Michele Hewitson: Favourite food reads

Despite demanding Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries for Christmas, and despite having read Toast,  his memoir of a childhood spent starving for love and finding it in the kitchen, my favourite Slater is still this battered copy of Real Cooking. This is a real cookbook: for cooking out of rather than savouring for the reading. But Slater is one of the few cooking writers who can actually write.

Here he is on asparagus. "My cat and I often share a plate of early asparagus ... Just the two of us with no one to tut at such apparent decadence ... There is something serene about a dozen fat green and mauve spears on a large white plate. A simple and sensuous plateful to be eaten with respect rather than wolfed like a portion of hot, salty chips."

That's food writing that makes you (although perhaps not the cat) hungry.

Another somewhat worse for the wear that is reading is M.F.K. Fisher's With Bold Knife & Fork. I'm not sure I have ever made anything from this book — there are as many curiosities as there are things you might want to eat. But Fisher has the magical knack of making a jaded cook want to get back into the kitchen.

This is handy for jaded cooks at this time of the year. As in: "It is therapeutic for a cook to depart from reality now and then and go right through the looking glass, and any classical manual will encourage such an occasional trip. It may only go as far as a trifle, and then only once or twice a year, like mine, but it clears the kitchen air of any lurking ennui and cynicism."

For real chefs, as distinct from those of us who potter about with pots, cooking is an obsession. It takes a certain sort. In The Soul of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman examines that obsession by charting the hopeful candidates undertaking the marathon that is the Certified Master Chef exams at the Culinary Institute of America.

These people are mad. They pay large sums to be here, hardly any of them will pass, and along the way they will be exhausted and humiliated. It's great drama. Then Ruhlman goes inside the kitchens, and creative minds, of chefs Michael Symon and Thomas Keller. A terrific study of kitchens and intensity told through solid reportage.

James Villas, the food and wine editor of Town & Country for almost 30 years, has his own obsessions: caviar comes high on the list.

Between Bites: Memoirs of a Hungry Hedonist is a memoir of his years, and evolution, as a critic. Although, as he writes, "I'm not and have never been a conventional food writer ... Much to the nervous horror of my peers, I refuse to drink wine at cocktail parties, I smoke, I spurn salsas, sushi and the food processor ... On principle I will not eat any kind of raw fresh tuna, blue potatoes, apricot mustard, or Parmesan icecream."

He also has never believed that "food writing is any more of an art than eating and cooking and that to try to elevate the craft to the exalted level of serious literature, music, and painting is a naive attempt by dreamers to transform a quite ordinary discipline into a complex process ..." What a sensible fellow.

That's about right about cooking too. "There is too much talk of cooking being an art or a science, we are only making ourselves something to eat," writes Slater.

A good food writer will make you want to make yourself something to eat. All of these books will, in different ways, make you hungry. And, goodness, it's been at least an hour since lunch. I quite fancy the idea of trifle for tea.