Award Winning Cookbook – Master It by Rory O’Connell

Rory O’Connell’s Master It, which was published in hardback two years ago, has quickly become one of our favourite cookbooks. It’s an essential book if you want to learn to cook, rather than just follow recipes, as O’Connell – a teacher by trade (as well as working as a chef at some of the world’s best restaurants including Chez Parnisse, O’Connell co-founded Ballymaloe Cookery School with his sister, Darina Allen, and still teaches there) – is a brilliant explainer of technique and method, as well as being inspiring on ingredients and why we should spend time cooking at all. The recipes in the book are also wonderful (and for things  you actually want to eat) and wonderfully precise, not least for having been honed by years of teaching experience, and O’Connell writes extremely well. For us, the book ticks every box and then some. Not surprisingly, Master It, was named Cookbook of the Year by several critics and publications (including the Observer Food Monthly), and it won the André Simon Award – the industry’s most prestigious food writing prize. You can read more about why we rate the book and O’Connell so highly here, when we raved about it in hardback, but we couldn’t resist giving the book another shout-out to celebrate its paperback publication.