Hom's latest book, Simple Chinese Cookery, is published by BBC Books.
· To order a copy of Italia by Antonio Carluccio (Quadrille, £25) for £23, or Simple French Cookery by Raymond Blanc (BBC Books) for £9.99 go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885.
The conceit of the series is simple - travelogue cookery.
The cookery is simple, but the processes used by the Scott family are not.
It has been bubbling like cinder toffee in a pan for the past decade, and is only going to get bigger with Sweets Made Simple, the new BBC cookery show from confectioners Hope and Greenwood.
Its cuisine, a kind of blueprint for the classic Mediterranean diet, is rooted in cucina povera (peasant cookery) and based on simple staples such as vegetables, seafood, pasta and olive oil.
Perhaps because they're Sicilian, but more probably because they're so simple, few of my trustiest Italian cookery books include recipes for arancini: Marcella Hazan, Elizabeth David and Anna Del Conte are all silent on the subject.
Worldwide appreciation for Italian cookery exists because of its simple care for quality, a notion that is spread in most Italian markets and restaurants.
He was working at a time when there was a growing eagerness for writing about food and cookery that went beyond the simple recipes for weekend magazines.
If you are looking for straight cookery – by which I emphatically don't mean simple dishes, but rather cookery with no other narrative thread, no ethnographic twist, no pouting lovelies, no restaurant in-crowd aspirations – the stand-out book of the year is Diana Henry's Salt Sugar Smoke: The Definitive Guide to Conserving, from Jams and Jellies to Smoking and Curing (Mitchell Beazley).
