THE READING PUBLIC’S insatiable love affair with food shows no sign of dwindling. Cooking, exotic and British, sophisticated and homely, spills out of the television and radio and fills rows of shelves in the bookshops.

But savvy publishers know that many food fetishists are voyeurs, not participants. It is for them that so many cookbooks are steeped in heady prose, with thick, glossy paper and pictures that make you want to lick the page. Even if you never cook a recipe, they are a pleasure to own.

Two stand-out books that marry mouth-watering pictures and prose with good recipes are Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries (Fourth Estate, £16.99/offer £15.30) and Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook (Bloomsbury, £30/£27). Although Garden Cookbook is expensive, it contains 450 recipes, which works out at around 6.7p each.

Slater wrote down everything that he cooked for a year, a strategy that immediately fills the reader with a foolish impulse to beg the great man to let them live with him so that he can whip them up ten-minute suppers of tiny lamb chops with feta and mint, or perfect, fudgy cheesecakes.

Raven writes from her vast garden in Sussex, suggesting recipes for produce with an agreeable mix of poetry and practicality. She sympathises with gardeners overwhelmed by how many courgettes their plants produce, givings recipes for courgette risotto, farfalle, soufflé, tart, salad, pie, fritters, chutney and more.

Angela Hartnett, of the Connaught restaurant, has written Cucina: Three Generations of Italian Family Cooking (Ebury, £25, £22.50), full of Italian dishes and styles of cooking. She has judged Britain’s taste for culinary adventure nicely, including recipes for rabbit pasta and stuffed veal that are excitingly challenging to cook at home, not off-puttingly complex.

For pudding, James Martin’s huge-selling Desserts (Quadrille, £20, £18), also has some complex recipes, and intriguing flavour combinations (chocolate and fennel, anyone?). They are counterbalanced by simpler things such as sticky toffee pudding, and a gorgeous passionfruit soufflé: excellent for anyone who has spent the past few years cooking through How to be a Domestic Goddess and now seeks a new sugar high.

Of the many foodie memoirs on offer, it is worth mentioning the very jolly Picklehead by Rohan Candappa (Ebury, £7.99, £7.59). Of Portuguese, Burmese and Sri Lankan descent, Candappa has much culinary history to draw on, and punctuates his moving and funny account of life as the child of immigrants with recipes for steaming noodle soups, fiendish curries and chilli sandwich spread.

Also good is William Black’s Plats du Jour (Bantam, £16.99/£15.30). The author is a veteran of the eat-your-way across the map genre, and this book about France is witty and thoughtful, redolent with garlic and goose fat. It extemporises at length on the specialities of each area.

The Year of Eating Dangerously by Tom Parker Bowles (Ebury, £7.99, £7.59) is another good holiday read, an account of eating to extremes around the world. The prose is rather naive (meat, at one point, is distinguished by its “meatiness”), but his enthusiasm is charming.

Buy the books here

Celebrity choice: Tom Parker Bowles, foodie

Grub Street has just reissued Jane Grigson’s GOOD THINGS, a classic that celebrated local, seasonal food way before it was taken up by eco-friendly name droppers. Her prose is clear and elegant, her knowledge deep and passionate and her recipes a joy to cook. It’s the sort of book you read in bed before using it. Great food writers never date.

The Year of Eating Dangerously by Tom Parker Bowles is published by Ebury Press at £7.99

Reader choice: Travel in time with Proust for bitchy giggles, obsessive love, snobbery, sodomy and sinuous prose. REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST should see you through autumn, winter and spring too. Value, no? Linda O'Callaghan, London

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