The photography and printing are obviously produced on a budget as I suppose is standard for an independently produced magazine. Hopefully in time as it grows in stature, Country Kitchen will take on the slickly produced finish that it deserves.

Country Kitchen is aimed at the non-city dweller and people who have access to seasonal produce, game and so forth. However, they have a monthly series called Foraging Around the M25. This month, there is an interesting article about mushroom hunting, in particular Morels. It is fascinating to read about the hidden gems, just peeking out from behind the constant flow of traffic on our motorways.

With February and March being the leanest months, produce wise, there is an interesting article on Store Cupboard foods, with some deliciously cosy meals utilising dried pulses, some traditional uses for milk (and a cry for us to start using the milkman again) and a wonderful article on the Kyle of Tongue Oysters.

 In fact, unlike its glossier and burlier shelf buddies, Olive, Good Food (both popular BBC publications) and Delicious (from heavyweight publishers, Seven), every page has something worth reading, it is not cluttered up with advertisements and the relative anonymity of its journalists make it feel more like the food takes centre stage (although, it does cite Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mary Berry, Paul Rankin and James Martin as contributors to the magazine).

The writing is friendly and ingredients all sourceable within this country. There is nothing in the magazine that I feel I, as an amateur home cook, couldn’t prepare with ease and enjoyment. I recently cooked Februarys cover dish, the Love Apple Tart, with great success.

What I find most charming about Country Kitchen is that it feels like an approachable magazine. There are no expensive restaurants reviewed and the food doesn’t look like it was arranged by a highly paid food stylist.

Of course, for the time being, this will work for and against the magazine, but if it continues to grow with such dogged determination, alongside achievable recipes and its slant towards homegrown organic produce (surely the culinary keywords for this millennium), it will soon receive the readership it deserves.

What I know about the show is that perhaps some of the leading ladies should eat some of the recipes featured in their cookbook. However, personal gripes aside, TDHC is actually a well thought out book with sections devoted to each character and therefore to suit cooks of various tastes and ability in the kitchen.

Each character has at least two sub sections devoted to starters, mains, desserts, romantic occasions, kids foods etc which makes the book easy to navigate.

Overworked Mom, Lynette, has lots of cheap and cheerful recipes: meatloaf (see my successful version of this dish here), Buttermilk Fried Chicken, Stovetop Pork Chops and so on. They are old school dishes that secretly have their place in most peoples kitchens (and hearts).

Gabrielle, the flirty Latina, has a spicy selection of Mexican recipes and, for the health conscious, a low fat section too. The Black Bean soup is particularly tasty and the Tamales are fiddly but worth the effort.

You would expect that Man Eater Edie has more things to think about than cooking and her luxurious (but scant) recipes reflect her seductive nature: Oysters Poached in Champagne and Cream, Ambrosia, Camembert Baked in Its Box.

Aspirational Bree has the most complex recipes: Bree’s Two Step Braised Duck, Chicken Cutlets Saltimbocca, Lobster Risotto with herb oil, but everything is within the capability of the slightly more experienced cook. These are recipes designed to impress the husbands boss.

Finally, walking kitchen disaster Susan has no less than four sub sections of recipes, none of which you would imagine she cooks herself but certainly wishes she could. Starting with Foolproof Macaroni and Cheese (the subject of an episode of Desperate Housewives where Susan apparently manages to simultaneously burn AND undercook the dish) and working through more homey dishes like Noodle Casserole, Meatballs, Sloppy Joes and Easy or Easier Coleslaw, these are dishes for busy people who enjoy comfort food.

What TDHC sets out to achieve is a combination of usable recipes whilst keeping the hardcore fans of the show happy. This may limit the appeal of the book because many people don’t like gimmicky cookbooks. However, it would be a shame to see this book relegated to the reduced bargain bin section of the bookstore as it does have many sound recipes.  Taking elements from each section, you can produce several decent meals and I feel that the ‘pick and mix’ feel of the book is part of its charm.

Book available from Amazon.co.uk for £12.53 and Amazon.com for $19.77.

With that in mind, I recently decided to pull out my Christmas Cookbooks. It seems that every chef or TV cook has either made a series or written a book devoted to that most magical time of the year. Let’s be honest though: how many recipes for Mince Pies or Guides to Roasting Turkeys do we really need? Apparently it is an infinite number.

Regular readers of cookery magazines such as the Good Food (UK) or Fine Cooking (USA) will, like myself, revel in the quirky new twists that their home economists slaved over in July. To help cut through the flotsam though, I have a few tried and tested cookbooks, ones that never fail to let you down and that, if you were so inclined, you would pass down through the generations of your family. Other books just fill you with a sense of Christmas spirit. Whether or not you choose to cook from them is another matter altogether.

