A journey that chef James Viles has dreamed of for more than 20 years, Due North is the informal travel diary of his epic road trip from Tasmania to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Viles’ commentary and Adam Gibson’s photography make for an inspiring combination. The Flinders Island section in particular has me engrossed as it’s a place where I’ve seen both Viles and Gibson at work. The book will appeal to the hungry, adventurous traveller, and makes the pang for travel more acute.

This is a book I first tipped in a line-up of 2019 releases that I’m coming back to time and time again. I’ve wanted to return to Japan, and Tokyo in particular, since 2012, but for the time being it will be through the pages of Burgess and Ryan’s curated selection of where to eat and drink. Beyond mere guidebook it tells the story of the people behind Tokyo’s ramen joints, izakayas, wine bars and coffee shops. It’s a dive into what’s good, from the mouths of people who know good hospitality in the city.

Essential reading for anyone looking to delve deeper into Australia’s First Culture; one that has endured for tens of thousands of years but is still often misunderstood. Professor Marcia Langton has created a book that’s part primer on Indigenous language and culture, and part guide to some of the country’s best tourism experiences. Most of us could know more about the country on and in which we live, who its traditional owners are and be more respectful of culture, and this is a book for that.

I’m wistful for France and also for time travel. Fisher’s memoir recalls her three-year stint in Dijon from 1929, and a culinary culture that exists in many a mind but now isn’t always found. Many will be unfamiliar with her name, let alone her work, but it’s perhaps best left to others. Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike called her “a poet of the appetites,” while food writer and editor Ruth Reichl recalled that “until I discovered M.F.K Fisher, it was a lonely existence.” To quote Reichl quoting Fisher, how could you not read a writer who said, “since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.”

Reissued in 2019, The Food of Sichuan made my list for the year, but it also led me back to my copy of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper. Dunlop recounts the formative years of her education in Chinese cuisine and culture in the mid 1990s. Much of the book recounts her time in Chengdu, as a student at Sichuan University. It recalls vividly her food encounters, and I dare say a city that is much changed. But it’s both an insight into Dunlop’s backstory, the joy of food discovery and taking a leap into the unknown.

Kitchen Confidential was the launch pad for Bourdain, and A Cook’s Tour picks up the action when he started his meteoric rise in TV, albeit before he’s the name he became. As you’d expect from Bourdain, it’s raucous, hilarious and provokes thoughts about what we take from travel. A much-missed talent, he lives on in these pages.

My childhood memories of Spain and its islands are primarily of the food. Being served a heaped bowl of tiny fried whitebait, my young mind was blown. For years my thought of Spanish food was Mediterranean, Valencian or Balearic, until visiting Madrid and then the Atlantic coast and discovering that Spain is a rich regional tapestry. Goulding lays out his love for Spain, its food and culture from the start, and then neatly dissects the country’s eating. There are the likes of Etxebarri, former stomping ground of Firedoor’s Lennox Hastie, lessons in drinking like a Spaniard and lines like “I first met Chaco in December 2010 when we gathered in a cave to kill a pig.”

For me, cookbooks are as much about travel as food. Many of my favourites evoke memories of travels, of culinary experiences or thoughts of long-held travel plans. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the books and the cities, fall into the latter, as much for the food as anything else. Having cooked from Jerusalem, a lot, I could be foolish enough to think I know how the food of the region tastes but I’m sure that’s not the case. There’s a poignancy in Ottolenghi and Tamimi being from different sides of the cultural divide, united by (amongst other things) food. Perhaps when we’re finally on the move again, I’ll test my theory on taste.

There are few publishers that do fine dining culture like Phaidon. Even its singular restaurant books inspire travel thoughts and memories, such as D.O.M in Sao Paulo and Brae closer to home in Birregurra. Currently it’s The Garden Chef that’s fuelling my imagination. I seem to have reached an age where it’s not pictures of dive bars that get me excited to explore. Give me garden beds in bucolic locales, good-looking poultry that free-roam, rooftop beehives and city patches that are ingeniously slotted into the urban landscape and I’m thinking about culinary world tours. Give me a book crammed with restaurants that I’d gladly go long haul for – Chez Panisse, Hells’ Backbone Grill, The Sportsman, Mugaritz, Hisa Franko – if it weren’t for cash, carbon footprints and Covid.