The best cookbooks published at moments of change

When Maria Lourdes, a popular tv chef, invited her audience to send in their household recipes, the response - at a time of political turmoil after the death of Portugal's dictator, Salazar, in 1968 - was overwhelming.

A fragile democracy and proposed membership of the European Union led to fears that the nation would lose its identity. Portugal's geography has led to historical isolation from her neighbours: on the one hand, a stormy Atlantic coastline, on the other a barren, mountainous interior. 

Portuguese housewives have always known how to make the best of what was available: out of some 8,000 contributions, half were for a left-over bread-dish, açorda, never found in restaurants. As a sea-going nation with strong culinary ties to her former colony, Brazil, Portuguese cuisine is surprisingly exotic.

A first-person account of the culinary habit of rural Britain gathered in the aftermath of WW1, Ms. Hartley set out to collect rural recipes at time when the countryside had been emptied of their young men, leaving young women without hope of a husband. 

Resourceful and independent, Dorothy travelled the length and breadth of her native land, sleeping under hedgerows, huddling round peat-fires, always with pen-and-ink and paper in hand, notebook at the ready. The finished manuscript complete with evocative illustrations didn't see the light of day until ten years after the end of WW2.

I well remember post-war rationing and terrible school catering in the 1950s, source of the nation's reputation for inedible food. Ms. Harley's recipes prove the reverse (particularly the baking). 

Ada Boni's culinary bible, Il talismano della felicità, first saw the light of day in 1928, six years after Benito Mussolini had succeeded in uniting Italy's quarrelsome regions under the banner of fascism.

Specifically targeted at the nation's housewives - ordinary folk on whose support El Duce rose to power in 1922 - this collection of nearly a thousand simple, practical traditional recipes for regional dishes became the dictator's favourite cookbook, as it did for generations of Italian women (still does). 

I first came across it on an Italian friend's recommendation while researching European Peasant Cookery and attempting to unravel the complicated traditions of a land that remains as fiercely partisan in the kitchen now as then. 

Unusually for a non-native cookery writer - and particularly so for the Catalans - this encyclopedic work by one of the US's most distinguished scholar cooks has become the go-to in restaurant kitchens throughout Spain's least-conformist region.

Publication in the Catalan language of its predecessor, Josep LLadonosa's El Gran Libro de la Cuina Catalana in 1992 (translated into Spanish, but not into English) was only possible after the demise of General Franco ended a fifty-year dictatorship that followed a particularly bloody civil war.

In spite of all efforts by Spain's central government to suppress Catalunia's language and culture, her spirit lived on - not least in a very distinctive culinary habit. It's no surprise that the iconoclastic genius of Ferran Adria surfaced in the land of Guadi and Dali. And no accident that Spain's gastronomic revolution started in Barcelona.  

After President Nasser expelled her family along with most of Egypt's Jewish population in the 1950s, young Claudia Douek, art student in London, began to collect memories and family recipes from her fellow refugees.

The subtext is what it means to be a woman - young or old - obliged to create a new life in an alien land. I once asked Claudia why it is that so many cookery writers are of Jewish descent (as am I): "Simple. We need to remember who we are." 

A stylish writer with an artist's eye who's also a serious historian, Middle Eastern is the book I treasure not only for culinary inspiration (authenticity guaranteed), but for the accuracy and accessibility of her beautiful prose.