Nadiya’s British Food Adventure

Nadiya’s British Food Adventure isn’t just a cookbook — it’s a cultural project. These are recipes to combine the two culinary traditions she encountered growing up — British and Bangladeshi, or rather, Luton-Bangladeshi. “Two culinary worlds that collided spectacularly to create a grey area that is more colourful than a rainbow, with a pot of sprinkles at the end of it!” she writes in her introduction. “A Britain we should be proud of for the diversity that it offers through the food it has welcomed.”

What it actually amounts to is Nadiya’s — like Delia, she needs no surname — take on the staples of the British repertoire, to go with her telly programme.

Reworking traditional dishes rarely works out well, at least in terms of cooking. Nadiya, being Muslim, doesn’t do pork, non-halal meat or alcohol, which means we get some very odd takes on the basics. Scotch eggs are made with salmon, soda bread with five-spice (hmm), steak and kidney with ras el hanout — and she uses turkey rashers.

Some things work: chicken livers with coriander or goat’s cheese galettes are good; straight curries are fine. But God, there are some atrocities here, perpetrated as diversity. Gazpacho is not better with copious amounts of dried tarragon and cornichons; imam bayildi, the Ottoman aubergine dish, isn’t improved with flaked almonds; a coq au “vin” made with grape juice instead of wine, plus Worcestershire sauce and no bacon, is not an adequate substitute for the real thing.As for her take on spaghetti Bolognese, in which the spaghetti is mixed with cheese sauce and used as a base on which to bake meat ragu, it’s culinary vandalism.

£9.99 | Amazon | Buy it now

Syria, Recipes from Home

It’s a relief, then, to turn to Syria, Recipes from Home, Hab Azzam and Dina Mousawi’s collection of recipes from refugees in Europe, collected in camps and far-flung places. It’s a way for the displaced to create a sense of home when far away — one of the casualties of the war is Syria’s food culture. But it’s also a good selection of recipes from a country famous for its excellent cooking, ranging from simple vegetable dishes to quite fiddly pastries. Useful and poignant.

£19.49 | Amazon | Buy it now

The Ivy Now: the Restaurant and its Recipes

The Ivy Now: the Restaurant and its Recipes is a series of articles about the restaurant plus a tremendous selection of dishes from the menu, and every one of them I tried was good, from the plain burgers with terrific salsa to the fabulous meringues with blackcurrant sauce. It makes you want to go and eat there, which is probably the idea.

£20.99 | Amazon | Buy it now

Supra

The nearest most of us will get to Georgia is Little Georgia, a café in Hackney, but Supra, a loving evocation of the cooking of the country by Tiko Tuskadze, is a way of entering into the spirit of the place. “Supra” is Georgian for feast, an expansive collection of dishes to feed family, friends and all-comers, a generous approach to cooking. Georgian cooking is big on walnuts, pomegranates and aubergines; it’s robust but not heavy. Many of the apparently different dishes, such as the assortment of dips and spreads, actually share the same base, so it’s easier than it looks. Delicious, calorific cheesebreads.

£20 | Waterstones | Buy it now

Pressure Cooking

​Lakeland’s cookbooks are excellent, and as reliable as its kitchenware. The latest, Pressure Cooking is as good an introduction as you could need to the range of dishes you can make in half the time in a pressure cooker. Lots of stews, obviously, but risotto, puddings and soups as well. Proper fast food.

£5.99 | Lakeland | Buy it now

Two Kitchens

Best of all is Rachel Roddy’s Two Kitchens, a wonderful account of the cooking of Sicily and Rome by an English writer who lives in Rome with a Sicilian husband. This is cooking that’s grounded in the place but with the appreciation of someone who comes to a rich tradition from outside. It’s a fine selection of recipes, written in the most engaging way.

£25 | Waterstones | Buy it now

The Really Quite Good British Cookbook

But if it’s the range of modern British cooking you’re after, you can’t do better than The Really Quite Good British Cookbook, edited by William Sitwell. It runs the gamut from Michel Roux (lemon tart) and Simon Hopkinson (chicken with saffron and cucumber) to Pippa Middleton (the same) with roast rib of beef, old favourites from Nigella and Delia, new talent such as Olia Hercules and yes, Nadiya, with burnt garlic, lemon and chilli squid. Plus tongue-in-cheek sherry trifle with powdered custard. All fab.

£19.49 | Amazon | Buy it now

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