I’m a self-taught chef: instead of the traditional route of becoming a commis in a restaurant and working on a staged series of culinary tasks, I did a number of dead-end jobs and spent my evenings poring over cookbooks, trying to figure out what made one version of a recipe more distinctive and delicious than another.

Books were my mentors and I’ve amassed about 2,000 of them, cluttering up the attic or the shelves at home. So when the ship goes down, taking my kitchen library with it, it’s going to be hard to decide which eight books to grab and drag towards the shore. These, though, would be among the first I’d search for.

With its photos of 12 of the best French restaurants during the bustle of service — from Paul Bocuse bawling out a sous-chef to François Bise rolling triangles of pastry into croissants — Great Chefs of France by Anthony Blake and Quentin Crewe was the book that made the prospect of becoming a chef seem unbelievably exciting and glamorous. Inspired by this, I began crisscrossing France during my summer holiday, armed with the Michelin Guide and GaultMillau, searching out restaurants and suppliers that would teach me about what goes into making great food. I’d have to take these with me so that, in my head, I could escape the desert island and revisit all those places. There’d be a pleasure, too, in rereading Michelin’s confident, authoritative pronouncements on cuisine, service and ambience and GaultMillau’s wordier and more wayward assessments.

The French chef who most influenced me was Alain Chapel. He seemed always to be ahead of the pack: using roasting juices as a sauce, for example, when everyone else was making complicated demi-glaces. When I first visited his restaurant in Mionnay I was bowled over by its relaxed informality, with its simple wicker chairs, and thought that if I got to live my dream of opening a restaurant, this was the kind of atmosphere I wanted. So I’d like my dog-eared copy of Les Recettes Originales d’Alain Chapel, its pages full of my word-by-word translations of the recipes. Chapel’s Gelée de Pigeonneaux and Tarte aux Pralines were the starting points for two dishes on the Fat Duck tasting menu, and his book continues to be a source of inspiration.

My other culinary hero is Mrs Agnes B. Marshall. Of her four books I’d choose Fancy Ices (1894) because ice cream has always been an obsession of mine. She was an incredibly forward-looking chef (advocating the benefits of liquid nitrogen in kitchens and hospitals when it was still a recent scientific breakthrough) who deserves to be better known. That she isn’t is because her publishers pushed Mrs Beeton, and because a warehouse fire destroyed her archive, and so her place in history went up in smoke. Fancy Ices is full of surprising ice creams, such as curry flavour, that would be fascinating to try out — if I could get some saltpetre to make ice the old-fashioned way.

I serve a version of Mrs Marshall’s Margaret Cornet, and historical dishes have come to be an important feature of the menu. I’d also want my copy of Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook, which provided the foundation for one of my first historical adaptations, Quaking Pudding. First published in 1660, May’s book has more than 1,000 recipes and gives an extraordinary insight into a rich but largely forgotten English culinary tradition. In the past, cookbooks were written more as reminders than as a set of instructions. I’ve had great fun, and a little frustration, trying to guess at what May might have intended by measurements such as “a small bigness” and helpful instructions such as “cook till it’s done”.

A lot of my inspiration has come from sources other than cookbooks. At the heart of my cooking is the idea that eating is a multisensory experience — it’s one of the few things we do that engages all the senses — so I’d need to have Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume (the story of Grenouille, a man hypersensitive to the odours around him and drawn to murder as a result) because it’s an extraordinary evocation of the power of our neglected sense of smell and a reminder of how intensely it can summon emotion and nostalgia. Many of the dishes at my restaurant have gained an extra dimension from triggers to the sense of smell: a spritz of lime grove scent, or a dry-ice waft of the aromas of smoke and whisky.

If, though, I could save only one book, it would of course have to be On Food and Cooking by my good friend Harold McGee. When it first appeared in 1984, it revolutionised the way I thought about cooking, encouraging me to question everything and to apply a scientific logic and rigour to my investigation of recipes, ingredients and techniques. It lucidly outlines the nature of ingredients and how they behave during cooking, covering everything from the character of yak milk to the best way to roast coconut — information I reckon I’m going to need if I am marooned in the tropics.

Heston’s Fantastical Feasts is published by Bloomsbury on May 3

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