Teasing the tastebuds

Eric Griffiths picks the bones out of the year's cookery books...

The worst thing about Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible (Ebury Press, £25) is its title, deplorable on grounds of overkill - the publishers should have been true to their whole-hoggish selves and added Celebrity Group Sex after Ultimate - and of unfashionable insensitivity to all possible shades of religious and anti-religious belief.

I don't much favour curry myself, but there are many dishes here to ravish your mouth: try the Sri Lankan prawns with roasted spices, or the perfumed saffron tea from Kashmir. A better index would help uninitiates who may be thrown when they find "pandanus leaf (bai toey, rampe, daun paandan)" as a 13th ingredient for the prawns, though none of these names appears in any of the book's alphabetised lists (after 20 minutes' searching, I found "pandanus" under "Screw Pine", "the vanilla of South-East Asia". I am a public-service reviewer).

The Duchess of Devonshire had hoped to call her new book I Haven't Cooked Since the War, but this "was not well looked on by others". Bloody publishers again. Her Grace is a delightful writer, sometimes risking controversy, as with her views on kosher ("very wise, no doubt, in the Holy Land before the advent of refrigerators, but hardly necessary in Oxfordshire"), but also voicing sentiments to which every decent bosom will return an echo: "I love watching young men of cricket-playing age eat all that is put before them and come back for more."

She shares Jane Austen's gift for infusing a whole form of life into a few plain words such as "Margaret comes to us for alternate Christmases". Unfortunately, the Duchess is the best thing about The Duchess of Devonshire's Chatsworth Cookery Book (Frances Lincoln, £9.99); the recipes equal the insipidity of the title with their lashings of whipping cream and superfluous arrowroot in the Cumberland sauce.

Neither the prose nor the cookery charms in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's The River Cottage Year (Hodder, £17.99). In his opening paragraph, he impersonates first the Prime Minister ("I passionately believe ...") and then Prince Charles ("our sense of seasonality is under threat"). These men may have virtues, but they are not models of English style. At other points, only overconfidence brought on by Hugh's own rhubarb cocktails could explain tripe such as: "March can be every bit as miserable, marrow-chilling and monotonous as February." Cut away the green-wellied bleating, and what are you left with? Moist socks warm from the Aga, which is what his parsnip risotto tastes of.

Books with "Christmas" in their title always disappoint. This rule applies even to Dickens, but not to Elizabeth David's Christmas (Michael Joseph, £14.99). We owe Jill Norman a debt for assembling it from Mrs David's posthumous papers. It's all good, except the 16-colour photographs added by the publisher to whet appetites, artily focused so that you can marvel at the perfection of a lemon or the romance of the radish (there are, given the season, no recipes which call for radishes).

Times have changed since Elizabeth David lamented that, "in this country, we don't make nearly enough of olive oil as a seasoning", or that "one never hears" of membrillo; saltpetre can no longer be bought from a chemist's, to the dismay of terrorists and those who would like to try her intriguing recipe for spiced beef.

Content yourself instead with tarragon and cream cheese croutons or spiced prunes, and with her melancholy, spry good sense. For example: "I do not willingly cook or eat bread sauce, but recognise that there are still many people to whom the turkey without bread sauce is not the turkey (An Italian friend once told me that in Sardinia a peasant woman said to her, 'Christmas without a roast cat wouldn't be Christmas')."

Gordon Ramsay's Secrets (Quadrille, £25) acknowledges Roz Denny as "tester-in-chief and wordsmith", so perhaps we have her to thank for gems such as "making bread is like making love - it's a passion, not an item". Readers might amuse themselves over a dull Boxing Day by finding other ways to complete that maxim - "don't hesitate to work your fingers till they hurt", "steer clear of children and sand", "leave for an hour till swollen to twice the size".

Such piffle aside, Gordon Ramsay's brilliance as a cook shines through recipes for aromatic steamed cod, marinated oysters on shavings of crisped fennel, or celeriac "lasagne". He is generous with ingenious advice about how to make a relish from powdered scallop corals, surprising but cogent places to put icing sugar, and the caramelisation of lemons; he even tells you why you shouldn't season the eggs before cooking an omelette. This is that very rare thing, a book by a professional which helps cack-handed amateurs like me do something more than just dream on.

Evening Standard's prestigious award for cookery book of the year, though, goes to River Cafe Book Easy (Ebury, £20). Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers make "interesting" (one of their favourite adjectives) Italian food such as chicken roasted with nutmeg or tagliatelle with chilli and figs, dishes which sing and which seem, like big Verdi tunes, obvious once you know them, though it took genius to find the precise combination of notes.