Food books with few or no recipes are this year's welcome trend. Tamasin Day-Lewis's Where Shall We Go for Dinner? (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99, pp288) has a recipe or three at the end of each episode, a good tactic for persuading the bookseller to display the book both in the biography and cookery sections. But the meat of her book is a foodie memoir and travelogue (Italy, France, America) charting her developing romance with Rob, the owner of America's best cheese shop, Murray's, in Greenwich Village, New York.
There's more than a little interest in the names she drops - father Cecil, brother Daniel, mother Jill Balcon, friends Julia Roberts, Kingsley and Martin Amis, godmother Elizabeth Jane Howard - but the real pleasure is Day-Lewis's fluent writing, especially apparent in her descriptions of the edible (not that easy - try describing your own lunch ) that turns this seemingly aimless book into a page-turner.
Her sole vice is the use of 'we food writers', which anyway runs rampant nowadays, whereas Nigel Slater's tic in his recipe-free Eating for England (Fourth Estate £16.99, pp304) is just a little too much grit in the oyster. Of course, reminders of snot, 'smells of old people' or pee give street cred to a book of self-contained essays about food.
Slater writes gorgeously, like a greedy angel, and these sometimes dainty portions of nostalgia, like some of the vanished childhood treats it documents, are pleasurable just because of their miniature size, but I'd have preferred more of the dining room and less of the kitchen sink.
Food: The History of Taste (Thames & Hudson £24.95, pp368) edited by Paul Freedman, is a savoury collection of 10 splendidly illustrated essays by serious historians, about the relationship of food and civilisation from prehistory through imperial China to today's food malls. The perfect present for the curious foodie in your life, these are exciting, completely accessible examples of the new directions being taken by food historians, though Elliot Shore vitiates his piece on the development of dining out by howlerishly misidentifying the first restaurant. The old story is the true one: it was Boulanger's in 1765 and its Paris premises still exist in La Rue du Louvre.
Recipes are, paradoxically, not the point of Heston Blumenthal's Further Adventures in Search of Perfection: Reinventing Kitchen Classics (Bloomsbury £20, pp320), even though the classics in question include the hamburger, fish pie, chicken tikka masala, risotto, baked Alaska and trifle. For one thing, there's too much fructose and dry ice among the ingredients for home cooks to be bothered and too much reliance on digital probes. In Heston's hands, cooking is rocket science.
But there's much more than culinary engineering: in 'Baked Alaska', a history of New York restaurant Delmonico's sits alongside accounts of the late Nicholas Kurti's wonderfully wacky presentations for the Oxford Symposium and the Royal Institution, which gave birth to molecular gastronomy. And who could resist reading about the bastard origins of chicken tikka masala? A good deal more than the book of the TV series. Maybe it's a guy thing, but I love it.
In another TV tie-in, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is back on form with The River Cottage Fish Book, written with Nick Fisher (Bloomsbury £30, pp608). Like his earlier book on meat, this is the product of serious research and, again, the recipes are almost beside the point. Encyclopedic entries for virtually every edible native marine and freshwater species make this an invaluable guide, one to sit next to Alan Davidson's fish books. As a bonus, the book tells you the conservation status of most fish and shellfish and encourages us to eat some delicious things such as diver-caught scallops and razor clams.
Moro East by Sam and Sam Clark (Ebury £25, pp320) is a recipe book pure and simple. I'm not a fan of Toby Glanville's photographs, set in the Clarks' slightly grubby allotment in the soon-to-be-demolished-for-the-Olympics Manor Garden in the East End, as the food looks a little beige. The eastern Mediterranean flavours, on the other hand, won me over, especially their meat recipes. Kebabs with flat breads, chicken with spring garlic and sweet PX sherry, pan-fried pork with almonds and fennel and roast chicken with the sour red Lebanese spice, sumac, onions and pine nuts - my kinda nosh.
I can't say the same for the quick recipes in Gary Rhodes's Time to Eat (Michael Joseph £25, pp256). The dishes which are appetising - his salads, for example - are so simple it's stretching a point to call the instructions recipes. And as for the first half-dozen store-cupboard dishes, I think I'd rather go hungry.
