
Honourable mention: One: Pot, Pan, Planet by Anna Jones (HarperCollins, $55 shows how to eat exceptionally well while doing your bit to save the Earth.
3. A-Z OF PASTA
By Rachel Roddy (Fig Tree, $65)
Full disclosure: I bought a copy of this book to send to my sister for her birthday but immediately decided I had to keep it. (Sorry, Marion!) The clue is in the name here - it's an extended love letter to the many and varied forms of pasta, weaving history, stories, culinary wisdom and damn good recipes into each shape.
Rachel Roddy is an English food writer who had the great good fortune to fall in love with an Italian. She's lived in Rome for the last 16 years, making regular pilgrimages to her partner's home village in Sicily. Her writing has the music of simmering sauce; she wears her immense knowledge and learning as lightly as her fettuccine wears a slick of anchovied butter.
4. MED
A Cookbook by Claudia Roden (Ebury, $65)
Food has been central to Claudia Roden's life since she was a child but it took a long time for the rest of the world to catch up. When she wanted to turn the recipes she'd collected from the Egyptian Jewish diaspora into a book in the 1960s, people thought she was out of her mind and suggested she take up painting instead.
More than six decades later, she's still proving them wrong. Med shows that she's still leading the pack at 85 years old, with a collection of recipes as sparkling and sun-filled as the eponymous ocean.
5. SHELF LOVE
Ottolenghi Test Kitchen (Ebury, $60)
You may think, if you have most of the other Yotam Ottolenghi books, that you don't really need another. On that basis I was completely ready to dismiss this one - a collection of recipes gathered from the chef and his Test Kitchen team - but I was quickly hooked.
While other Ottolenghi books are sometimes criticised for their lengthy lists of ingredients, Shelf Love focuses on using up random vegetables and condiments lost to pantry shelves and freezer drawers (all the things you bought once to use in an Ottolenghi recipe and then forgot about). Best to make room for this one - but be warned, it's the first in a series.
6. SAFFRON SWIRLS AND CARDAMOM DUST
By Ashia Ismail-Singer (Bateman Books, $50)
As if her day job wasn't busy enough thanks to pandemic pressures, Auckland nurse Ashia Ismail-Singer spent much of 2020 and 2021 working on this collection of spice-infused baking and dessert recipes.
Saffron Swirls And Cardamom Dust is proof that pressure makes diamonds. The book is visually stunning thanks to exceptional photography and styling by Christall Lowe, while the recipes manage to be both exotic and rooted in practicality. Beautiful baking books abound, but few of them actually get used. This one deserves to be different.
7. THE EDIBLE BACKYARD
By Kath Irvine (Penguin, $50)
If you have the smallest yearning for a garden, don't buy this book. Reading it will feed any green-thumbed desire until it becomes an insatiable monster that keeps you awake at night, thinking of how nice it would be to grow your own fruit, vegetables and herbs.
It's not a recipe book but it is an excellent reminder of where our kai comes from - and that it IS possible to grow it yourself. Kath Irvine's advice, distilled from decades of hands-on experience, is eminently practical, encouraging and sensible. If you've got the slightest interest in having control over what you eat, you'll dig it.
Honourable mention: Homegrown Happiness by Elien Lewis (Bateman Books, $40) traverses similar ground, explaining no-dig gardening and adding in recipes to use up your harvest.
8. HOMECOOKED
By Lucy Corry (Penguin, $55)
I feel like an egg, shamelessly self-promoting my own book in this line-up, but as fellow cookbook writer Alice Zaslavsky told me, "If you don't do it, no one else will."
Homecooked is designed to be as useful as it is beautiful - it's split into the four seasons and each season has recipes and ideas that focus on eight to 10 "hero" ingredients found in ordinary New Zealand kitchens. It's a book for people who love to read as well as cook and the strokeable, embossed cover (illustrated by Evie Kemp) means it will look gorgeous on your bedside or coffee table.
