I rather bristle at newspaper column collections. They strike me as a bit lazy, a cheat’s way of getting another book under the belt, often just in time for the gift-giving season. When it comes to Rachel Cooke’s Kitchen Person, however, I have to eat my words. It draws from the 14 years of monthly food columns Cooke wrote for the Observer from 2009. Each comes with a postscript from the author looking back on her thoughts at the time, ensuring that the pieces hold their own as a collection, as something cohesive. You sit down to read one essay, and look up 75 pages later.

The tone, too, is instrumental in achieving this. At once intimate and no-nonsense, Cooke brims with frank opinions, holding no truck with faddy eating and finding supposedly meditative kitchen tasks such as podding peas or making sofrito boring. Proper linen is integral to proper dining; a British egg custard tart is far superior to the Portuguese version.

She is clearly obsessed with food, and reading her is like chatting to your most interesting and forthright friend in their kitchen. She reminds me of Laurie Colwin, the novelist and food essayist. In these essays, Cooke becomes a companion to the reader, advising, celebrating, recommending and occasionally reproving.

Most importantly, she takes food seriously, regarding it as

another aspect of culture: one of its high points, in fact… When people rule out, for no good medical reason, whole food groups or, worse still, entire cuisines, to me it’s the same as if they’d announced that they dislike classical music or abstract art or science fiction. I mean, what? All of it? Really?

Accordingly, her topics span the gamut of human experience – poetry, politics, class, friendship, love – seen through the lens of cooking and eating. Jumping-off points vary wildly, from books she has read to a visit to the Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury, via David Cameron’s ‘kitchen suppers’, a love of French tinned peas and her feud with Rick Stein.

She is also blessed with perfect recall of past meals, her relationship with food being akin to synaesthesia: ‘My memory is vivid and voluptuous – a historical Rolodex sparked by helpful remembrances of halva and ratatouille, kale and hoisin sauce.’ Even the introduction is more than just a preamble to a collection of essays: it is a rollicking autobiography, taking in Cooke’s Sheffield upbringing, the three years she and her family spent in Tel Aviv, her obsession at university with the pricey Maison Blanc and her young adult years in London, with questionable love interests in unquestionably good restaurants (‘I was prepared to put up with quite a lot in those days in the cause of a decent dinner’), followed by her marriage and life to date.

She is extremely knowledgeable and well-read when it comes to food. I found myself making a list of every book she mentions that I haven’t read and noting the dishes she recommends. Kitchen Person is determinedly not a cookery book, but informal recipes abound, as if Cooke can’t help herself. Though she tells us she would never describe herself as a good cook, readers will think differently. In these shortform instructions, she shows herself to be an extremely competent cook with an impressive repertoire: little cheesy biscuits, meatloaf, meatballs, devilled eggs, mayonnaise, tiny club sandwich canapés, Café de Paris butter…

But ultimately the book is about life. It feels as though Cooke is talking about more than preparing a dish when, towards the end of the introduction and in a moment of uncharacteristic earnestness, she writes: ‘What I really want to say now is that it is worth it, all that stirring and whisking and measuring and pouring.’ Over and over again she draws out meaning, pulling together disparate ideas and finding value in all of life’s moments through food. She truly is a Kitchen Person, and it’s a joy to get to know her.