This year’s bumper crop looks at salsa, salads, drinking culture, home baking, and Italian cuisine.
Amazingly, that serendipity happened multiple times this fall. What makes this year's group of best cookbooks unique is that they are all artistic big swings. It’s almost like the authors, photographers, editors, and art department folks stood in a circle, put their hands in the middle, counted to three, and shouted “go for broke!”
Another group—the first five books newly added to the list below—are the classics done right. With an Ottolenghi alum and Samin Nosrat among them, it is overflowing with talent.
This year's bumper crop looks at salsa, salads, instant ramen noodles, Italian recipes, drinking culture, and home baking. Subtle they aren't, but they get you cooking, eating, drinking, and dreaming, which sounds like cookbook perfection to me. Enjoy!
Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes
Courtesy of Abrams
by Helen Goh
If you're a fan of the Ottolenghi cookbooks, you might notice over time that they are a team effort. As someone who cowrites cookbooks, this is particularly nice to see. There's a nice effort made to highlight the other cooks who work and even coauthor with him. One alum striking out on their own is particularly exciting to me. Helen Goh's sweet and savory baking book is way out there on its own, perhaps like St. Vincent's first full-length album, fully formed and beautiful.
Goh was born to a second-generation Chinese family in Malaysia and emigrated with them when she was 11 to a less-discriminatory Australia. Fast-forward a bit and after a career misfire in Big Pharma, she opened a Melbourne café before becoming a pastry chef at a fancy restaurant, while also working as a psychologist.
Moving to London, she began working at Ottolenghi's group, eventually becoming his lead pastry developer, and enrolled in a doctoral program to study existential philosophy. Amazingly, she structures her cookbook around the philosophical tenets that bring meaning to life and it works. My word! How bold, how touching.
She's incredible at it. I made her rice pudding with plums and cardamom and along with the cardamom, the pudding is infused with orange zest, cinnamon, vanilla, and bay. The plums are halved with the flat sides up, coated with sugar and ground cardamom seeds, and cooked separately in a pool of orange juice. They roast until they give up some of their juice and collapse, a tart accompaniment to the pudding.
Globe-trotting like Goh's can make teasing out a coherent through-line difficult, but perhaps she succeeds because her inner philosopher thought it through. Her food is what you might hope to find at the down-the-street bakery of your dreams, yet not so fancy as to feel too difficult to make at home. I made what she calls "chewy cheese puffs," a sort of mochi-adjacent cousin of a cheesy gougère, which was a fun experiment, and up next, I'm sticking with the wow factor and making her Dutch baby with mortadella and arugula where the odds of disappointment appear to be nil.
The Cook's Garden: A Gardener's Guide to Selecting, Growing, and Savoring the Tastiest Vegetables of Each Season
Courtesy of Knopf
by Kevin West
Kevin West and I overlapped for a spell in my Paris food writing days and a couple times we went to lunch, perhaps testing how far he could push his glossy magazine's expense account. He's written Saving the Season, coauthored the Grand Central Market Cookbook, and contributed to Edna Lewis: At the Table With an American Original, but man does he ever seem born to write this book on how to grow produce and what to do with the bounty.
Originally conceived to be something of a successor to The Victory Garden Cookbook, West's writing has a deep-hearted, old-soul wisdom that brings to mind Robert Redford's narration in the film adaptation of A River Runs Through It, though perhaps it's more apt to say he sounds like the book's author, Norman Maclean.
“When you bring zucchini straight in from the garden, the flavor is fresh as grass and mildly sweet,” he says. “Tiny beads of sap rise from its cuts, countertop dew. The smell is indefinite but clean, like the air over a lake.”
He quotes John Donne and Tom Waits, and he pals around in his garden in the Berkshires with his chef-friend Wes. He devotes a chapter to tomatoes. Mostly, he has a fine palate, the ability to pass on his enthusiasm, and writes clean, informative recipes. I made his green frittata, a recipe that "accumulates chlorophyll" with steamed potatoes, sautéed scallions and herbs, and a great thatch of spinach. Its eggs are enhanced with Parm and buttermilk. It is cooked in a 12-inch skillet which you flip onto a plate "without flinching" to the admiration of whoever is around to inhale it.
