It’s always fun to change things up in the kitchen with a new recipe book. But in a market as saturated as the cookbook one (5,000 cookery titles were published in 2020 and only 48 sold more than 5,000 copies), how do you sort the wheat from the chaff?

Here, we’ve found three new tomes that we promise will tickle your tastebuds.

The Farm Table By Julius Roberts


The Farm Table- A Cookbook

Nobody sells the dream of the good life better than chef turned cookery writer Julius Roberts. When he realised that he couldn’t sustain the pace as a chef at Noble Rot, he left London and set himself up with sheep, goats and beehives on a small farm in Dorset. His new cookbook, which focuses on the careful handling of local and seasonal produce, is inspired by that journey. With its beautiful photography and accessible recipes, The Farm Table is a pure delight. If you don’t take our word for it, take Nigel Slater’s. He describes it as: ‘a heartwarming and uplifting book. The recipes are utterly gorgeous.’ Roberts’s Instagram feed @juliusroberts is not bad either.


Yiayia: Time Perfected Recipes From Greece’s Grandmothers By Anastasia Miari


Yiayia- Time-perfected Recipes From Greece

Born in Corfu and now based between Athens and London, Anastasia Miari is a glamorous food writer, podcaster and cook. Six years ago, she undertook a project, Matriarch Eats, in which she travelled the world in order to cook with, and interview, grandmothers of every kind. The culmination of that project is her new cookbook, Yiayia (which means ‘Granny’ in Greek). Evocative and romantic as a piece of travel writing, the book is a joy to read. Its recipes are mouth-watering and its message is as clear as the Aegean Sea: lap up life’s small pleasures, eat loads of fish and vegetables – and never hold back on the olive oil.


Tomato: 80 Recipes Celebrating The Extraordinary Tomato By Claire Thomson


Tomato- 80 Recipes Celebrating The Extraordinary Tomato

This perky book is bound to make you fall in love – whether for the first time or all over again – with tomatoes. In it, bestselling writer and professional chef Claire Thomson produces 80 recipes that have the fruit (both fresh and tinned) at their heart. Thomson, who is deeply likeable and on Instagram as @5oclockapron, says: ‘Vegetables dominate in the food I make, and olive oil and lemons are always to hand. I cook because I love it and we all need to eat. I write because all the best cooks and chefs I have ever known share a deep and greedy love of good food writing. I am almost always in an apron.’

By Becky Ladenburg
October 2023