It’s more than a recipe book, it’s paean to a way of life and of eating and anyone who is interested in food beyond what’s fashionable this week should get a copy. Lulu will in her simple way tell you more about cooking than any Masterchef ever could.

Containing no fewer than 1,000 recipes and organised first by season, then by course, Cooking Through the Year aims to provide a one-stop reference to help cooks understand which meats, fishes and vegetables are in season at any given time of the year, and to provide wholesome, simple recipes to make the most out of them.

‘Devnaa’s India’ demystifies a cuisine that’s disappointingly under-represented on bookshop shelves and in restaurants – home-style Gujarati fare. Hearty, humble and pretty darn healthy, Guji food is the just the sort you could gorge on and still feel just gorgeous.

Using cheap, simple ingredients to simply stunning effect,’The Dal Cookbook’ is perfect for straightened gourmets undernourished from – and underwhelmed by – dreadful’dude food’.

We all like pies don’t we; from the handheld variety to be waved aloft at football matches, to luxury en croute creations to wow guests at dinner. They are comforting, they are tasty and they are as British as queuing.

Omar Allibhoy can do complicated if he wants; his food at Tapas Revolution, the restaurant chain he founded, can serve up seriously inventive snacks, but this book is all about the simple recipes he grew up with and which he wants to share.

Once I managed to squash the urge to tear out the endpapers and use the colourful, stamp-laden pages as wrapping paper, I got – ahem –’stuck’ right in to’Sun Bread and Sticky Toffee’. Then promptly got waylaid once again, contemplating the evocative location photography by the author and food shots from the ever-stellar Kate Whitaker.

The book’s republishing now in paperback, after some years out of print, is hopefully not an act of doomed bravery by Grubstreet but a timely push back against the tide of food writing rubbish that threatens to engulf us all, even in our Sunday papers. If you don’t already own a copy, now’s your chance to rectify that omission.

Pesto is 150 years old and that jar you have in the fridge is no spring chicken either. Jonny reads the recipe book 

AKA the book I wish I’d penned. And, were I a British-born son of the Subcontinent with a way with a word, a dashing, dandy-ish dress sense, and a slim pencil moustache, I may well have pipped him to the post.