I also made what he calls salmonato, a riff on Italy's tonnato. He makes it as a dip for that perfect raw zucchini. His version includes mayo (I love Kewpie), anchovy paste, fish sauce, capers, and lime juice. It's divine. On my shelves he'll be near Tamar Adler, Alice Waters, Nigel Slater, and David Tanis. Yes, that good.
20 Amici 40 Ricetti: Friends and Food From the Heart of Chianti
Courtesy of The Collective Book Studio
by John Bersani
“Is this made with fried eggplant,” asked an Italian friend who joined us for dinner. She'd had one bite of Parmigiana alla Napoletana and her face expressed appreciation for the effort involved while her voice intoned the guttural satisfaction of having an itch scratched on a genetic level. Frying all the eggplant took time, but layering it with tomato sauce, basil, Parm, and a bit of mozzarella made for a nostalgia-inducing end product.
The recipe came from a book I doubted, then quickly fell for; Italian cuisine can make for delicious food and staid, repetitive cookbooks. This one is penned by a foreigner who runs a travel company, which experience has taught me can be a recipe for disaster. Smartly, the author stays out of the spotlight, instead shining it on the amici from the title, who are food experts in the Tuscan village of Gaiole-in-Chianti. There's Luciano the mushroom man, the restaurant chef who looks ready to be cast as a mafia movie heavy, the women who run a trattoria, the wine shop owner. The photos by Nico Schinco are artistic, but there's a frankness to them that shows we're seeing a true slice of life.
Rigatoni all'amatriciana is made by Bersani under the watchful eye of his Roman friend Sergio. The distinguishing factor of the dish, which is doable on a weeknight, is the play between the red sauce and the fatty guanciale—cured, aged pig jowl—that highlights the funky deliciousness of the meat.
With minimal ingredients, a farro soup somehow creates deep sweet and savory flavors. Pan-roasted waxy potatoes are slathered in olive oil, sported crispy edges and we demolished them by the panful.
For a book that felt like it appeared out of nowhere, the recipes are surprisingly well explained, with art folded into the language. Those potatoes are first parboiled then "roughed up" in a bowl to create more surface area and thus more crispiness. Use restraint with the rigatoni, he counsels, as "you want to dress your pasta like a salad; It should not be swimming in sauce."
This book's magic lies in its ability to teach you these dishes and turn you into an armchair Gaiole-in-Chianti townsperson. This happens partly with language, partly with photos, and partly by cooking and eating their food.
Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share With People You Love
Courtesy of Random House
by Samin Nosrat
You don't need me to introduce this author to you, but I'd like to draw your attention to two specific and overlapping features of her new book. The first is her gentle insistence on good technique. This is the sort of stuff that you appreciate while working your way through a particular recipe, then take with you for all the recipes you make in the future. Take the way she shows you how to pre-salt (aka “dry brine”) chicken thighs ahead of time, which makes the finished product notably juicy and flavorful. Now watch how she has you handle the raw parts, seasoning with one clean hand and using the other to flip the raw meat.
The second thing is her slow-roasted salmon. If you are unfamiliar with it, this is a method to keep in your back pocket forever. I first heard of this technique from the meal plan company Ends + Stems back in 2020, and it's quite simple; coating with olive oil, salt, and pepper then cooking it at 225 degrees Fahrenheit. This low-low temp makes overcooking much more difficult, yet it still cooks in a reasonable amount of time. Up here in the Pacific Northwest, wild salmon's American HQ, the salmon runs much leaner—and is far easier to overcook—than its farmed cousins, and you'll appreciate this technique even more.
