Darina Allen's favourite cookbooks from 2016

So what to do with all those Christmas book vouchers?

Of course there are hundreds of tempting volumes like The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, but this is a food column so here’s a list of my pick of the 2016 cookbooks.

This year there’s been a whole slew of books from the Middle East with wonderfully evocative titles, such as Samarkand: Recipes and Stories from Central Asia and the Caucasus. This volume, by Caroline Eden and Eleanor Ford, is a love letter to Central Asia. It’s not just recipes: There are travel essays, beautiful photography, stories, and dishes that are little known in the West but that have been expertly adapted for the home cook. For hundreds of years, various ethnic groups have passed through Samarkand sharing and influencing each other’s cuisine and leaving behind their culinary legacy.