This week I am

thinking about my favourite cookbooks. Book Depository had a great swag of so-called essentials a few weeks ago, most of which I have. It was good to see Edouard de Pomiane in there - he wrote wonderfully about food and eating in the 1930s and onwards. I'm not sure anyone would follow the recipes particularly now, but he was full of good sense and aimiability. Over the years my favourites change, but there are a few I always come back to. Marcella Hazan remains my favourite writer on Italian food, and her recipes are extraordinary because I have found that they cannot be improved. I loved The Classic Italian Cookbook, and even more The Second Classic Italian Cookbook. Usefully, everything came together in a compendium called The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. The other thing that make her Italian books so very good were the suggestions about what to precede or follow dishes with. Giuliano Bugialli I love because of his approach, but the recipes themselves are less important for me.Claudia Roden's book of Middle Eastern Food has been an essential for me since I bought it years ago. She is for me one of the most important food writers, for many reasons. Firstly, the depth and breadth of her understanding, the range of her knowledge, the sense that her own family history was the basis of her knowledge - not its boundaries. And the recipes work. It's interesting to compare some of the dishes in her books with those in Ottolenghi's books, particularly Jerusalem. Many of the same flavours, but Ottolenghi's flavours tend to be bigger and punchier.I bought the revised edition Of Middle Eastern Food recently. Oh my! No orange and almond cake in it. Never mind, it's in The Book of Jewish Food, but in any case I've made it so often I don't need to check the recipe. That second book is amazing in its research into Jewish history and the history of communities as well as dishes. Years ago I took to Richard Olney, whose Simple French Food is full of recipes that aren't at all simple. but I've always found it an inspiring book. The section on cabbage led me, one year, to stuff a whole cabbage - but that's another story. Lulu's Provencal Table is wonderful, an account of one woman's splendid cooking - and written with the same understanding of cooking and the way food is eaten. It also, incidentally, contains my favourite cooking instruction. "Displace the vegetables gently....." It's in the recipe for ratatouille, and although I laughed when I first read it, I think it's brilliant. Don't stir, don't toss, just make sure the vegetables don't stick to the base of the pot.And of course I love More than French, recipes & stories which I wrote with Philippe Mouchel. We worked closely to make sure all the recipes worked in a domestic kitchen, and it's the sort of food I love. About eight of the dishes have become part of my everyday repertoire (what ever did I do without that recipe for salmon rillettes), and at least as many are made occasionally.Since I have mentioned one of my books, the other essential for me is 50 Fabulous Chocolate Cakes, which grew out of a series I edited in what was then the Epicure section of The Age newspaper, and which went into a second edition. Now sadly, out of print.No Chinese or Japanese books? No, because although they are both loved cuisines, they are not the cooking I do. And someone in my list of influences must come the Larousse Gastronomique. I have three editions of it, and am still cross with myself that I did not buy a first edition, still in its original box, at a street market in Paris.