The cooker prize

Mrs Beeton gathering dust and Delia's collection all collected? Fear not. Michael Bateman selects the year's best cookbooks, for everyone from impecunious students to Gordon Ramsay gourmets

Stock market

When buying a gift for a foodie this Christmas, it's hard to look past Oxo (Tank, £25). It comprises four small silver books packed in a funky cube. They contain contributions from a cavalcade of celebs, from Jamie Oliver and Antonio Carluccio to the more unlikely, such as fashion designer Paul Smith. It's an anthology of recipes, essays (on famine, pasta, vegetarianism...), cute pictures (lunchboxes of the world) and silly asides (how to make a carrot face mask). Art direction is dizzying: no page numbers, recipes printed in scribbled italics. Proceeds go to the charity Warchild.

Easy does it

There are plenty of options for the cook whose skills are less than expert. Let's start with Bill's Food (Murdoch Books, £14.99; pictured) by Sydney restaurateur Bill Granger. One of the most successful of the new generation of Ozzie cooks, he sets the agenda with stylish and informal dishes. A smart present for anyone, especially hip young cooks.

Anyone new to the ways of the stove will thank you for Jill Dupleix's Simple Food (Quadrille, £19.99). It's straight-forward, clear, good-looking and still manages to be exciting.

Students are saved from beans on toast by Betsy Bell's Hard Up and Hungry (Penyghent Publishing, £10) which has lovely recipes (soups, salads, rice dishes, pasta...) for four which can be made for 50p a head.

But if you like your pasta truly gourmet, go for 100 Pasta Recipes by Franco and Ann Taruschio (Kyle Cathie, £14.99). Born in north-east Italy, Franco took his dishes to a pub in Abergavenny, where his Walnut Tree Inn became legendary. This is no ordinary pasta book, with vincigrassi as its crowning glory – sheets of lasagne layered with porcini mushrooms, Parma ham and cream.

Books at bedtime

If you're after something to read rather than cook from, Colin Spencer's British Food (Grub Street, £25) is ideal. Spencer champions our cooking, arguing that the further back you go, the better things get, climaxing with the age of the Anglo-Normans when our cooking was "exotic... more influenced by Persia than Paris". For a livelier read, try It Must've Been Something I Ate (Review, £16.99) by Jeffrey Steingarten, perhaps the world's wittiest food writer.

Everything you need to know about...

This year produced some essential reference books including Jill Norman's superb revision of Herbs and Spices (Dorling Kindersley, £25; pictured). The book was first published just 12 years ago, but it seems globalisation works fast these days, bringing more exotic spices into our lives all the time. The book is well produced and a must for every kitchen shelf.

Another exotic revision is Charmaine Solomon's Complete Asian Cookbook (Grub Street, £25). The author is Sri Lanka-born, but she covers the cuisine of the whole continent, taken country by country, and includes numerous comprehensive – and delicious – recipes.

Stephen Pini's The Fishmongers' Company Cook Book (Fishmongers' Company, £25) is a lavish tome with grand dishes using almost everything that swims.

The most catch-all encyclopedia of the year, though, is the Penguin Companion to Food by Alan Davidson (£20). It's not as big as last year's 12lb 4oz Cambridge History of Food (£110), but it still fits the more-than-everything-you ever-wanted-to-know-about-food category. Easy to dip into, though – it's arranged alphabetically.

Fame and fortune

The celebrity chefs are in the bestsellers charts every Christmas. This year, Jamie's Kitchen (Michael Joseph, £25; pictured) is the most obvious runner in the field. It's a great book (Oliver got my son interested in cooking, so he's OK by me) full of casually thrown-together dishes, such as grilled marinated mozzarella with crunchy bread, smoked bacon with black olives and lemon dressing. A book for our time, ringing with his enthusiastic Mockney voice.

While Oliver is certainly flavour of the month, the king is still Gordon Ramsay, whose A Chef For All Seasons (Quadrille, £14.99) also came out this year. Unlike some chefs, Ramsay has the good sense to work with an amanuensis, Roz Denny, a good cook in her own right.

Rick Stein is another favourite, and another with a TV tie-in. His latest book, Food Heroes (BBC, £20) sees our top fish cook turn his back on the oceans and focus on Britain's food producers (can we hear Gary Rhodes saying, "Get off my patch"?). It's a whistle-stop tour of the UK with Stein enthusing over the good and bemoaning the bad, with the common sense you'd expect – and fine recipes.

Heston Blumenthal's first cookbook, Family Food (Michael Joseph, £20), is a sure candidate for recipe book of the year. The country's most scientific and inventive chef, who plies his trade at the Fat Duck in Bray, is known for creations such as bacon-and-egg ice-cream. However, for this book he has teamed up with his own three children, and the results are far from daunting.

Around the world

David Thompson's Thai Food (Chrysalis, £25) really ought to win prizes. The author is Australian but knows more about Thai cuisine than your average local – he works for the country's government, speaks the language, and has the largest private collection of Thai family cookbooks.

When Thompson came to London restaurant Nahm, he won the first Michelin star for a Thai restaurant. A note of caution: the recipes you'll find here are complex, but the reward for perseverance is an in-depth insight into a unique, complex food culture.

Down Mexico way, Elisabeth Luard's Latin American Kitchen (Kyle Cathie, £19.99) interprets the delights of the whole continent. Luard, a diplomat's daughter, grew up in Mexico. A scholar, artist and brilliant cook, here she has her finger on the pulse of the unique characters of each country's food. Essential reading for the adventurous traveller.

Elsewhere, Nada Saleh's Seductive Flavours of the Levant (Robson Books, £18.95), tackles food from Lebanon, Syria and Turkey with great authenticity. While in Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons (Mitchell Beazley, £20) Diana Henry mops up other lesser-visited shores of the Mediterranean (including the Middle East and North Africa) with such mouth-watering recipes as charmoula-marinated tuna with pomegranate cous cous. Henry is a born travel writer. If you know someone who can't get away for a break in the winter sunshine, Henry's book is a good substitute.

Euro stars

Under the Sun, French Country Cooking by Caroline Conran (Pavilion, £25) is a collection of family recipes donated by some of France's top chefs (the one pictured above is for squid with green peas). Conran has cooked in the south of France for more than 30 years, and these dishes are informed by produce from local markets.

Tessa Kiros's Twelve: A Tuscan Cookbook (Tessa Kiros, £25) is a book of lovingly collected seasonal recipes for each month of the year. The dishes are both authentic and beautifully photographed.

But it's not only French and Italian recipes this year. Girardet (Ten Speed Press, £35) is by Swiss chef Fredy Girardet. When Girardet stepped down from his famous three-star restaurant in Crissier three years ago, he left many proclaiming him as the 20th century's greatest chef. This is a lavish collection of suitably world-class dishes. *

Thanks to Rosie Kindersley of Books For Cooks, Blenheim Crescent, London W11, tel: 020 7221 1992.

The books featured on these pages can also be bought from Independent Books Direct, tel: 0870 800 1122