A book that I could read all year round is from the New York Times Restaurant reviewer Mimi Sheraton, Visions of Sugarplums (with the wonderfully alliterative subtitle: A Cookbook of Cakes, Cookies, Candies and Confections from all the Countries that Celebrate Christmas!). First published in 1967, this book collects together a variety of luscious sweets and cakes that are only made once a year. Whilst many of the recipes listed would not be suitable for the home cook (candy canes anyone?), there are some wonderfully evocative descriptions of how other cultures celebrate Christmas that should inspire the most jaded person to at least attempt a batch of Gingerbread Men. Unfortunately this book has been out of print since the mid-80s but with revived interest in home cooking, perhaps a reissue could be on the cards?

If you want someone to decide on your every move, Christmas-wise, from October onwards, then Delia Smith will ensure that you carry off a successful Big Day with military precision. For the American readers who may not be blessed with Delia, she is our equivalent of Martha Stewart (I am recalling an episode of The Winter Collection where she ‘suggests’ how the viewers should eat spaghetti). Delia is not as glamorously curvaceous as Nigella Lawson nor as trendy as Nigel Slater but she offers the reader good, solid, reliable recipes. Her book, Delia Smith’s Christmas has every traditional recipe you could wish for, with some classics that have been updated too. Where some books might be a little vague on timings or quantities, Delia’s are spot on to the very last molecule of flour. Some readers may find her style to be a little dry or old fashioned but if you find yourself disorganised at Christmas, Delia does remove a lot of the stress for you with her suggested timetables and menus. I enjoy her no nonsense approach to cooking and undoubtedly she has been one of the most important culinary figures in British cooking in the last 30 years.

Not strictly a Christmas Cookbook in its entirety but an important read nonetheless, is Diana Henry’s Roast Figs, Sugar Snow – Food to Warm the Soul. Diana Henry is one of Britain’s most intelligent food writers. Roast Figs, Sugar Snow is a beautiful collection of winter recipes from around the world, starting in Scotland and working through to New England, via Russia, Sweden and Quebec. The wonderful thing about this book is that the recipes are unusual but really delicious. Like the book itself, the recipes are hidden gems, for example the beetroot knodl is outstanding and would make a delightfully recherche Christmas Day starter. Her Ale Soaked Christmas Pudding is fruity and alcohol sozzled (as should all good Christmas Puds!).

The recipes have romantic names like Peasant Girls in a Mist (a sort of apple and cream fluff dessert) and her essay on the New England tradition of making Sugar Snow make you want to curl up by a warm fire and dive straight into the recipes. If you feel a bit budget conscious, buying a book that will only be dusted off once a year, Tamasin Day-Lewis Kitchen Bible has a concise section on Christmas and the book is useful for the rest of the year too…and Nigella Lawson, whilst she is yet to release a Christmas Cookbook (the time will come), Feast offers up many variants of the Christmas celebrations, with her own seductive twist on things. Ina Garton’s Barefoot Conessa series of cookbooks never fail to put me in a party mood, her sense of joy is contagious and her food just looks delicious AND achievable for the home cook  - always important at Christmas when you have guests to impress.
And finally, to another British culinary stalwart, Elizabeth David. Her posthumous Elizabeth David’s Christmas is short on glossy pictures but reads like a passionate novel, such is the author’s devotion to food. She concentrates on some archaic foods that we no longer even consider as part of our seasonal celebrations, such as salt beef (of which the author is currently making some of her own!), Mediterranean feasts (the Italians in particular having the greatest skill in really celebrating special occasions) and some of her own concoctions. It is a lifetimes work in one book: she had started compiling this long before her death. Proof that even a prickly sort as Elizabeth David was touched by the goodwill of Christmas.

As a final note, I would like to wish the hardworking team at the Well Fed Network and all its readers a Happy Christmas and Merry New Year!

Visions Of Sugar Plums Amazon.co.uk from £3.53 Amazon.com from 1c

Delia Smiths Christmas Amazon.co.uk £5.89 Amazon.com $8.95

Roast Figs Sugar Snow Amazon.co.uk £13.60

Elizabth David’s Christmas Amazon.co.uk £10.19 Amazon.com $13.26

It’s a sad fact that many cooks these days simply use the most commonly available books in the supermarket or recommended by Amazon. To us Brits, this usually means Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay or Delia Smith. It also seems to me that most people don’t choose to read the bibliography so carefully listed at the end of many cookbooks, and discover the well of inspiration whence forth the book in their hands sprung from.

It could be that most people aren’t as slavishly driven by the need to discover the heritage behind certain foods as I am. This is no bad thing. We are literally tripping over cookbooks and magazines in our house, piles of them stacked in every room, and squeezed into any book-shaped nook and cranny.  I admit it, I am an obsessive cookbook collector and reader. Much to my husband’s chagrin (for he is the one who builds and consequently reinforces the bookshelves), I have recently started collecting both Time Life food series: Good Cooks and Foods of the World. Let me make this clear: I feel bad for the people that actually paid out good money to buy these new, on a monthly basis, and, after realising they’d spent well over £1000.00 on completing the collection, shamefacedly stashed them away in the attic until the next garage sale came along.

For me, some 3 decades later, these books are a rediscovered gem.

