Best summer books of 2024: Food and drink

Sift by Nicola Lamb (Ebury Press) 

If you find baking a cake about as enjoyable as algebra, Lamb will be the maths teacher you wish you had. This meticulous book aims to demystify the complicated science of baking through encouraging, diagram-heavy explanations of its constituent parts — a bit like Samin Nosrat did for cooking in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. There are also recipes.

Bethlehem by Fadi Kattan (Hardie Grant) 

Chef Kattan’s first solo recipe book reminds you of the range of things a recipe can be; from a three-ingredient, one-step salad to something that requires the purchase of lamb testicles. It’s also a beautifully photographed homage to the family and traders essential to the Palestinian food that diners have come to love at Kattan’s London restaurant Akub.

Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journeys by Caroline Eden (Bloomsbury)

Eden is not one for hot holidays, “the sheer vanity of it all”. Instead, from her basement kitchen in Edinburgh, she cooks and remembers the food she’s encountered in the world’s chilly reaches: borsch eaten in empty Ukrainian hotels; train carriages in Siberia that stink of fish. A good book for anyone stuck at home this summer.

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Back to the Local by Maurice Gorham (Faber & Faber) 

This illustrated London pub crawl was first published in 1949 and has been happily dredged from obscurity. Gorham, an Irish journalist and professional flâneur, catalogues a scene that in some way resembles our own (everything is too expensive, and the parallels between post-Covid and postwar are striking) and sometimes does not — for example, he is very worried a fashion for darts will gentrify pubs. There’s a map in the book so you can retrace his unsteady footsteps.

London Feeds Itself edited by Jonathan Nunn (Open City and Fitzcarraldo Editions)

And here is a successor of sorts, an anthology of essays about London’s food culture as it exists (but is often ignored) beyond Zone One. Edited by Nunn, founder of the online food magazine Vittles, the book is rich, well-researched and confident in scope: Jeremy Corbyn and Claudia Roden contribute, alongside relatively unknown writers on the bit of the city they know best. This is an expanded reissue of the 2022 original.

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