For somebody who can't really cook I seem to have gathered up a decent collection of recipe books, I noticed the other day.

Looking along the bookshelves I could see a couple of Nigel Slaters, a Japanese cookbook (when do I ever eat Japanese? Never is the answer. Unless I pick up some veggie sushi from the supermarket), Mother India at Home, Monir Mohammed and Martin Gray's book from last year, and a run of Yotam Ottolenghi titles (love Yotam; I particularly like the cushiony cover from Plenty).

My other half - who can actually follow a recipe - has a few more, though hers tend to the more utilitarian (lots of Good Housekeeping titles and the like). Me, though, I like the ones that come with all the frills. You know, gorgeous pictures, posh paper, fancy endpapers. The recipes themselves are, if I'm honest, of secondary interest.

I can't imagine I'm totally alone in this. These days publishers know that cookery books are as much about aspiration as utility. As Nick Davies, MD of John Murray told me the other day, "the better written of the books might even be on people's bedsides. They're not just on a kitchen shelf covered in whatever has been splashed onto the cover."

They're certainly not on my kitchen shelf. I know the recipe for veggie chilli, my signature dish (OK, my only dish), off by heart.

So why the obsession with cookery books? There are two pleasures at work here. The first is a material one. One of the unexpected benefits of the digital revolution has been the rediscovery by publishers of the art of book-making. You can read paperbacks - especially those Game of Thrones scale tomes - on your Kindle or your Kobo and be perfectly happy. But electronic data just can't duplicate the tactile pleasures of the finely made book. And ever since Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries in 2005 the bookishness of cookery books has been at a premium.

"I think that Nigel Slater and that team at Fourth Estate broke new ground with Nigel's writings. There were some exquisite formats coming from that list," suggests Davies. "But I think every publisher is putting a lot of effort and time in. Even the big mass market names they all want beautifully designed books. It's not enough to put a glossy cover on the front with a big mugshot. So I think everybody's at it."

John Murray too, it should be said. I've just been leafing through one of its new Saltyard imprint titles, Rachel Roddy's Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome. Roddy made a name for herself with her blog and now her food writing has graduated to hard covers. The result certainly ticks all the boxes in terms of production values. You'd be happy to have it on your coffee table or by your bed.

The words match the presentation too. "There's quite an authentic down to earth feel to what she does," suggests Davies. "It's come from a heartfelt place. She'd doing this for her own pleasure long before we came and knocked on her door."

More importantly she also fulfils the second pleasure of the contemporary cookery book. The pleasure that has always been there in all the best food writing down the years and the centuries even. Roddy is not just telling us how to boil the pasta or how not to cook an octopus (though that is in there if you require that information).

Like the best food writing Five Quarters is also a form of travel writing, provides a taste of history, memoir and literate display. It is a form of utopian thinking too, you could argue. This is how we might live, it implicitly says. Or at least look at the pictures of how we might live.

Why do we love cookery books? Because the best ones are about so much more. Rachel Roddy - like Yotam and Nigel - is writing about a sense of place, about culinary culture and culture in general. In short, she is writing about life. The nice pictures are just a bonus.