Vegetarians eh? Blooming nuisances that they are, always checking you haven’t used non veggie stock in their soup or slipped some gelatine in their jelly. If there’s one thing worse than a veggie round for dinner though, it has to be a vegan. They won’t eat anything that isn’t 100% made of plants.

If you go and dig around the Christmas leftovers cupboard- what do you mean you don’t got one?- you might find one of those whimsical, hexagonal boxes of Turkish delight. And you might think a few glunky cubes would be the perfect accompaniment to this sweet tome. Wrong.

This is ultimately a book you will in fact probably never cook from but you will enjoy enormously. It will make you want to search out restaurants that take the care, the creativity and the time that Marque does to deliver a dining experience beyond the norm. You’ll eat with renewed appreciation of what it takes to be a chef at this level and you’ll savour every morsel because you’ll have a very good idea of just how very hard it was to create.

Nuovo Mondo is a collaboration between Stefano de Pieri, Italian originally of course, and Jim McDougall who was born an Aussie. Together they set out to create dishes that break moulds. Stefano admits he is a conservative chef, marinaded in tradition. Jim, once his apprentice, is brimming with new ideas and together they set out to surprise each other, to create new dishes together and argue amicably in pursuit of the exciting.

Morocco is still a mysterious place but it is accessible, a vast area with cooking as varied as its landscape, towns, villages, souks and medinas. Tangiers, Casablanca, Marrakech are all names that conjure up memories of classic films, as well as of Led Zeppelin, and Paula Wolfert has over 50 year’s experience in country. This lavish book is another expert excursion into the cooking she loves so much.

Chocolate. Who’s not a fan? At Christmas, be you ardent admirer or casual consumer, the brown stuff seems to be afforded an elevated status as a valid and necessary food group. What the hell- there are far worse forms of substance abuse. And, in fact, chocolatiers like Chantal Coady are in the finest of fettle- testament to the properties of the food that fuelled Montezuma.

Magnus Nilssen’s Faviken Magasinet may uphold the stripped-back, austere values of the simultaneously reviled and revered ‘New Nordic’ label, but ‘Faviken’ is the art-house porn of the cookbook world- and we all know there’s only so much vicarious titillation you can take before you, too, are sweaty, splattered, and very, very satisfied.

Ooh I do like a fuggy kitchen on a cold day, with all those lovely cooking smells wafting about like the Christmas Fairy. Especially these Scandi  bakes with their liberal use of cardamom. And my own majestic love for those cakes and cookies knows no bounds. So those smells are about the only things that are going to resemble the Fairy this Christmas.

Kneading is the bit most home bread-makers fall down on – it’s such very hard work. Sure you can use the bread hook on the mixer but, unless you’ve paid for something serious like a KitchenAid, the thing will dance all over the worktop and probably won’t last ten minutes before emitting a smell of burning wires as a prelude to bursting into flames.