Our carefully chosen selection of cookbooks — contemporary classics and quiet gems from some of the most interesting food writers working right now. At Ondine Ash, our curated shop on the Old High Street in Falmouth, Cornwall, the books we stock are the ones we’d actually cook from, chosen because they sit as well on a shelf as they open on a kitchen counter, and because they make some of the best cookbook gifts for food lovers, Christmas presents for cooks and housewarming gifts we know of.
Yotam Ottolenghi anchors the collection with three of his best: Comfort — a celebration of deeply satisfying, soulful cooking from his London restaurants; Shelf Love — the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen’s relaxed, fridge-friendly approach to weekday cooking; and the perennial Simple, his much-loved guide to bold flavour with minimal effort. Anna Jones brings her equally loyal following with Easy Wins, her most recent collection of achievable plant-forward recipes, and One Pot, Pan, Planet — vegetable cooking for real life, with a sustainability conscience. Letitia Clark’s For the Love of Lemons is a sun-soaked love letter to Italian and Sardinian cooking, perfect for anyone who wants to cook the Mediterannean way at home.
For Japanese food lovers, Nancy Singleton Hachisu’s Japan: The Cookbook is the definitive home cooking bible for the cuisine, while Saori Ichihara’s Japanese Comfort Food takes a warmer, more accessible route into the same tradition — both make brilliant Japanese cookery gifts. Liz Knight’s Forage is the one for the wild food enthusiast: a practical, beautiful guide to seasonal foraging in the British countryside, at home on any serious cook’s shelf. Fraser Reid’s Seasonal Soups covers warming, seasonal soup recipes for every month of the year, and Alexina Anatole’s Bitter makes the case for bitter flavours across sweet and savoury cooking. Two small-format additions — Claire Dinhut’s The Condiment Book and the Kimchi Pocket Guide — make great stocking fillers for the food-obsessed.
Cookbooks by Ottolenghi, Anna Jones, Letitia Clark & more — contemporary food writing gifts for cooks. Ondine Ash, Falmouth, Cornwall.
