If Santa is kind enough to bring you a wad of book tokens along with your annual delivery of Homer Simpson socks, undersized knitwear and embossed handkerchiefs this Christmas, why not redeem them on a truly memorable cook book?
In recent years, chefs and their publishers have grown wise to a growing appetite for coffee table tomes with the production values of a James Cameron movie and the weight of a small child. Here, Caterer showcases five of the most sumptuous, wallet-lightening volumes on the market.
Coco: 100 Emerging Culinary Stars Chosen by 10 of the World's Greatest Chefs
Various
Phaidon Press £29.95
ISBN 978-0-7148-4954-5
The premise is simple: 10 stellar chefs (think Ramsay, Adrià, Ducasse) each select 10 up-and-coming stars of the kitchen who are then published with a short biography and an explanation of inclusion from their selector, along with their recipes and images of their signature dishes.
Some of our selectors seem to have stayed rather close to home in their chef choices. Ramsay picks his Royal Hospital Road head chef Clare Smyth, Maze chef-patron Jason Atherton and former Pétrus head chef Tristan Welch, not to mention Lyndy Redding, whose company Absolute Taste he is involved in. Elsewhere, Fergus Henderson picks St John alumni Tom Pemberton and Jonathon Johns. But if you can bear the whiff of nepotism and the glaring exclusions (there's no room at the inn for Nathan Outlaw or Sat Bains), this breeze-block of a book is a fantastic compendium of the global state of the industry to come.
Three Star Chef
Gordon Ramsay
Quadrille Publishing £200
ISBN 978-1-8440-0585-7
After a year that he may wish to forget, Gordon Ramsay's sumptuous Three Star Chef offers a timely reminder that, if there were a Harlem Globetrotters of chefs, the Potty-Mouthed One would be on the team.
From the silver-embossed cover onwards, this is a mission statement that oozes confidence. Fifty of Ramsay's classic dishes are reproduced, first pictorially in finished form, and subsequently in recipe form. Among them are lobster ravioli, corn-reared beef fillet with marrow crust and pan-roasted fillet of John Dory with Cromer crab. A sweary Mary he may be, but Ramsay is also a mighty fine chef, and this monolithic tome will stand as a monument to his technical brilliance.
A Day at El Bulli
Ferran Adrià
Phaidon £29.95
ISBN 978-0-7148-4883-9
For those of us that have about as much chance of getting a reservation at El Bulli as Wales do of winning the World Cup next year, A Day at El Bulli provides a fascinating insight into a day's service in the world's greatest restaurant.
Starting at daybreak and ending in the early hours of the following morning, the book encompasses visits to local markets, chefs' brainstorming sessions, mise en place and service by means of mind-blowing food photography and reportage shots of Adrià's brigade at work.
There are recipes to try for the more confident chef, but purchasers should expect a historical document of a groundbreaking restaurant at the top of its game rather than a recipe book.
Grand Livre De Cuisine: Alain Ducasse's Culinary Encyclopaedia
Alain Ducasse et al
Alain Ducasse £40
ISBN 978-2-8484-4038-5
Ducasse took the Ronseal approach when he named this volume. It is, indeed, a big culinary book - one of the biggest - and full of big numbers: 700 recipes across 1,080 pages, inspired by an A-Z of 100 core ingredients, to be precise. 'A' is for acacia, anchovy, artichoke and asparagus; 'B' is for baby broad beans, Atlantic bass... you get the picture.
The imagery is stunning, if lacking the food porn quality of other titles in this roundup, but it's the forensic approach to recipe transcription that'll have chefs slavering.
The Big Fat Duck Cookbook
Heston Blumenthal
Bloomsbury £125
ISBN 978-0-7475-8369-1
Generously proportioned, pricey and lavishly illustrated, this is the definitive last word on the Fat Duck's cuisine, a wonderland of test tubes, children's stories and conches all shrouded in an eerie, dry-ice mist. It's the fact that Blumenthal is giving away his culinary knowledge that will draw chefs to this book.
"I make no apologies for it not being 'The Fat Duck at Home'", Blumenthal told Caterer on its release. "It's not intended to be a book that turns Fat Duck dishes into domestic kitchen fare. The recipes are down-to-the-milligram Fat Duck recipes. All the secrets are given away. There's no 'if you can't get foie gras, go and buy yourself chicken livers'.
"Some of these dishes have taken several years to get right - and there may be an ingredient in there without which they will not be the same."
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