Do you like to cook or do you like to read? Are you a culinary voluptuary, or do you yearn to use up that ancient turnip hanging around at the back of the fridge? This year the range of cookery books on offer is wide enough to please all tastes.

For the food fantasists, two books stand out - literally and figuratively. I challenge anyone to hold Heston Blumenthal's The Big Fat Duck Cookbook (Bloomsbury, £100/offer £90) and Ferran Adrià's A Day at El Bulli (Phaidon, £29.95/£26.96) at the same time and not fall over. These are luxury volumes about luxury product, Blumenthal and Adrià being masters of “molecular gastronomy” - cooking which requires rather more equipment (pipettes, liquid nitrogen) than you or I are likely to have in our kitchens. For that reason, these books are a pleasure, offering real insight into the process behind these men's work. Although Blumenthal's book is slipcased and comes with not one but three pretty ribbons, it's hard to see why there's a £70 price difference between them.

Of course, it wouldn't be Christmas without Nigella: and this year the glamorous goddess goes head-to-head with Sarah Raven, whose low-key aesthetic is of a rather different order. I love Raven's Garden Cookbook - even though I don't have a garden - and if I am ever going to make florentines, I will surely try the recipe in her Complete Christmas (Bloomsbury, £25/£22.50).

That said, now that I know about them, how can I live without trying the Christmas Cornflake Wreaths on offer in Nigella Christmas (Chatto & Windus, £25/£22.50)? Note the lack of an apostrophe s: making it clear to us that Ms Lawson is an Entity, not simply a mere Person. But how can we resist her when of these trashy treats she writes: “I try to rein myself in, but not always successfully”? You go, girl.

If you only buy one book this Christmas make sure it's...

Michael Parkinson, Sheila Hancock, Roger Moore, Elaine Paige and Andrew Castle pick out some perfect reading for the festive period

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Gifts

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• Christmas bestsellers

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Art

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Food

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• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Children's audiobooks

BACKGROUND

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• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Graphic Novels

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Back to basics

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Poetry

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Children's 2-10

If you want to be thrifty this Christmas, there is plenty to choose from. Delia's Frugal Food (Hodder & Stoughton, £17.99/£16.19), that classic of the Seventies, has been reissued: you'd be much better off making the lovely porc au chou from this book than anything from her ghastly How to Cheat at Cooking , also published this year (Ebury, £20/£18). This is the book that caused the “Delia and the frozen mashed potatoes” outrage.

Richard Mabey's The Full English Cassoulet (Chatto & Windus, £16.99/£15.29) is a little book with pretty pictures, somewhere between a memoir and a cookbook. The frugality of its recipes (“liver chop suey”) is offset by the gloriousness of its prose. This is the man who brought us Food for Free, so there's nothing about making do that he doesn't know - the book's a delight. If you mean to change your life in the new year, arm yourself with The Kitchen Revolution: A Year of Time and Money Saving Recipes by Rosie Sykes, Polly Russell and Zoe Heron (Ebury, £25/£22.50) which even prints your shopping lists for you. It's a fat, sturdy hardback seemingly pitched - with small type and a lack of illustration - at the already confident cook.

Now, the telly chefs. Jamie Oliver's Jamie's Ministry of Food (Michael Joseph, £25/£22.50) is a horror, there is just no getting around it. “Anyone can learn to cook in 24 hours” he says: not from this book, you can't. If you look at the photographs you won't want to cook anything at all. The recipes are confusing and condescending. And the book is priced at £25! Which “anyone” was he thinking of, do you reckon?

I much prefer Valentine Warner's What To Eat Now (Mitchell Beazley, £20/£18), full of sustainable autumnal delights. But Warner might like to adapt his recipe for shortcrust pastry after he reads The Best of America's Test Kitchen 2009 (£25/£22.50). If you don't know about Cook's Illustrated magazine and America's Test Kitchen, you should. Yes, there will be brands that the test kitchen - its show airs on public television in the US - recommends that you can't find, but this is a small price to pay for such thoughtful writing and thoroughly tested recipes. Shortcrust pastry? Don't moisten with water. Moisten with vodka. Truly. Get a subscription from cooksillustrated.com for the real foodie in your household.

Finally, two books you don't need but which might, in these straitened times, raise a smile. I am sure Nigella would approve of Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton's retro-chic The Branded Cookbook (Kyle Cathie, £16.99/£15.29) - loads more uses for cornflakes, plus cooking with Vegemite for the really hardcore. And carbohydrate-lovers couldn't fail to enjoy Maria Balinska's The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread (Yale, £15/£13.50). After the turkey on Christmas Day, why not bagels and lox for Boxing Day brunch?

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