Books make a great present, particularly if they will encourage members of your family to become creative cooks.

This year the Italian Silver Spoon classic has been adapted for children aged ten and over, to enable them to create some really scrumptious Italian dishes for themselves.

The Silver Spoon for Children (Phaidon, £12.95) features easy to follow Italian recipes that have been tested by nutritional experts and accompanied by a brief lively text providing young cooks with fascinating facts about each dish. Dishes such as ravioli Napoletana, baked aubergine with tomato potato gnocchi and tuna frittata, each of which comes with step-by- step instructions, make it a very accessible and entertaining book for children.

Claire McAvoy’s The Minichefs Cookbook (Grub Street Press, £9.99), is a great little book too, and contains some healthy modern recipes that children will find fun to make and bake.

For children aged seven and over there is Lookit Cookit by Judy Jackson (Blurb, £9.99) a fun little book designed to excite curious children through a series of kitchen games that will help them understand what cooking is all about.

Fiona J. Houston spent a year alone in a dark chilly cottage living as one would have done in the 18th century. In The Garden Cottage Diaries (Saraband, £17.95) Fiona provides us with a blow-by-blow account of the difficulties she encountered when attempting to live and cook as an 18th- century woman without electricity or kitchen gadgets. This is a delightful read which describes the hardships and delights of living in the past.

I Know How to Cook by Ginette Mathiot (Phaidon, £22.95) is such a massive book that would cost a small fortune to post, so it’s best bought for someone who lives close by. First published in 1932, and constantly updated over the years, it has been the cookery French bible to three generations of cooks. Not only does it equip the reader with the building blocks for good cookery, it conveys the philosophy that’s at the heart of the French kitchen.

Those who already own one of Julie Duff’s books on cakes and baking will no doubt be delighted to discover she has now brought out Cakes From Around the World (Grub Street Press, £14.99), which includes some superb recipes, including the Austrian doughnuts, Krappen, which if eaten while warm and tossed in sugar are simply scrumptious. Her chocolate brownies from America are fantastic too.

Buy a copy of John Torode’s Chicken and Other Birds (Quadrille, £20) and you will never be left wondering what to do with a packet of chicken breasts again. It will talk you through the problems of cooking the Christmas turkey too, and his pheasant dishes are inspirational.

Many of the dishes described in Tamasin Day-Lewis’s latest book, Supper for a Song (Quadrille, £20) are elegantly simple, yet inexpensive and easy to make. Her bitter chocolate custards are to die for and carrot, apple and blue cheese soup delicious. This is inexpensive comfort food at its best.

For the cook in your life who collects unusual cookery books and who likes experimenting with new ingredients, there’s North African Cookery, by Arto der Haroutunian (Grub Street, £18.99). The 300 recipes take the reader on a tour of the cuisines of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya and includes some unusual recipes for vegetables and meat dishes. Her chicken with coriander and mint, is particularly tasty, so are her stuffed globe artichokes. The Oxford Companion to Italian Food, by Gillian Riley (Oxford University Press, £9.99) provides the reader with an A-Z guide to one of the world’s favourite cuisines. This is not a recipe book – rather an informative work which will make a useful addition to a cook’s library as it covers all aspects of history and culture of Italian gastronomy.

For the cook who enjoys following recipes by celebrity chefs, Gordon Ramsay’s World Kitchen (Quadrille, £20) takes the cook on a magic carpet ride around the globe and introduces them to his favourite recipes.

Award-winning chef Neven Maguire is not as well known as Ramsay, but his book Home Chef (Harper Collins, £20) contains some mouth-watering recipes which he has adapted for the home cook. His aim in putting this book together is to raise the standards of home cooking and help us all gain confidence in the kitchen.

Prospect Books have come up with an intriguing little book which will make an ideal stocking filler for the cook in your life. Rhubarbaria – Recipes for Rhubarb, by Mary Prior (£8.99). This book offers a history of this fruit (or is it a vegetable?) and includes some really unusual ways of combining it with meat and fish dishes.

Finally, for the chocoholic in the family, go for Willie’s Chocolate Factory Cookbook (Hodder & Stoughton £20).