Most cookbooks hand you a recipe. Johanna Nelson hands you the whole evening. Menu is built around complete menus rather than single dishes, so the question stops being what shall I cook and becomes who is coming over. A wintry Thursday dinner. A movie night with something better than popcorn. A tea party in the garden. Friends, a glass of red, and a grazing board of tapas.

Nelson is a chef who came up through some of the world's finest restaurants and specialises in desserts, and every recipe here has been through what she calls the most critical panel of all, her own family. That is why the cooking is generous rather than fussy: make it from scratch in your own kitchen, or cut a corner where you feel like it. Nothing collapses either way.

The photography is by Viola Minerva Virtamo, and it is the reason this book keeps getting bought as a gift. Long tables, low Nordic light, food shot the way you would actually serve it. Menu headers run through the book like the card at a good restaurant, so you can pick a whole spread in one turn of the page.