Best cook books of the year: 'Tis the season for foodies

By the time you've bought the digital thermometer, let alone worked out how to use it, procured a digital scales or a battery for your old one, invested in a pack of disposable icing bags and scoured London for 11-12mm nozzles, you're talking quite an outlay.

M Hermé tells us that he tested this book on his 10-year-old daughter and she got on fine. She is made of sterner stuff than I am. I got outside help to work the thermometer. The process involves precision in timing and temperature. At the end of it all, my macaroons were not so much glossy as slightly cratered. The consensus at home was that they were too sweet. Well, I enjoyed them. With sufficient practice I too could turn out something exquisite, but I can see why the rich buy them instead.

At the opposite end of the spectrum - the feminine end - there is a reprint of one of the best cookbooks ever, The Constance Spry Cookery Book (Grub Street, £30). Mrs Spry was famous for inventing coronation chicken - actually the work of her co-author, Rosemary Hume - and her book is of its time: 1956. It's profoundly French in spirit but it's got everything, from how to shuck an oyster to a galantine of partridge, and you could cook from it for the rest of your life and never eat badly. The drawback is that it's big; the advantage is you could throw out your other cookbooks to give it room.

Another year, another book from Jamie Oliver. Jamie's Great Britain (Penguin, £30) brings him back to his roots and his parents' gastropub. It's one of his best. Granted, Britishness is interpreted liberally -there's a Yemeni lamb recipe and Guyanese apple pepperpot cake - but that's fair enough. I'm not persuaded that a citrus cake made with almonds and doused with syrup is English rather than Mediterranean, but this is British-inspired rather than replicating the classics. The whole thing is infused with the go-for-it enthusiasm that makes him not so much a food writer as a food missionary.

Heston Blumenthal, with his foray into Waitrose, has taken middle England to places you would think it would never go. His latest, Heston Blumenthal at Home (Bloomsbury, £30) attempts to popularise his scientific approach further. The book would work best for men a bit like the author: obsessive, prepared to take enormous pains and interested in process. Often he sets out to solve problems that don't exist. He thinks Brussels sprouts are always unevenly cooked, so he makes you separate the leaves (not easy) and fry and steam them. Which is fine, but so is halving sprouts and boiling them. But he has some excellent recipes too, and he always makes you think about what you're doing.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's latest, River Cottage Veg Every Day! (Bloomsbury, £25) is about "changing your culinary focus from meat to veg". That means having a different take on ingredients: seeing vegetables in their own right rather than as supplementaries, and presenting small Middle-Eastern-style dishes as well as full-on main courses. It's one for carnivores as well as vegetarians because the recipes are simply so good.

Sometimes the best cookbooks are simply an account of a cook's favourite things to make. Claire's Kitchen (Claire Caminada, £16.95) is just that. She's not afraid to include classics such as Tarte Tatin but she adds a twist to some favourites - ginger with a squash soup, say. An interesting, useful book.

One of London's best-loved Italian restaurants is La Famiglia. Its patriarch, Alvaro Maccioni, has brought together his best-loved recipes in La Famiglia, The Cookbook (Palazzo, £25). They're familial, as you'd expect, and unabashedly trad Tuscan. One friend ate three helpings of his torta della nonna.

This was Fiona Cairns's year: she made the royal wedding cake. Her Birthday Cake Book (Quadrille, £18.99) is a delight to the eye, but my spirit failed me at the thought of making stripy sponges into the shape of seaside buckets. You can, however, adjust her excellent basic recipes to your own, simpler needs.

The Ultimate Festive Feast (Caravan, £12.99) is not quite as comprehensive as the name implies but it has some very good recipes for the season, including contributions from Angela Hartnett, Mary Berry (including her chocolate roulade), Gordon Ramsay and Michel Roux. What's more, a share of the proceeds goes to the National Grocers Benevolent Fund. Now that's Christmassy.