Matt Preston’s 10 favourite cookbooks

1. Encyclopedia of Food and Cookery Margaret Fulton or The Cook’s Companion Stephanie Alexander

My world is divided between these two. I love Fulton because it basically has the solution for cooking just about anything you might find in the supermarket but, more than that, over the years I’ve found that whether its golden syrup dumplings, lemon delicious or pancakes, no-one’s recipes are quite as good as hers. I love Stephanie because it is basically a bible of the best Australian family cooking. The recipes are pretty bulletproof and her tone really means that the book — to quote one of my Twitter pals –—“keeps you company” while you cook. Everyone has a favourite recipe but her scallop potatoes, Vietnamese chicken salad and the afternoon tea orange cake are the messiest pages in our copy.

2. The Essentials of Classic Italian cookingMarcella Hazan

While Jamie Oliver may have turned on more Australians to the wonders of Italian flavours and Pellegrino Artusi may have written the first great truly Italian cookbook, Marcella Hazan’s epic is the benchmark on all the rich regional variations of cooking Italian. No pretty photos, just the occasional plain line drawing and 700 pages of wonderful, delicious recipes for everything from old favourites like carbonara to bolognese, 11 different frittata recipes and

my current Hazan favourite, meatballs with savoy cabbage.

3. Larousse Gastronomique

The encyclopedic work on cooking from a very French perspective may seem a little outdated now. The wonderful thing about French cuisine is that there is a definitively right way to do everything — and these are all detailed here. Try to find an older, second-hand edition as they are cheaper, more purely French, and strangely more authoritative because of that, than the more recent revised editions.

4. On Food and Cooking Harold McGee

If you want to understand the science behind why things happen the way they do in the kitchen then this is a must read! While it is loads of science, McGee’s writing has excellent clarity and there is something rather exhilarating about being to explain to a stuck-up chef — and prove — that searing doesn’t seal in the juices of a steak no matter what they say!

5. White Heat Marco Pierre White

White Heat launched a thousand culinary careers

with dreams of roll ‘n’ roll celebrity and the idea of kitchens that were cooler than nightclubs a decade before the celebrity TV chef was a fixture on our screens. While Bob Carlos Clarke’s black and

white photographs still look wicked, it is the elegant and comparatively easy recipes that always remind me that simple home cooking can still be sophisticated and elegant.

6. The River Café Cook Book Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers

Deep fried whole artichokes; baked herbed ricotta; shells with broccoli, anchovies and chilli; ribollita; pumpkin soup; their lemon, rosemary and garlic marinated butterflied lamb leg on the BBQ; lamb shank slow-cooked in balsamic, red onions and rosemary; pork loin cooked in milk with sage and lemon … If the measure of a successful cookbook is that you cook three things out of it then this list is proof this sophisticated simple Italian book needs to be in my top 10.

7. Arabesque Greg & Lucy Malouf

Middle Eastern flavours are now very much part of the modern home cook’s repertoire — and much of this due to the influence of Greg and Lucy Malouf and their 1999 primer on cooking with Middle Eastern flavours. While books from the Clarkes of Moro, Melbourne’s MoVida and Yotam Ottolenghi would also chart the Muslim Mediterranean, North Africa and Spain most successfully — and would definitely all be in my top 20 — it was the Maloufs who blazed this trail in Australia. Of course if being first is the key factor, then NSW-born Tess Mallos’ Complete Middle Eastern Home Cookbook, first published in 1977, might have a case for edging out Malouf!

8. How To Be A Domestic Goddess Nigella Lawson

Forget, if you can, all the finger-licking and midnight pyjama raids on the fridge

of her TV series. This book (and her other cookbook, How to Eat) proves what a wonderful, inspirational, food-writer Lawson is.

She turns a phrase with the grace of David Beckham stroking over an in-swinging corner; her writing is rich, extremely evocative and at times very funny. And the recipes aren’t half bad either.

9. Roast Chicken and Other Stories Simon Hopkinson

It was a toss-up for this spot between Hopkinson’s almost mythical book and pretty much anything from Nigel Slater like his Real Food or Eat.

I’ve gone with Hopkinson because I find it an even more friendly and inspirational read when it comes to elevating home cooking.

10.The last spot in the Top Ten needs to be made up by you

Tell us your choice on twitter at @Mattscravat.

For some inspiration check out a list of my suggestions for this final place online at taste.com.au