My Favourite Cookbooks.

I have over 300 cookbooks, some of them I havn't even opened! I see them in bookshops or charity shops, take them home and put them in my cupboard and forget about them! But there are a few that I always refer to when creating a dish or cooking something on a day off.
My Roux cookbooks are special to me as I won them at the final of the Roux scholarship and they are signed, Michel Snr signs one to ''Christopher'', only Gastro Gran ever calls me that! Also special to me are my Thai cookbooks, written by my old boss David Thompson, his first (the pink book), took 10 years to write! And his new book Thai Street Food, he gave me when I left Nahm. He was such an inspiration to me and I will never forget my time at Nahm, I have never met a person as passionate as him or as dedicated to one cuisine as David.
Then there are my Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, 'Meat' and 'Fish' books, they are full of everything that you need to know about the great Produce Britain has to offer, with a few fairly easy recipes, top books.
When looking for a bit of Japanese inspiration I open one of my Nobu cookbooks or Yoshihiros Murata's book Kaiseki, with great recipes from his 3 michelin starred restaurant in Kyoto, also full of great Japanese recipes and ingredient information is Shizuo Tsuji's Japanese cooking, a fine art.
I also have a great Escoffier book (no introduction needed) which I picked up for £9 in a charity shop! But my all time favourite and bargain book is called 'A Practical Cook' written by Joseph Bregion and Anne Miller, it was written in 1845! That makes it 165 years old!!!!!!!! It has some amazing recipes in it, including 'Real Turtle Soup'! Amazing, I bought it from a second hand bookshop on the Kings Road for £12! Gorden Ramski's new book costs £25, and he probably doesn't even know the person who wrote it! Did I write that or think it?