Another testing hit was her take on famed cookbook author Marion Nestle's yeasted waffles. Along with their crispy-yeastiness, I love how Nosrat counsels letting the batter set for 15 seconds before closing the lid, allowing it to spread out a little more, taking some of the guesswork out of where to pour in the batter. My home is populated with only occasional sweet breakfast people, but these waffles disappeared in a heartbeat. Other hits were a Caesar dressing using aquafaba (the liquid in a can of chickpeas) instead of a homemade egg-yolk mayo to bind everything in luxury. A few recipes I tried seemed weirdly just OK for a bestseller this important, but the book is worth it for the techniques alone.
Linger: Salads, Sweets, and Stories to Savor
Courtesy of Knopf
by Hetty Lui McKinnon
I love how cookbooks have grown and expanded to accommodate new flavors and cuisines in the last decade or two. Our pantries—at least mine anyway—may now have permanent supplies of fish sauce, MSG, sunflower oil, chili crisp, brewers yeast, preserved lemons, and pomegranate molasses. In the wrong hands, or the wrong cookbook, these powerhouse ingredients might steer your toward what might be called "gourmet slop," especially when using that stuff more as a crutch than an enhancement.
Linger will keep you on the straight and narrow. It presents itself as a salad cookbook, but McKinnon's definition of "salad" is very flexible. It's really just food you'd love to see piled high around the dinner table. It includes whole roasted cauliflower, spring rolls, and a potato chip salad (woot!) that's inspired by the Indian snacks known as chaat.
I made that cauliflower, roasting it in a hot oven, then drizzling with a tahini, garlic, lemon juice, and chili oil mix before showering it with a heap of dill. Even more fun were soba noodles with crunchy cabbage ribbons, snow peas, cilantro, basil, and toasted sesame oil. My favorite part is the sauce where cubes of fu yu—fermented tofu sold in a jar—are blitzed into a show-stealing sauce with tahini, garlic, and rice vinegar. It coats the cold noodles and provides funk and zip.
A nice balance of flavors is a given in this book and I like to see how much attention is paid to texture. In fact, it all works so well together that it took a while to notice that, as the Knopf publicist put it, the book is "quietly vegetarian."
Soju Party: How to Drink (and Eat!) Like a Korean
Courtesy of Penguin Random House
By Irene Yoo
I've always had a soft spot for offbeat or accidental travel guides that help you understand a place in a different and usually more interesting way than something like Tripadvisor can offer. These books are like secret keys to understanding a culture. I love Fernando Pessoa's Lisbon—What the Tourist Should See, pulled from his unpublished papers in 1992, and journalist and historian András Török's quirky and loving Budapest: A Critical Guide. In the 2000s, Barcelona-based Le Cool's cloth-bound books lived up to their names and didn't make you look like a dork tourist with your Lonely Planet beside your wine glass.
If a good guide is your jam, add Soju Party to your list. Food writer Irene Yoo owns Brooklyn's Orion Bar and grew up in the US while spending summers with family in Seoul. While her book is loaded with information about soju, Korea's most consumed alcohol, and its cousins like beer and makgeolli, it is also a cultural guide, decrypting boozy, fun rituals that take place over the course of a multistage night.
Of course, it's full of recipes for drinks and drinking food, but the book may be most valuable for the way it opens up this specific and important sector of Korean life to the reader. There is basic information like how to pour for others in a group, which is often deferential to elders and respect-based, and how to receive a pour. (Never pour for yourself.) There’s fun stuff like creating a soju tornado or playing the drinking game created by twisting and flicking off the metal ring on a Soju cap. We also learn how to make haejung guk, the "hangover soup" of beef chuck, Korean radish, cabbage, and soy beans. There's even a "ode to Pocari Sweat," the electrolyte-rich drink she loves because it's neither carbonated nor too sweet, making it chuggable relief.
I made dubu kimchi, where slabs of tofu and pork belly each get a side of the plate. The pork belly, seared on its own, then bubbled with kimchi, gochugaru, garlic, and sesame oil, may briefly and wildly overwhelm your sinuses at the stove, but it provides whopping amounts of flavor, especially when paired with a belly-filling wodge of tofu. It's classic Korean drinking fare, but there's no need for the drinkers to hog all the fun.
