Menu No 6: Pineapple, Parmesan, Earth, Marine, Citrus, Cardamom

This is part of an imaginative series of small books, each of which offers a charming seasonal dinner menu. There is a confident, thoughtful unpredictability about them which we greatly admire.

They truly are small (5" x 7", 36 pages), but composed with care. Author Brian Voll is a home cook who enjoys having friends over to give himself an excuse to step outside his usual boundaries.

Voll provides a shopping list and is careful not to ask you to buy an ingredient only to use two snips of it. In this volume, for instance, the parsley, cilantro and pineapple will be used in three recipes, the radishes, carrots, ricotta, and orange in two recipes, and the indispensable lemons in five recipes. There's also a page called Get Ahead which tells you what can be done in advance.

Menu No 6 offers recipes for:

• Mezcal cocktail with tepache
• Radishes with anchovy butter
• Raviolo al'uovo nel brodo di Parmigiano
• Green harissa rice pilaf
• Asparagus and roasted-pickled beets
• Cod broiled in chermoula
• Carrot cake with cardamom and fromage blanc

Paperback.