Too many cooks?

"Tried. Tested. Trusted" proclaims the next cover, qualities admirable but not riveting. However, Classic Recipes by the Good Housekeeping Institute would return a failed fusion cook to the straight and narrow, though Prawn Madras might be a classic in England but not, I think, in Madras (Collins and Brown £14.99).

Home on the Range by Emma and Bryn Parry would be a jolly hardback hurrah to send to a country cousin. Bryn Parry is a sporting cartoonist for country magazines and his coloured drawings of animated Agas and canine chefs called Mango and Pickle enliven instructions for such as "continental breakfast, bacon butties, and rifle brigade savoury" (Swan Hill £16.99).

By the same publisher, but much more serious, is Good Game: British and European Game Cookery by Victoria Jardine-Paterson and Colin McKelvie (Swan Hill £16.95). They properly start with grouse, its natural history, then a limited number of British recipes, no curry here, rather a concoction called grouse-moor keepers' hotpot that requires "one brace old grouse (usually available quite cheaply off the moor)" and Guinness. The increasingly populous red or "French" partridge comes with chocolate, Spanish-style. Rabbits come curried. I read to my astonishment that the golden plover is a gamebird. Cunning ruses are given on luring the flashing flocks of plovers to a gun and culinary tips are provided for dealing with the "sweet flesh".

Pike, salmon, sea-trout, brown trout, and carp swim by, wild boar lurk "hairy and horrible", pheasants need eating up by the British - 36m a year. This book is a bit well hung, being a paperback edition of a 1993 hardback, but worth reconsidering as game is riding high on the sometimes justifiable "natural" bandwagon.

My staple diet is la Real Fast Vegetarian Food by Ursula Ferrigno (Metro £8.99). This is nice, simple, tasty territory to revisit.

A page of photographs in Zilli's Italian Food for Friends by Aldo Zilli shows "some Italian ingredients - bresaola di tonno (air-dried tuna), tartufo bianco (white truffles), wood smoked mozzarella and red basil" (Metro £16.99). "Quick and easy" is also the claim for The Zilli Fish Cookbook (Metro £16.99). Tuck into his potato pizza with dandelion and smoked eel.

A Cook's Tour, in Search of the Perfect Meal by Anthony Bourdain is perhaps many things, foodie decadence, politics, or an excuse to be bad and eat the still-beating heart of a cobra comes to mind, but it is not a recipe book, nor festive (Bloomsbury £7.99).

Real Fast Indian Food by Mridula Baljekar should satisfy the requirements of those who have exhausted the possibilities of the local, and probably, even faster, takeaway. The paperback outing of her companion volume, Fat Free Indian Cookery, could be sent to a student nephew so as to mitigate the damage done by the half gallon of lager that takeaways are often floated on (both Metro £8.99).

A Brief History of Thyme and other herbs by academic and broadsheet columnist Miranda Seymour could be risky for said nephew (John Murray £9.99). For, though soothing on lemon balm she (with a supporting cast of George Washington, Queen Victoria and King Henry VIII) is contentious on Indian hemp and could flavour a familial Christmas row.

Last but not least and a present beautiful in appearance and for a talented cook is Thai Food by David Thompson (Pavilion £25). It has nearly 700 pages, part history, part recipies, 20 years of research by the Australian author and his work with the chefs of the Thai royal palaces. Authentically, we are provided with a recipe for curried fish innards. A dish called "green curry of trout dumplings with apple eggplants" has 34 ingredients and looks quite vivid.

To obtain the "sensational tastes" requires "time effort and well honed skills", with Thai women having by tradition the required patience and dexterity