Books, glorious books. What other gift can give such lasting enjoyment, particularly if it's full of delicious recipes and essays on food? The new foodie publications this year are as varied as ever, which means that regardless of who is on your Christmas shopping list, there are loads of delicious books to choose from. In fact, even the canine members of the family are catered for this year, thanks to Stephanie Mehanna, who was written Pupcakes (Hamlyn, £8.99), which features 35 healthy recipes for the dog's dinner. She even includes recipes for dogs with allergies or on special diets.

Books that help a cook gain confidence and basic cooking skills include Hamlyn's How to Cook (£9.99), which gives step-by-step instructions, expert tips and clear advice for those requiring a little help to get them started. For those who have mastered the basic rules about cookery, but still need a little bit of help to get things right, there's Kitchen Wisdom, by Anne Sheasby (Ryland Peters & Small, £9.99). This is the perfect gift for a young person living away from home for the first time, or someone who wants to make their cooking disasters a thing of the past.

The social history of drinking is the subject of The Art of Drinking, edited by Philippa Glanville and Sophie Lee (V&A Publications, £30), making it the perfect gift for those who would love to know more about the way ritual and ceremony have shaped our relationship to drink. This beautifully illustrated book also shows how alcohol has inspired a dazzling array of innovative objects, from decorative punch bowls to corkscrews and cocktail shakers, and fuelled many Bacchanalian celebrations, victories, state occasions and drinking games.

Persia in Peckham, by Sally Butcher (Prospect Books, £17.99), opens up one of the world's greatest cuisines and allows us all to enter into the Persian experience, understand how this great cuisine developed and appreciate how Persian cookery is reacting to the modern world. Sally and her Iranian husband, Jamshid, run Persepolis, a food store which, as the residents of Peckham know only to well, is nothing less than a foodie's paradise, as it gathers together all that's best from Iran and the Middle East. This book distils everything remarkable about this shop and the style of cooking that it supports.

A Treasure of Persian Cuisine, by Shirin Simmons (Stamford House Publishing, £19.95), continues the Persian theme by taking us back thousands of years to a Persian civilisation that existed before the Greeks, then forward, via Artaxerxes and Ghengis Kan, to today's Islamic state of Iran, interweaving the whole with a broad knowledge of the traditional foods of the region and their significance.

Taste, by Kate Colquhoun (Bloomsbury, £20), tells the history of Britain through its food and cooking, beginning with Roman times and continuing right through the ages to the modern times and the rise of the celebrity chef. It's a fascinating book as it addresses a range of questions from the serious to the light-hearted and encourages an intelligent understanding of our past. This, to a great extent, helps us understand why, in an age of convenience and waste, Jamie Oliver has become the guardian of our children's diets.

Britain The Cookbook, by Paul Vickery (Mitchell Beazley, £20), celebrates all that's good by featuring British food producers who strive to grow, produce or catch the best food possible. He includes the Whitstable fishermen who harvest succulent fresh oysters, Stilton cheese makers, rhubarb growers, millers and gamekeepers. Superb recipes created to bring out the best of British produce make this a book that any serious foodie will treasure. The Heinz Tomato Ketchup Cookbook, by Paul Hartley (Absolute Press, £7.99), is a quirky little book which would certainly add a dash of colour to a cook's library, as it's full of hilarious trivia, history and anecdotes about the country's favourite sauce. It also contains some rather useful recipes, which may encourage children to cook, making this a particularly good family gift.

TV cook Rachel Allen's book Food for Living, (Collins, £20) follows her popular television series of the same name, which means the recipes she features draw inspiration from those happy moments in life and are a celebration of life, love and cherished memories. It's rather a nice book and would make an ideal gift for anyone who has watched Rachel in action and would like to cook as she does.

Pumpkin ravioli, marinated anchovies and ligurian seafood stew are just three of the tempting recipes featured in Marina Filippelli's Fresh Italian (Hamlyn, £16.99) which helps the cook transform the simple ingredients that are so essential when cooking Italian food into nutritious dishes that taste as good as they look.

Frankie Dettori's Italian Family Cookbook (Harper Collins, £20), which is co-authored with Marco Pierre White, also contains a sumptuous collection of mouthwatering Italian recipes, some which are inspired by Frankie's traditional family home, others by Marco's world-famous kitchens.

No Christmas list would be complete without a few republished classics, such as Jane Grigson's Good Things (Grub Street, £14.99), which is considered one of her greatest collections of recipes. Though it was written in 1971, it is even more relevant today than when first published. Grub Street has also republished Jane's The Mushroom Feast (£12.99), which is an indispensable classic, and a new hardback edition of Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking (£14.99), which should not be ignored either. This classic was re-issued because of the huge demand for Elizabeth David's works and should grace the shelves of every cook's library.