BLOOMSBURY A Table Full of Love

With hand-marbled patterns and glorious recipes and photography, A Table Full of Love is a beautiful cookbook. It invites you to pull up a chair to Skye's delightfully aspirational and unabashedly romantic table.

Skye McAlpine is a wonderful cookbook writer. Her recipes are often quick and easy, sometimes more complex, but always the sort of food you want to cook and eat. Her table always looks fantastic because she is also a talented stylist while having her own range of fabulous tableware adds an extra dimension. We can all dream. At least we have the recipes if not the enviable lifestyle shared between Venice and London. Her new cookbook, A Table Full of Love (Bloomsbury) has just hit the shelves. Subtitled recipes to comfort, seduce, celebrate and everything else in between, it is a book that covers most bases.

In the introduction to A Table Full of Love, McAlpine writes about the importance of love in making our lives worthwhile and she has written about this subject through the language of food. She is not talking about romantic love alone. Some recipes come with a symbol that indicates that the finished dish can be left on the doorstep for a friend or neighbour who may be going through a tough time or to take as a gift when invited for dinner. Then there are cakes – lots of them – and desserts with which to treat friends and family. While McAlpine acknowledges her sweet tooth resulting in many recipes that satisfy this craving, there are lots of savoury options – chicken soup to nourish and heal, pasta dishes to whip up in no time to delight those gathered at your table. These are not overly fancy dishes, but rather ones to enjoy cooking, serving and eating.