Like Yoo's inviting tone, Heami Lee’s photos cast a wonderful spell. You might be a little intimidated at first, but the book is too fun and beautiful to resist.
Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake
Courtesy of Penguin Random House
By Nicole Rucker
This book wasted no time introducing itself as my new best friend in the kitchen. Covid, explained baker-author Nicole Rucker, changed her relationship with baking, forcing a short hiatus. When she returned to her own recipes, she found them fussy and found herself wondering if some of the high-maintenance aspects of the baking craft were really necessary, especially at home.
"Why wasn't I using a stand mixer to mix my pie dough? Why does every cookie recipe in my recipe binder start with "cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy"? Why can't every recipe be as simple to put together as a good banana-bread recipe?"
She kept asking herself these questions and paring things down as she realized that a lot of what she was making could be simplified and still taste wonderful. As she did this, she found her love for baking again.
"There I was, 40 years old, back in the kitchen, finding myself in a bowl of smashed banana guts," she says. "I realized that, as I moved forward, a core value of my baking life would be to not fuck around with fussiness unless it's 100 percent necessary."
Her key innovation is applying what she calls the Cold-Butter Method, aka the CBM, which combines methods used for cakes (reverse creaming) and biscuits (cut in or short crust), to simplify things like cookies and pie dough.
I started with her lemony Greek yogurt pound cake, which gave me an appreciation for her encouraging and economical recipe-writing style, which gives plenty of signs of doneness so you don't get lost. The sour cream, she explains, creates a "sturdy but tender crumb" while tucking in clever techniques like starting the cake in a cold oven to give it that lovely golden brown exterior. I followed up with her "classic 1980s mom banana bread," which was nostalgic, sure, but ripping good, getting molasses flavors from both dark brown and Demerara sugar and a bit of tang from the sour cream. I dropped off a few slices with a neighbor and bumped into her a few days later in the grocery store, where she was so effusive about it that I turned bright red, right there in the dairy section.
Salsa Daddy: Dip Your Way Into Mexican Cooking
Courtesy of Penguin Random House
By Rick Martínez
Rick Martinez' first book, Mi Cocina, floated right past me, and his follow-up with its curious, arcade-game graphics almost did too. One night I brought it to bed, fired up my headlamp, and started chuckling at his funny anecdotes, including one about a bunch of dudes running around in glittering Speedos at a party. I paid attention to the way he cleverly builds flavor in a recipe, like the way he uses powdered chicken bullion—which uses MSG—as a way to bring out flavor in cooked sauces. Combine that with heaps of fun and good-looking photos, and there I was, dog-earing pages at 1 am while plotting a trip to the Mexican grocery store down the street.
I made his salsa verde tatemada, a charred green salsa where the tomatillos, jalapeños, and serranos seared in my grill skillet. In the blender, those met up with sautéed poblanos, onion, and garlic, before having any remaining raw edges cooked off in a saucepan. I was supposed to be testing other recipes and other cookbooks, but I made this a couple times instead. I even brought a big batch to my friend Kristen's annual pig roast, where fans of the pig sought me out to ask about the recipe. I also made his breakfast tacos on a Saturday morning to accompany his mañanera (look it up) salsa and soft scrambled eggs with chorizo. Later, I slung up a fantastic picadillo (hash) of Mexican chorizo and shrimp, where the star ingredients absorb each other's flavors and the whole thing makes for a fun and easy dinner.
In a way, I've always kept Mexican cuisine on a pedestal and been a little afraid to dive in and cook it. Yet here was this nonchalant but expert cookbook kicking the door open. There on the inside was Martinez offering up a plate full of chilaquiles, saying, "Hey man, grab a Speedo!"
