Father's Day Gifts for Dads Who Love Cooking

Buying for a dad who loves cooking should be easy. He's got a hobby, he talks about it constantly, and there's a whole industry built around it. And yet every year you end up in the same place: another gadget he'll use twice, another cookbook by a chef he's never mentioned, another apron with a slogan on it.

1. A cookbook made from his own recipes

This is the one worth thinking about properly.

Dads who cook usually have a repertoire, and most of it came from somewhere. His mum's roast potatoes. The curry he learned from a flatmate in his twenties. The pasta dish he invented one Tuesday and has been quietly refining ever since. The barbecue rub he's oddly secretive about.

None of that is written down. It lives in his head, in a few splattered index cards, and in a drawer full of torn-out magazine pages.

A personalised cookbook gathers all of it into one properly made book - recipes from family and friends, with a line or two about who each one came from, telling the story of how he cooks and who taught him. It gets used every week and then handed down.

It also solves a problem he'll never solve himself, because writing it all down is exactly the kind of job that stays on the list forever.

How to do it without ruining the surprise: you don't have to collect and type everything yourself. Send a link to his family and friends and each of them adds their own recipe, a photo and a paragraph on why it's special. You'll get more than you expect, and the memories that come back are often as good as the recipes.

2. A really good knife, and something to keep it sharp

Most home cooks are working with a knife that stopped being sharp about six years ago. A well-made chef's knife is one of the few upgrades that changes how cooking feels day to day.

Buy the sharpener at the same time. A great knife left to go blunt is just an expensive blunt knife.

3. Cast iron

A skillet or a casserole dish is heavy, ugly-beautiful, effectively immortal, and gets better the more it's used. It's the opposite of a gadget. He'll still be using it in thirty years, and someone will inherit it.

4. For barbecue dads specifically

The barbecue is a whole subculture and it has its own upgrade path. In rough order of how much difference they make:

• A good instant-read thermometer. The single biggest improvement to anyone's barbecuing, and the cheapest.
• Lumpwood charcoal instead of briquettes, or a chimney starter, which removes the need for firelighters entirely.
• Proper long tongs and a heavy fish slice. Most people are working with something bent.
• Wood chunks for smoke - oak, cherry, apple. Consumable, cheap, and immediately noticeable.

What to avoid: the six-piece branded tool set in a case. Nobody has ever used the fork.

5. Ingredients he wouldn't buy for himself

Good saffron. Aged balsamic. A tin of properly good olive oil. Single-origin chilli flakes. Real vanilla. The stuff he looks at, thinks "that's ridiculous", and puts back on the shelf.

6. A class in something he's never tried

Not "how to cook", which he can already do. Something specific and slightly outside his comfort zone: pasta from scratch, proper sushi, sourdough, Sichuan, butchery, fermentation. The gift is the excuse to spend a day being a beginner again.

7. An apron that isn't a joke

He does not want the one that says "Licence to Grill". He'd quite like a heavy cotton or linen apron that fits properly, has decent pockets, and looks like something a person would wear on purpose.

Gifts from young children

If the gift is nominally from a five-year-old, the thing dads keep is the thing the child made. A drawing of him cooking, or a recipe dictated by the child and taken down word for word - "you put the chicken in for ten hours" - then printed exactly as said.

These are also, incidentally, the best pages in any family cookbook. Don't correct the spelling.

Step-dads and fathers-in-law

Both are made much easier by the same principle: build the gift out of something that actually happened between you. A recipe he taught you, written up properly and given back, does more than anything bought.

Common questions

When is Father's Day in the UK?

The third Sunday in June, the same as in the US - unlike Mother's Day, where the UK and US dates differ. Some other countries celebrate it on entirely different dates.

What do you get a dad who says he doesn't want anything?

Something consumable, something with no physical form, or something about him. He's objecting to owning more stuff, not to being thought about.

What's a good Father's Day gift for a dad who has every gadget?

Stop buying tools and buy inputs - ingredients, a class, a day out - or something built from his own history. Gadget-owning dads are the clearest case where another object genuinely doesn't help.

What if he's not really a cook, just a barbecue person?

Same principle, different content. Barbecue people are extremely opinionated and their methods are exactly as undocumented as anyone else's - a book of his rubs, timings and arguments is a funnier and better gift than a branded tool set.

How long do I need for a made-to-order gift?

Four to six weeks if you're collecting recipes from other people, less if you're doing it alone. Father's Day catches people out less than Mother's Day, but only because it's later in the year.