Italy

Italy includes both the country's own standard reference work and the books that have shaped how Italian food is understood outside Italy.

Silver Spoon was first published in 1950 and has since sold more than a million copies across eight editions. It remains one of the most common wedding gifts in Italy, the book you are expected to receive when you start cooking for yourself. Its vegetarian companion volume contains more than 200 dishes, and Italian cooking is more often meat free than its reputation suggests.

In The River Cafe Cookbook, published in 1995, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers defined ingredient led simplicity for an entire generation and won both the Glenfiddich Award and BCA Illustrated Book of the Year. Their kitchen also trained Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, April Bloomfield and Theo Randall, whose own The Italian Table brings together 100 recipes arranged as an Italian table actually is.

Russell Norman writes about Venetian cooking on a small scale in Polpo, while Big Mamma Cucina Popolare represents the modern and considerably louder interpretation.