The Sunday Times food book of the year

In Defence of Food; The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating by Michael Pollan (Allen Lane £16.99)

I have lost track of the number of people I've spoken to this year who say that they have changed their eating habits and entire outlook on food as a result of reading this short but passionate work. ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,' is how Pollan begins his defence of real food against the packaged nutrients that make up too much of our diet in the West. With the simplicity of a poet, the author shows how we have lost our health and happiness (read him and you will never again think that ‘low-fat' is anything to boast about) and how we can find them once more, through the basic pleasures of cooking. The good news: margarine is out and butter is back.

OTTOLENGHI: The Cookbook by YOTAM OTTOLENGHI and SAMI TAMIMI
Ebury £25
If you are feeling the lack of a new Nigel Slater or River Café book this year, then this might just fill the void: gorgeous, healthy recipes from Ottolenghi, the food shop-cum-cafe in Notting Hill. Salads and generous-hearted vegetable dishes are particularly good: radish and broad bean salad, roasted aubergine with saffron yoghurt. But the real excitements, as at the shop, are the irresistible baked things: pistachio shortbreads, lavender and honey teacakes, sticky chocolate loaf, vast billowy meringues. A wonderful book for vegetarians and cake-lovers alike.

THE KITCHEN REVOLUTION by ROSIE SYKES, POLLY RUSSELL and ZOE HERON
Ebury £25
This genuinely original book offers a year's worth of weekly menus, based on a thrifty system of shopping and planning. For each week, the authors suggest one “big meal from scratch” (often a large joint or a piece of fish), two meals using leftovers, a “seasonal supper”, a “larder feast” from store-cupboard ingredients, a “two-for one” meal where you can eat half and freeze half, and a pudding. The approach won't appeal to everyone - those who want to be spontaneous as well as economical might prefer Delia's Frugal Food (Hodder £17.99) - but for hard-pressed foodie families, it could become a bible. The recipes (roast duck with Seville oranges, purple sprouting broccoli with chilli and anchovy) are alluring rather than austere.

SRI OWEN'S INDONESIAN FOOD by SRI OWEN
Pavilion £25
Indonesian food is far less well known than Thai food in Britain. Sri Owen is the woman to change that. In this glorious saffron-yellow volume, she interweaves the story of her life - from her birth in 1935 in a remote hill town in West Sumatra to life in Wimbledon with her English husband, Roger - with stunning recipes. Owen's recipes for beef rendang (an earthy, complex casserole) and rempeyek (ethereal peanut fritters) will convert anyone to the joys of Indonesian food. This would make an excellent gift for anybody who enjoyed David Thomson's bright pink Thai Food in the same series.

SHARK'S FIN & SICHUAN PEPPER y FUCHSIA DUNLOP
Ebury £16.99
Food memoir is a tricky genre - in the wrong hands, it can read like a catalogue of gluttony, as dull as someone else's dreams. This one succeeds triumphantly because Dunlop tells such a compelling story - how, as a young Englishwoman, she was seduced by the spicy food of Sichuan province. In the mid-1990s, she was the first foreigner to study at the school of cookery in Chengdu, learning how to make such wonders as “fire-exploding kidney flowers” while enduring the mockery of her classmates. Along the way, she poses fascinating questions, such as: Why is it okay to eat deep-fried scorpion in China, but not okay to eat a caterpillar from an English garden?

JAMIE'S MINISTRY OF FOOD by JAMIE OLIVER
M Joseph £25
There is no longer any room for argument: Jamie is officially the greatest living Englishman. First, he took on school dinners. Now, he's trying to teach the whole nation to cook. Next, he'll be walking on water. This book isn't for everyone. It probably wouldn't do much for an experienced cook of the post-war generation; and the pudding chapter is disappointing. But let Jamie loose on someone who can't boil an egg and he will perform miracles. A nine-year-old used this book to cook chicken and chickpea korma from scratch; a five-year-old (with minimal help) made broccoli and pesto tagliatelle. The results? Delicious.

THE ROAD TO VINDALOO by DAVID BURNETT and HELEN SABERI
Prospect £9.99
This charming little historical stocking filler is a collection of obscure British curry recipes from medieval times to now. The authors have unearthed some never-before-published gems. They show that the British love of curry goes back a lot further than chicken tikka masala and the text is dotted with well-chosen illustrations such as old labels for “currie paste” or Bombay duck (actually a kind of dried fish and nothing to do with duck).

A DAY AT ELBULLI by FERRAN ADRIA
Phaidon £29.95
This has been a bumper year for haute-cheffy offerings, from The Complete Robuchon (Grub Street £25) by France's top culinary maestro and Heston Blumenthal's outrageously priced The Big Fat Duck Cookbook (Bloomsbury £100) to The Clatter of Forks and Spoons (Fourth Estate £25) by the meaty Irish chef Richard Corrigan. None of them can match the sheer lunatic glamour of Ferran Adria, the chef at elBulli in Spain, the most desirable restaurant in the world (which, as the cover boasts, has “2m requests for 8,000 places every year”). This is an absurd and splendid coffee-table book for food geeks. Fabulous photographs document every moment of the day at elBulli, from Adria's strange system of hieroglyphs for different food stuffs and his fondness for liquid nitrogen to the moment when the lucky guests arrive, ready to taste such rarities as frozen purée filled with an infusion of powdered green pine cone. Mad, but great.

THE NEW ENGLISH TABLE by ROSE PRINCE
Fourth Estate £25
Prince is on a mission to show how interesting English food can be. This pretty book sings the joys of cobnuts and watercress, of grouse and gurnard, of elderflowers and asparagus. She gives good consumer advice on how to eat cheaply and well, and her recipes - blancmange with crystallised rose petal, barley water, grilled oysters with butter celery and aniseed - are generally subtle and refined.

A DELICIOUS WAY TO EARN A LIVING by MICHAEL BATEMAN
Grub Street £18.99
Until his untimely death in 2003, Bateman was perhaps the most consistently entertaining and informative food writer in Britain. This collection of his journalism gives a flavour of his impressive range. He was equally at home writing in-depth interviews (his profile of Elizabeth David is especially revealing), analysing food additives and branded goods (there's a terrific account of the Heinz baked bean factory), commenting wryly on the “cappuccino craze” or campaigning for real chickens and real bread. Wherever you dip in, there are unexpected treats.

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