What a real joy it’s been to spend the last few weeks collating together pieces which make up the first book of Berger & Wyse food cartoons. For those who aren’t already aware of their (spare-)rib-tickling work from the Guardian Weekend magazine, they are humorists who express their love of food via a new cartoon each week. Their regular characters include the gastronauts and the godzillas and a whole host of neurotic, talking vegetables.

This beautiful comic collection contains 52 of their favourite pieces and there isn’t one of them that won’t merit a big grin, and many that will result in a giant (pork-)belly laugh. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall puts it very simply indeed: ‘I like Berger and Wyse cartoons and I like food, so I particularly like Berger and Wyse food cartoons.’

You can follow them on Twitter for updates on each new cartoon. Berger & Wyse is available from the beginning of September.

The Eagle Cookbook was first published in 2001 – as Rough Edges and Strong Flavours – and was reissued in 2009, featuring wonderful 
new recipes from a number of award-winning ex-Eagle alumni such as Sam and Sam Clark of Moro and Jonathan Jones from The Anchor and Hope and completed by evocative photography that captured 24 hours in the life of this frantically busy and ever-popular gastropub. It remains one of the best collections of Mediterranean-inflected recipes in print. The book is divided into recipe sections for Soups, Salads, Meals on Toast, Eggs for Dinner, Pasta, Rice, Fish, Meat and Side Dishes: all of them full of the kind of wonderfully robust and vibrant flavours that the Eagle put their stamp on twenty years ago… long before any other gastropub got there.

First opened by Mike Belben and David Eyre in 1991 The Eagle soon had the phrase ‘gastropub’ coined after it. Since first opening a steady stream of highly talented chefs have passed through it’s kitchen, many of whom have gone on to radically transform the eating scene in London and beyond. The Eagle can justifiably claim to have transformed the way the British eat out and, along with Fergus Henderson at St John, helped the nation rediscover its culinary heritage.