Italo Punk: 145 Recipes to Shock Your Nonna
Courtesy of Tra Publishing
By Vanja van der Leeden
It might feel a little weird, sitting in the United States and reading an Italian cookbook written by a Dutch lady. But open to just about any page here, and that trepidation will dissolve. Coming at the book like a fellow food and travel writer and former cook allows van der Leeden to create something that feels like snapshots of the culinary tour of Italy of your dreams. Look at the photo of the old lady in a sundress, holding a child's drawing while taking a drag of a cigarette through her orange lipstick, or read the pull quote from Abruzzo's Sarah Cicolini, chef at Rome's Santo Palato restaurant: “If my grandmother had killed 10 chickens and was left with the entrails, she would make a kind of scrambled eggs with them.” Van der Leeden, with a long history in Italy, tries to break through the country's "culinary dogmatism" where many "restaurant menus seem like state menus." If any type of cookbook is in need of a reboot, it's Italian.*
I made her puttanesca integrale, the OG umami bomb. This version uses whole wheat pasta, a natural accompaniment to anchovies, olives, garlic, and capers. Hers gets a splash of whipping cream at the end, creating flavor-lengthening luxury. I also made spezzatino, a stew usually made with veal but made here with lamb—her spin—along with mint labneh (gasp!) and fava beans. Two of us made short work of a pot's worth in less than 24 hours. This is not a book for beginners, but if you have your culinary wits about you, you'll be fine.
Special praise should be heaped upon photographer Remko Kraaijeveld, the author's husband, whose photos bring the food to life, of course, but really make Italy seem like a place where real-feeling hungry and beautiful people live to eat. He has a stunning knack for making pictures where you feel like you are peering into peoples' souls.
Van der Leeden's book isn't a rallying cry against culinary dogma. It's really a love letter to Italians and their cuisine, with a few reasonable-feeling changes. Sometimes she makes (and signals) these gentle tweaks, sometimes she leaves a classic alone. Sometimes she doesn't tell you whether she has changed anything. How punk is that?
* OK, maybe French too.
Instant Ramen Kitchen: 40+ Delicious Recipes That Go Beyond the Packet
Courtesy of Chronicle Books
By Peter J. Kim
I'm a fan of big swings from the heart, which can be helpful for readers who pick up a single-subject cookbook. Those can get really boring without that go-for-broke chutzpah, but when they get it right, it's insane; Think back to the bonkers bliss induced by last year's Big Dip Energy. That level of intensity, with a very different style, is now being channeled into instant ramen noodles.
Peter J. Kim, founding director of Brooklyn's Museum of Food and Drink, podcaster, and Pinterest dude, has just the right approach. Instant ramen has inexpensively fed billions—stoners and college kids, of course, but really, everybody. Kim gives a nice dose of history, including how inventor Momofuku Ando “developed a technique for deep frying noodles that simultaneously made them slow to spoil and fast to cook.” He also notes that a Fuji Research Institute poll of 2,000 Kanto region residents concluded that instant ramen was the greatest Japanese invention of the 20th century.
Kim and the folks at Chronicle clearly put a lot of thought into the book with a noodle-themed design and font, that compact and enjoyable history, some philosophy, a bit of filler, and a fun “field guide” to highlight many of the great brands around the world. I'm currently trying Sapporo Ichiban, which Kim likes for its "springier noodles due to the addition of tapioca starch" and 15 percent larger-than-normal portion size.
There are plenty of inventive and traditional recipes in the book, all of them designed to go from start to slurp in under 20 minutes. My favorite so far is the kimchi jjigae ramen, where sizzled cabbage and bacon are combined with half the seasoning packet, kimchi, and water in which the noodle cake (as it's called) and cubed tofu cook. Moments later, you pour it into your bowl and add a splash of kimchi juice and a shower of thin-sliced scallions. Uncharacteristically classy for instant ramen? Perhaps, but still fast.
Food writer Joe Ray (@joe_diner) is a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year, a restaurant critic, and author of Sea and Smoke. ... Read More
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