Food books for Christmas: feast your eyes on a festive wish list

What jumps out from the book is how different Mrs David's approach was — and if she were still with us, you wouldn't be calling her Liz — from the chatty, me-centred, love-me/love-my-food style of many contemporary cookery writers. Her prose is clear and elegant. Her essay on the tastes and colours of a day in south-east Spain in late October or her trenchant observations on the happy-go-lucky cooks who make things up as they go ("the ones who can't resist a different little piece of embroidery every time they cook a dish will end by inducing a mood of gloomy apprehension in their family and guests"), can be read with pleasure by people who care about good writing as much as good food. And for cooks, her simple, classic recipes are unsurpassed.

Talking of me-centred cooking brings us inexorably to Nigella Lawson's latest, Kitchen: Recipes From the Heart of the Home (Chatto, £26). It's no good complaining that Nigella's recipes run the cook herself a close second for your attention: what you're buying is the package. The book is about "my love affair with the kitchen": everything from her philosophy of entertaining to
her indoor picnics.

Some of the recipes are good — though sometimes given a needless spin, like the lime in her otherwise excellent chocolate and almond cake. But it's hard to navigate through a book that's organised around chapters like Hurry Up, I'm Hungry or The Cook's Cure for Sunday-night-itis. One for the groupies, then.

The essential thing about Jamie's 30-minute-meals (Penguin, £26) is — you've guessed — that they should be do-able in half an hour. This is because, he says, one of the chief reasons people give for not cooking, along with "I don't know how" and "It's too expensive", is: "I'm too busy". Jamie will have none of it. And so we get meal combinations of things like spinach and feta filo pie with salad, followed by coated ice cream, or a British picnic of sausage rolls, mackerel pâté, asparagus and Pimm's Eton mess: perfectly good stuff and, yes, quick to prepare.

Yet the ordering of the recipes seems pretty haphazard. I'm not persuaded about the merits of cooking against the clock either. Not that it's new: Edouard de Pomiane's classic Cooking in Ten Minutes (1948) was written "for everyone who has only half an hour for lunch or dinner and yet wants half an hour of peace to watch the smoke of a cigarette while they sip a cup of coffee which has not even time to get cold". But he didn't try to squash into half an hour dishes that should take longer: Jamie's attempt to translate a roast beef Sunday lunch into a seared beef fillet with mini Yorkshires shows that sometimes cooking should just take as long as it takes.

But it would be mean-spirited to quibble. Underlying the blokishness, there's a serious missionary endeavour: to persuade people who can't be bothered to cook that the effort is worthwhile.

As for The Home Cookbook by Monty and Sarah Don (Bloomsbury, £25), it's so startlingly unpretentious that it takes a kind of upper-class confidence to pull off. But pull it off they do. It goes from breakfast through to dinner in a charming time-warp. Cold lunch includes radishes with bread and butter ("avoid industrially processed bread" but of course!), while the chapter on dinner has a completely untweaked houmus starter, and a recipe for coq au vin straight from the Seventies. It's that simple.
Fans of Indian cooking are spoilt for choice. There's the easy-peasy but unbastardised approach of Madhur Jaffrey, whose Curry Easy (Ebury, £20) simplifies her recipes without compromising authenticity. But for the serious-minded, this year's blockbuster from Phaidon, Pushpet Pant's India Cookbook (£29.95), is billed as "the only book on Indian food you'll ever need", and, you know, they may be right. It comes, moreover, in a dinky cotton bag.

For those obsessed with macaroons but who can't afford a fix from Ladurée — whose own cookbook in a familiar pale-pistachio box, Sucre (Scriptum, £28), is perhaps the prettiest offering of the year — there's Jose Marechal's Irresistible Macaroons (Simon & Schuster, £6.99), a guide to making the real thing: salted caramel, pistachio, chocolate, the works. The only downside is that you need a sugar thermometer — but it's worth it. Oh, and for those, like me, who rejoice in afternoon tea there's pleasure to be had in Tea at Fortnum & Mason (Ebury, £10), with all the recipes you'll need to replicate the £35 per person experience at F&M.

After the renaissance of the cupcake, let's hear it for the resurrection of jelly, the proper stuff. Jelly, with Bompas & Parr (Pavilion, £14.99) is a celebration of the genre, from simple fruit ones right through to the chartreuse and peach jelly served on the Titanic. I loved it but I should say I served up their authentic, no-packet, orange and lemon jellies at a children's party, and unhesitatingly, the six-year-olds sent them back. It's Hartley's for the brutes next time.