Spring-clean your cooking

While foodies eagerly wait for The River Café Two Easy by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers and the paperback of Nigella Lawson's Forever Summer, to hit the bookshops, there is a current batch of cookbooks that are just the thing for a spring-clean of your eating and cooking habits. All celebrate a back-to-basics approach, with a strong British influence.

Nottingham-based dinner lady Jeanette Orrey has spent more than 14 years cooking for schoolchildren, so she can teach Jamie Oliver a thing or two - and, in fact, she has. Oliver acknowledges her help in the foreword of Orrey's
The Dinner Lady (Bantam Press, £16.99).

The book is appetisingly presented in a Jamie Oliver/Nigella Lawson coffee-table-style cookbook. But the recipes are more dinner-table than coffee-table: chicken nuggets made with organic diced chicken, breadcrumbs, garlic powder and paprika served with homemade tomato relish, and sweetcorn, and fish crumble pie.

Orrey knows her market - "dice vegetables very small", so even the most committed vegetable-hater will be coming back for seconds of her lasagne made with carrots, celery and courgettes topped with a cheddar-cheese sauce.

This beautifully photographed and childillustrated book is not just for mums - recipes are given for four children and for 96 children, so it is dinner lady-friendly as well.

Food historian Annette Hope has jumped aboard the British food wagon with Londoner's Larder (Mainstream Publishing, £9.99), where she gives recipes and anecdotes from the eras of famous literary Londoners, from Chaucer to the present day.

Hope has rewritten the recipes in contemporary cookbook-speak (no Jamie Oliver pukkas or mates). Some of the recipes are remarkably contemporary, such as fennel soup subtly spiced with ground ginger from Chaucer's 14th-century lunchtime to a fast, easy lobster cocktail recipe from 1927.

Hopping to the opposite side of the world, Australia, where Britain exported quite a lot of its culinary habits, we have a cookbook from Sydney chef and restaurateur Neil Perry.

This popular, supertrendy chef, whose restaurant, Rockpool, was voted among the world's top 50, has just published The Food I Love (Murdoch Books, £30). His stylish 200-plus-page hardback is a study in white: white bowls, white plates and white napkins make the recipes look effortlessly stylish.

Perry likes to write: he can devote two pages on how to make an omelette, but his recipes are very user-friendly and adaptable.