Recipes from the masters

Autumn is here - time to light the fire, give up the gym and curl up with a good cookbook. And when all that reading leaves you hungry, you'll have a cornucopia of solutions at your fingertips...

I like Nigella. Yes, she's trendy, and the whole domestic goddess thing has set feminism back a decade, but that's not actually her fault. I blame the marketing men. Her recipes are superb: practical and delicious, and slipping easily from basic (sweet potatoes with marshmallows) to haute cuisine (champagne risotto). And there's nothing goddess-y about her writing, which deals with anything from a tendency to prioritise gingerbread over more existential topics of thought to the best sort of soup for soaking up a hangover.

Reed made his name as bartender of the Met Bar in its trendy heyday, so when he goes behind the bar early in this beautifully presented book, he's right at home. But he understands that most of us aren't, and his hints, tips and basics are designed for novices.

All you need to make great cocktails, he claims, are five bottles of alcohol (he gives a choice), sugar syrup, lemons and limes. From this, he points out, you can mix and match. Why make a Caipirinha with rum when you can use vodka and have a Caipiroska? Out of vodka? Then substitute tequila for a Rude Cosmopolitan. It's an ingenious idea that won't please traditionalists but should make a lot of Christmas party hosts very happy indeed.

It's just not enough these days to know that bèarnaise sauce is a hollandaise sauce with tarragon and chervil, or that chorizo is a particular type of Spanish sausage. For one thing, according to Sinclair, chorizo is Middle Eastern, too. In the global village - at least in its kitchen - it helps to know that fegatini is Italian for chicken livers, that in South Asia, molee is a fish or meat dish with a thick coconut milk sauce, that to pare is to slice thinly and that a Czech hotdog will arrive if you order a parek v rohliku. So this book is very useful, but - with its strange culinary snapshots of cultures everywhere - it's also compulsively readable.

In 1994, Henderson started St John, the carnivorous Smithfield restaurant where sweetbreads and liver fall at the tame end of the menu. A decade later, he seems to believe we're ready to take our pig's head, lamb's brain and duck's neck home with us. I'm not sure he's right, but at least he gives his readers practical advice: you'll need a very large pot indeed for 'ham in hay', and you can use the pig's ears left over from your brawn to make chicory, sorrel and crispy ear salad. And this book is worth buying for the photography alone, which is monochrome and as witty as it is arty.

Spry was the lady who revolutionised flowerarranging in the 1930s; Hume was the Cordon Bleu graduate who actually wrote these recipes. The book first came out in 1956 but was out of print for years. It shouldn't have been; Spry and Hume are extremely thorough, and many of these 1,000-plus pages dish up the kind of useful information that mothers once passed on to daughters but which most of us now discover through trial and burned, embarrassing error. The pictures are scarce and stodgy words such as preliminary are commonplace; and there's no recipe for coronation chicken, which seems odd as Spry is credited with its invention, but you will find something for every taste in this compendious cookbook.