The recipes are sound and informative (due in no small part to such great contributors/editors as Richard Olney for the Good Cook series and MFK Fisher for Food of Provincial France for Foods of the World) and I regret to say that they can be picked up really cheaply online.
I am also particularly fond of the American Regrettable Food era, which is to say anything produced by the Culinary Arts in the 50s or Betty Crocker’s small series of spiral bound books. I love the joyful artwork and the frugal experimental attitude of the era. England, on the other hand, was a far more stoic place in the 50s. I could compare, England’s cuisine to America’s as Watercolours and Oil Paints – one being subdued and classical, the other bold, bright and brash.
Therefore, when Elizabeth David published her first book, Mediterranean Cookery in 1950, it was with a very gloomy reception that her book was received. How on earth could the British Housewife find such exotic produce as Avocados and Sardines (except in a tin)?

However, curiosity began to grow about ‘foreign’ cookery and in her beautifully respectful prose, David published the seminal French Country Cooking the following year. This book, coupled with Italian Food, cemented her reputation as the British forerunner for writers who took food to a literary level. Her books could be taken to bed and read, almost as novels.

I have heard Elizabeth David compared to Julia Childs (both published world famous books on French cookery) but I consider her to be more like MFK Fisher. They both had a lust for life and adventure that was enhanced through good food.
Bringing us up-to-date (I don’t like to write chronologically) we have another highly intelligent food writer whose current reputation as a bit of a sexpot has over-shadowed her culinary skill: Nigella Lawson. Many remember her early food columns in Vogue magazine, then a weekly slot on Nigel Slater’s excellent TV show, Real Food Show. Fame rapidly shot her into the stratosphere as she fronted her own cookery show that illuminated a million bored housewives kitchens: Nigella Bites. The book of the same name is a veritable goldmine of helpful tips and quick recipes for the harrassed wife and mother. It is, however, her book on baking that makes it onto my list. How To Be A Domestic Goddess is essential for anyone wishing to dip their toes into that science of baking. Her straightforward, big-sisterly prose make the most complicated recipes (and really, they don’t get much more complicated than a Christmas Cake) seem simple. 

Her latest book, Feast – Food That Celebrates Life, is a monster cookbook devoted to recipes for all occasions, from the first date to Rosh Hashanah. It is joyful in its execution and prosaic descriptions of those events that give us history and meaning.

If Nigella Lawson is your sexy big sister, then Tamasin Day-Lewis is your strict but good-natured schoolmarm. Tamasin Day-Lewis is, without doubt, the Queen of Tarts. She has published two amazing books, The Art of the Tart and Tarts with Tops on, in addition to several other highly recommended cookbooks. I consider her to be today’s Elizabeth David. Her food is sophisticated without being fussy and is grounded in an alluring combination of the French, British and Middle Eastern traditional cuisine. She is adamant and unrepentant about her crusade for people to use organic produce, to the extent that it isn’t always possible to entirely replicate to the note. However, with that in mind, she (wittingly or unwittingly) allows the reader the ability to improvise on her dishes to suit their own purses/palates/store cupboards and this is what makes her recipes so appealing. She is a very underrated food writer in her home country and more the pity because her good sense and seemingly exotic but effortless recipes are real winners.

For the lazy but enthusiastic cook we have the inimitable Nigel Slater who has stripped cooking back down to its basics, right down from the previously complicated procedure of roasting a chicken to a simple but delicious chocolate cake. His seminal work, Appetite, is revelatory in its acceptance that not everyone can afford expensive kitchen utensils or that we might actually be cooking for just one tonight. His writing is sexy and alluring and makes you want to cook, right now!
Finally, no scant list of recommended British Food Writers could be complete without Mrs Isabella Beeton, the cook who inspired many pre-war housewives into making blancmanges and holding gargantuan picnics. Whilst it has been since claimed that much of her work was plagiarised (and let’s be honest, all recipes from the last 100 years have been stolen from someone else, improved or butchered, tweeked and twisted, if this wasn’t the case, what on earth would we be eating?), she was still, nonetheless, one of the first women to produce her own cookbook (Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management in 1861) and THE first celebrity female chef, a Victoriana Nigella Lawson. When you take into consideration that she died at the age of 28, her achievements were amazing.
This is a brief list, merely skating over the ever-increasing glut of excellent British food writers. I have not made mention of Delia Smith, many of whom think revolutionised cooking in the 1970s and 1980s, just as Elizabeth David did in the 1950s, nor have I made note of Hannah Glasse who was published more than a century before Mrs Beeton or Elizabeth David’s favourite author, Eliza Acton, famed for writing one of the first domestic cookbooks, Modern Cookery for Private Families.

These are all books that our cooking heritage is based on. How many of us have inherited cookbooks from our parents or grandparents - we might not cook from them ourselves but we know that our traditional Christmas Pud recipe comes from one of those moth-eared pages and we wouldn’t want it prepared any other way than the one that evokes our special childhood memories.