The cover of the latest, much admired Vittles magazine displays a mocked-up tombstone bearing the inscription: ‘In affectionate remembrance of Food Writing, born 1825, died 2026. Deeply lamented by a dwindling circle of friends and well-wishers.’ Inside is an essay that dives deep into the theme of influence and influencers and the effect this kind of advertising – it is rarely independent thought – has on food media. Vittles’s argument is that there’s not much to cut out and keep these days. Still, the cult of the cook book fights on, even if it’s shrunk like a jumper in a hot wash.

A great cook book can be the most joyous read of all – my thoughts, having just put down Jeremy Lee’s Kitchening: Day-to-Day Good Food, Come Rain or Shine (Fourth Estate, £30). Lee is the chef at Quo Vadis in London’s Soho. He is also a sage who writes with rhythmic Scottishness, charm and not a little of the Rodgers & Hammerstein songbook. Here he is on seasoning: ‘Woe betide the cook who blithely seasons too much, for, as with life, it is the very devil to correct.’ And on practice:

There will always be trial and error in the kitchen, but measures of constancy, a modicum of obstinacy, a sharp knife and cleared decks with which to prepare good ingredients will result in dishes that always please.

Lee proves that our oldest formulas fit perfectly in the present: pickled fruits, mustardy sauces, seasoned breadcrumbs, fruity puddings, broths and braises. Each page is beautifully designed, and he shares what he knows with humour, a light matriarchal bossiness and good taste. Kitchening is the art of cooking and smiling at the same time.

Jess Elliott Dennison is another Scottish writer, whose third book, Vegetable Recipes: Glorious Everyday Cooking from a Scottish Borders Glasshouse (Elliotts-edinburgh.com, £23.50) cements her talent. Her books are not long, but they are somehow full. From the salads section, try lemon butter green beans with chilli and rosemary. There are things to put on toast; ‘fried and crispy bits’; tarragon panisse and fennel and onion bhajis; soups, broths and curries; lentils, grains, pasta and noodles. It is inspiration pared down – exactly what I want from a new cook book.

I was lucky to have met Kay Plunkett-Hogge in northern Thailand. My late husband spent his last years being cared for there. I knew little before about the food, believing it ran to variations on curries and noodles. Kay, born and raised in Bangkok and speaking fluent Thai, whisked me off to explore northern roadside roast chicken shops and an astonishing farm/restaurant where we ate black-fleshed chicken and a divine broth laced with hot nam prik pao. Her knowledge of Thai food is intimate and forensic, and she pokes into every corner of the country in Siam (Pavilion Books, £26). Recipes, while far removed from the pad thai cliché, stick to the core Thai flavour principles of hot, sweet and sour in all its forms. Among many easy recipes is ‘Lisu stir-fried pork and avocado’, the very same made by the aforementioned farmer Khun Sarit Srilimpanon for Kay and myself.

Any new book by Fuchsia Dunlop brings excitement to the kitchen. Another great explorer, Dunlop always remains inspired by the huge subject of Chinese cooking. In Five Tastes: The Magic of Flavour in a Chinese Kitchen (Particular Books, £30), she discusses the key tastes of Chinese cuisine – sour, bitter, sweet, pungent and salty – and how to combine them. Before reading her books, I always found cooking Chinese at home terrifying. I now realise this is absurd, since all you need is some basic equipment and access to a decent online Chinese supermarket. In her hands you can easily make ‘Great Wall braised pork with chestnuts’, or my favourite, ‘Braised aubergines with mint’, seasoned with Sichuan chilli bean paste. I also love her spicy peanut butter noodles.

Jacob Kennedy is behind the much-loved Bocca di Lupo restaurant in Soho – as well as Gelupo, my favourite gelato bar across the road, where earlier this year I downed a blood orange sorbet after a trip to the Lucian Freud show at the NPG, the fruit suiting my mood exactly. In his compact, nicely designed Pasta Tricolore: Recipes in Green, White and Red (Bloomsbury, £18.99), he takes colour as his theme, identifying the three shades that classically match pasta on the plate. In the ‘green’ section, expect pesto, but this time with pistachios, and pureés of fava beans, broccoli, peas, spinach and chard. In ‘red’, you will find tomatoes, of course, but also a series of lovely ragus. In ‘white’, there are the cheese, butter and cream sauces, leading inevitably to the controversial carbonara, the right recipe for which I utterly trust Kennedy to know: no cream, ever, only extra egg yolks.

The ‘better-than-most-in-Paris’ bistrot seems to have hit London full force. In Josephine Bouchon and Maison François you can enjoy oeuf en gelée served with a smile and not a sneer; and it seems we’ve always had the beloved Racine. In fact this wonderful restaurant has been through a couple of changes, closing down and reopening elsewhere, as its chef Henry Harris explains in The Racine Effect(Quadrille, £40). This is a wonderful book for those of us who love Harris’s style of cooking, with its slightly messy plates featuring puddles of butter, blots of mustard, shoals of anchovies, twists of fried sage, semi-soft boiled eggs and of course the heady presence of garlic. I found a sharing dish, named ‘Caviar de la Croix-Rousse’, the most intriguing recipe: a massive concoction of Puy lentils, properly flavoured with a mirepoix of tiny vegetables, sautéed first, plus bay and thyme, shallots, mustard, lardons, parsley and black pepper. We will all need to know how to make this, since lentils live happily in our future war cabinet storage facility, ready to eat with our meat ration and  potatoes grown in the window box.

Adam Byatt’s Trinity (Quadrille, £55) packs 300 pages of superb technique. The photographs very much identify the dishes as being for high dining, and however much I’d love to make them as they appear, these are the meticulously executed delicacies that you would meet in his restaurant, Trinity, in Clapham Old Town. Instead, I’ll be garnering his attitude and clever ways with food. There are elements in each recipe that could be adapted to the home kitchen, and his advice on measures, timing and temperatures is bound to be spot on. This is a giant work, which, like in the final scene of the film Carrie, thrusts its defiant fist up through the turf in food writing’s so-called graveyard.