Melanie McDonagh chooses cookbooks for lockdown

This is the time of year when people who don’t know any better give things up as part of dieting and clean living for the new year. It’s a bad idea. This is the moment to embrace carbs.

You could do much worse than try The Irish Cookbook by J.P. McMahon ­(Phai­don, £35; Tablet price £31.50), a genial individual and chef. It’s one of Phaidon’s blockbuster editions of national cookbooks (The Turk­ish Cook­book was a model of its kind). The great thing about Irish food is its simplicity, and this excellent book celebrates cooking grounded in good ingredients, popular ­tradition and the influence of the “big house”.
Nowadays the food that used to be eaten by the poor – whelks, seaweed, eels, offal – is showcased by new-wave chefs like J.P. There’s something for everyone here, including those whose tastes run to new Irish cooking, and spud fanciers, for whom there are no fewer than eight pages of potato recipes. I didn’t think I would love this book when I discovered that J.P. uses egg in soda bread (an ­abomination), but it’s actually very good.
Sabrina Ghayour’s Simply (Mitchell Beazley, £26; Tablet price £23.40) is a feat: a fashionable (it was showcased in the Fortnum & Mason food hall) Persian cookbook which features easy and delicious recipes. Not all of them work equally well, but there are some terrific things here. The lamb kebab which is cooked as a flat cake in a pan will be a permanent favourite.