Britain & Ireland

Britain & Ireland is the category that has gone from joke to reference point in a single generation.

Fergus Henderson marks the turning point. Nose to Tail Eating, published in 1999, and his restaurant St. JOHN in Smithfield gave rise to the entire nose to tail movement, the idea that the whole animal should be eaten rather than just the expensive cuts. The book deals with marrow, kidney, tongue and pig's ear, written with dry British humour and without a trace of apology.

Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories represents the other British tradition, where the recipe is secondary to judgement and a well roasted chicken counts as a perfectly complete meal. Nigel Slater writes in the same tradition, but with a stronger focus on seasonality and prose worth reading in its own right.

Heston Blumenthal and The Fat Duck represent the opposite, a technically obsessive kitchen of triple cooked potatoes and cooking treated as a research project.

JP McMahon's The Irish Cookbook contains 480 recipes and is the first serious attempt to document Irish cooking in its entirety.