A tone of encouragement and enthusiasm permeates the whole collection; when Alice isn’t comparing root vegetables to characters from Doctor Who, she is sharing stories of her coriander-hater brother, Ian, or cheekily catching the reader out, when she acknowledges that they probably didn’t bother reading the recipe introduction.

As opposed to fake food perhaps? No we know what Stevie means, he’s talking about food that is not restaurant style, not prettified, petrified, emulsified and self-satisfied. Well it’s hard to argue with that

A new recipe book from Mark Hix, he of all the restaurants strewn around London bearing his name and the chef most beloved by ‘blokes’. Not for Mark the pansy hand of fusion, the effete mannerisms of molecular gastronomy. He’s the prop-forward of seasonal cuisine, always ready for a ruck, a maul and a singsong with the critics in the showers afterwards, while trying to stitch his ear back on.

Step forward Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, creators of jelly airports, cocktail lakes, gin clouds and scratch and sniff cinema, whose first book, ‘Jelly’ is published this month…

Hailing originally from Breton, Richard Bertinet is a chef, baker and food writer, who also runs a range of courses at his kitchen in Bath. It is the latter which has provided the inspiration for his latest book, Cook, as a lot of the content has been inspired by questions from his customers.

It’s against the flow of female chefs that My Grill (subtitled Food for the Barbecue) from Pete Evans makes its debut. Evans is well-known in his native Australia, where he has owned restaurants, and appears regularly on the Australian version of MasterChef – cooking doesn’t get taffer than that! – as Greg Wallace might say.

With a foreword from Grand Master Pierre Koffman, this is a real celebration of real food – it can look pretty but it never sacrifices visual appeal for visceral satisfaction. Get greased up with some duck fat and dive into this unique collection of taste and terroir.

Simone and Ines Ortega are the chef/authors and names to drop whenever talk turns to tapas. Their book, 1080 Recipes is a fixture in just about every Spanish home kitchen and they are a trusted authority. Their Book of Tapas has the tone of voice of people who know what they’re doing and if you pay attention you will too.

All of GB’s best and unique ingredients are used here, venison, ham hocks, beetroots, John Dory, rare pork breeds, Somerset cider Cromer crabs – the list goes on and on reading as a roll call of all the things we can be proud to call British. Preferably raising a pint of warm beer into the air as we do so while litter flaps around our ankles in a bracing seaside breeze.

The reissued volume 2 of Julia Child’s seminal work Mastering the Art of French Cooking is now out and shows yet again how a cookbook should be written. A work of luminous writing, compassion, pedagogy and superb classic recipes made possible for any cook who wants to learn and knows how to read.