Fifty-Two Cookbooks - Cooking my way through 2023

I have many cookbooks. Correction: I have too many cookbooks.

It just, sort of, happened. There was a time when I didn’t have enough, when I simply didn’t have the funds to acquire all the carefully written recipes I wanted - needed. New additions to the shelf were pored over, read cover to cover and back again. The information, words, photos and methods absorbed in a way I only wish I’d been able to do at university.

I revered them. They had an aura. Each may as well have been a codex, holding secrets, power. Magic within the pages. The French Laundry Cookbook. Nose to Tail Eating. White Heat.

At some point new books started to appear with more regularity, hitting the bookshelf with a rapidity that rendered it impossible to fully engage with them. By then my interest had become a habit. The acquisition became more important than the purpose, the spines more often read than the pages. Justification by means of ‘one day’, when things are less busy.

Until not enough tipped over into too many.

“How did you acquire such a large library?” Very slowly, then all at once. Crushed by the damning weight of all the dishes I’ll never cook.

A new year helps with these things. January brings promise, expectation, hope, freshness, ideas, new ways to do old things, old ways to do new. A combination of the two. So that’s how we - my wife and I - ended up spending January 1st: shelves empty, floor full, surrounded by several lifetimes of meals, recipes, reflections.

Faced with that vast pile we hit on a plan, and picked out 52: sometimes with care, sometimes with abandon. A year’s worth of books: one a week, from which to cook at least one recipe. Motivation for the project was two-fold: to allow these books to breathe, to live again - but also to rescue us from the puzzle of what to cook for dinner, a question that often comes too late in the day to give it any meaningful thought and, as a result, sometimes yields no exciting or novel answers. The freezer provides: or the chef will cook yet another (delicious) late-night grilled cheese sandwich.

The results are three shelves, containing 12 months of meals, new-old recipes plucked from stasis ready to feed, to nurture. A happy, tasty new year full of potential, excitement and new flavours.

I’ll try to keep track of my progress on Instagram using #fiftytwocookbooks - and here, in order, are the 52 books we’ll be cooking from in 2023:

Thai Food by David Thompson

Hong Kong Diner by Jeremy Pang

How to Cook (Book One) by Delia Smith

The Food of Sichuan by Fuchsia Dunlop

Carbs by Laura Goodman

Kaokasis by Olia Hercules

Pitt Cue Co. The Cookbook by Tom Adams, Jamie Berger, Simon Anderson and Richard Turner

Greenfeast Spring, Summer by Nigel Slater

The Hastings Fish Cookbook I, II and III by Various contributors

In Bibi’s Kitchen by Hawa Hassan with Julia Turshen

Rotis by Stephane Reynaud

Week In Week Out by Simon Hopkinson

No Place Like Home by Rowley Leigh

Genius Recipes by Kristen Miglore

The Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver

Towpath Recipes & Stories by Lori de Mori and Laura Jackson

Simple by Diana Henry

Syria: Recipes from Home by Itab Azzam and Dina Mousawi

Momofuku by David Chang

Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden

New York Cult Recipes by Marc Grossman

Cook As You Are by Ruby Tandoh

The Year of Miracles by Ella Risbridger

The Girl & The Fig by Sondra Bernstein

Arabesque by Claudia Roden

The Les Halles Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain

Mexican Food Made Simple by Thomasina Miers

The River Cafe Cook Book Two by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers

Fresh India by Meera Sodha

Swedish Summer: Recipes from the Stockholm Archipelago by Viveca Sten

The Complete Colour Cookbook by Gill Edden

Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour

The Green Roasting Tin by Rukmini Iyer

Hashi by Reiko Hashimoto

Our Korean Kitchen by Jordan Bourke and Rejina Pyo

The Silver Spoon Cookbook

Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook

Comptoir Libanias by Tony Kitous and Dan Lepard

Dishoom by Shamil Thakrar et al

The Little Library Cookbook by Kate Young

Ad Hoc at Home by Thomas Keller

A. Wong The Cookbook by Andrew Wong

Ripailles: Traditional French Cooking by Stephane Reynaud

The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater

Spuntino: Comfort Food (New York Style) by Russell Norman

The Book of St John by Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver

Greenfeast Autumn, Winter by Nigel Slater

Plenty More by Yotam Ottolenghi

Nigella Christmas by Nigella Lawson

Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes by Peter Meehan et al

Hidden Kitchens of Sri Lanka by Bree Hutchins

Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many by Jeremy Lee

Wish me luck and in return allow me to wish you a happy new year: may yours be delicious, bountiful and filled with books

(In addition, I will (of course) be cooking at Vanderlyle, four nights a week. Tickets for tables in February go on sale tomorrow at midday: head to exploretock.com/vanderlyle from noon onwards to book)