Another day, another top ten list of something probably already covered elsewhere but we’re compiling it anyway because we’re bored. This time it is the top ten most useful cookbooks ever written, compiled by Waitrose Food Illustrated. Roast Chicken and Other Stories, unknown in the Blighty household as we don’t eat meat, came in first. Just nipping Delia Smith’s Cookery Course, which is installed on Blighty’s shelves for when one of us forgets how to boil water or something.

Blighty is also the proud owner of number eight in the list - Rick Stein’s Seafood Cookery, although we have to admit to having only cooked the Gremolata Prawns as yet. When Ms Blighty bought it as a Christmas present we were supposed to be moving to Whitby, and as Rick Stein insists that you catch the fish yourself, with your bare teeth, at around four in the morning, cod in butter sauce from Morrisons just won’t do. That’s always the problem with cookbooks though, you speed read the ingredients, the excitement building, medium onion, check; clove of garlic, check; teaspoon of cumin, check; Jerusalem artichokes, ah, check, thought you had me there!… then you get to the last ingredient and it’s bloody truffles from a specific village in southern Italy. Sod it, Fish Fingers and Chips again.

Leith’s Techniques Bible came in 6th. Blighty can recommend Leith’s Vegetarian Bible if you want to cook meat-free. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book is not recommended in that regard however. Hugh breeds and kills his own animals, although we think his cats are only slaughtered on special occasions. When they’re burning an effigy in the local village for instance. Perhaps it’s a good guide for what you chuck down your throat, though. What you would be willing to kill. The Blightys could bring themselves to kill a prawn, but a Sussex cow is out of the question. We all draw the line somewhere, would you eat Tiddles, Rover or the winner of the 3.15 at Ascot?