BLOODY TYPICAL: YOU wait a lifetime for an omnibus on British food, and along come four at once.

Bloomsbury is to be admired for risking not one but two books ready to fill those post-turkey Christmas hours: Taste: The Story of Britain Through its Cooking and its evil twin Sausage in a Basket: The Great British Book of How Not to Eat. At the same time there's Eat Britain!: 101 Great British Tastes, a recipe-cum-elegy book that started as Andrew Wheeler's blog for Brits abroad who miss Marmite, and then there's Nigel Slater, not to be outdone, licking his lips over every delicately dipped phrase in Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table.

It's a tradition in our household to lie back after Christmas lunch and nuzzle up to a well-upholstered gift-book — all four of these would serve rather well in their different ways, though none of them would help with digestion: our national cuisine emerges as an eccentric mélange of the inscrutable, the insufferable and the indigestible. But when it comes to nostalgia, there's no accounting for taste. And these books are more concerned with food as memory or as repository for our island story than food as, well, food.

Martin Lampen's Sausage in a Basket is a full-on saveloy-in-cheek homage to the worst and most embarrassing tropes of British food, from Chinese takeaways to Terry's (short-lived) chocolate lemon. For a book on food, it is anomalously queasy; a bit like a cross- Channel ferry canteen, it seems designed to put you off eating.

Often this is simply because laughter turns out to be the best appetite suppressant. He narrates an entire evening of social and gastronomic embarrassment — a bastard child of Mike Leigh and Delia Smith — that was supposedly his first dinner party but is about as believable as most chaps' accounts of the loss of their virginity, though nonetheless funny for it. A writer of wit and warmth whose book is a joy, I suspect, mainly if you are essentially suspicious of good food.

Lampen and his Sausage share with Slater, and for that matter with Wheeler, a bite-size structure that does not make for steady reading. There are dozens and dozens of “chapters” — mere fridge-notes really — from the grumpy-old-foodie school of “and another thing”. But all three writers pull it off rather well, allowing them to free-range across foods and recipes (black pudding, pie and mash, trifle) to less definable but equally vital desiderata of our national table, with items variously on Irn-Bru, theme restaurants, tipping and Jaffa cakes. Yum.

It occurs to me that — almost as much as food — these books have in common the key element to understanding the British: embarrassment. Slater is particularly good on this, as it relates to tipping, for instance, and the exquisite class nuances of coffee mornings as they were, or trifle as it has always been.

Eat Britain! is equally 101 great jokes about how pained the British often are when their noses are rubbed between the opposing forces of sensuality and one-upman-ship; do we enjoy the postmodern irony of the inglorious Scotch egg, or acknowledge that it was (who knew?) invented by Fortnum & Mason? Is it now permissible in all environments to dunk? The recipe collection at the back is a bit of an afterthought: it's too small to read except in desperation, but maybe you will be desperate for sticky toffee pudding having read all about it in Wheeler's succulent prose.

In Eating for England, Slater follows the same format as the first two, but only in the sense that Heston Blumenthal follows the same format as Little Chef: this is food-writing with a masterchef. It's not so much that Slater knows his Dairylea from his rebluchon — all these writers are keen to emphasise their humorous disdain for elitism in food and their catholic tastes, that they love Jaffa cakes every bit as much as smoked salmon. It is more that Slater chews on a slightly longer memory stick and a lifetime's dedication to structuring an existence around food — good, bad and bizarre.

He also has a sweet tooth, which gives rise to much Proustian musing on longforgotten jewels of the sweet jar — Rowntree's Fruit Gums, Murray Mints and jelly babies — that unlock our childhoods and are too often neglected by (male) food writers in their atavistic focus on the meat of things. As ever, Slater is also very funny; why, indeed, do the British puddings syllabub, flummery, blancmange sound like they are being enunciated under water?

Kate Colquhoun's Taste is altogether a fuller meal. In ambition, scope and style it is as lavish as an Edwardian feast, as long as a Regency dining table; you could weight pâtés with this book. It is primarily a breezy and entertaining trawl through two millennia of British food, from pre-Roman times to today, with an emphasis on the written record of cookbooks. It also comes garnished with commendations from the man who reinvented food history, Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Marguerite Patten herself and the Arts Council (which supported Colquhoun's research, it would seem).

It is a gloriously decorated and impressive meal, but I am not utterly won over by the occasional close focus of Colquhoun's panoramic take on British food history; Fanny Burney never wrote a book called Evangelina in 1788 (it was Evelina in 1778) and Carême did not cook for the Rothschilds for 25 years after the stated occasion. But these are quibbles. I want to have faith in her overview despite editors' flaws and the book is a joy, an education, and, as Fanny Craddock used to say, feeds the eye just as much as the mind or stomach.

Taste: the Story of Britain Through its Cooking
Bloomsbury, £17.99

Sausage in a Basket: The Great British Book of How Not to Eat
Bloomsbury, £9.99

Eat Britain!:101 Great British Tastes
Friday Books, £20

Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table
Fourth Estate, £10.99

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