Kitchen Person

In 2009, Rachel Cooke started a monthly column for The Observer on cooking and eating. Here are her fifty best.

In Kitchen Person, unfussy eater Rachel Cooke chronicles several food upheavals since then: new TV cooks, Brexit, viral recipes, the home delivery phenomenon, and the global pandemic. She journeys from her childhood in Sheffield with Henderson's relish and Granny's lamb chops, to a job interviewing top chefs and eating in fancy restaurants, to learning to shop and cook well herself, all the time growing more knowledgeable and opinionated about food.

'Reading Cooke is like chatting to your most interesting and forthright friend in their kitchen' SPECTATOR

'Erudite, insightful, fearless, often hilarious, with needle sharp observation' Jeremy Lee