Our 7 favorite cookbooks for the holiday season
Great cookbooks are more than just a collection of recipes, though of course they’re that too. No, a great cookbook is an exhortation to cook, to eat, to live.
Just in time for holiday giving, we have gathered our favorite seven cookbooks published this year. Spanning the globe , these books reflect our love of exploration and the personal — besides great recipes, each shine with personality.
‘SEASON: BIG FOOD, BEAUTIFUL FLAVORS’
It’s no coincidence that the most impactful cookbooks tend to also be the most personal. This is the case of first-time author Nik Sharma’s “Season: Big Food, Beautiful Flavors.” In his introduction, Sharma writes his “is the story of a gay immigrant, told through food,” but his recipes and striking photography tell a deeper personal story of innovation juxtaposed with tradition. Marrying flavors of his native India with Western preparations (think dishes like roasted chicken with hot green chutney, apple masala chai cake or fluffy “potato chops,” craveable patties stuffed with spiced lamb) to clever pantry-building tips featuring various spice blends and other DIY ingredients, Sharma has created a modern classic worth returning to again and again.
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‘BOTTOM OF THE POT: PERSIAN RECIPES AND STORIES’
The cover of Naz Deravian’s “Bottom of the Pot” is irresistible: A plate of tahdig, saffron-scented rice cooked until it forms a perfect toasted mound, here presented broken, grains of rice scattered. It’s a fitting image for a cookbook rooted in Deravian’s family history. In 1979, her family left Iran during the revolution, eventually immigrating to Canada. Deravian, who now lives in Los Angeles, calls the tahdig the “Trojan horse of Persian cooking.” Considering what lies inside the pages of her book, she’s right. Instructions for showy dishes, like tahdig and stuffed branzino, reside alongside homier fare, like everyday turmeric chicken, roasted squash and grapes, and smooshed potato and egg. Deliciously well-balanced, sumptuously photographed and written with heart, “Bottom of the Pot” is the book you need to survive the post-holiday doldrums. ‘KOREAN BBQ’
The title is something of a ruse. You’ll find recipes for Korean barbecue in this handsome cookbook, but most are willfully nontraditional. How else to explain cauliflower steak with Korean pesto? Instead, this is really an introductory guide to cooking like Bill Kim, one of Chicago’s best chefs. And he’s made it easy for you. The book starts with seven sauces and three spice rubs, all blissfully simple to make, which form the flavor foundation of all the recipes. ‘JOE BEEF: SURVIVING THE APOCALYPSE’
What could have been simply a superb sophomore cookbook also explores deeper, darker thoughts about our current moment. Frederic Morin and David McMillan, the chefs and partners behind the Montreal restaurant Joe Beef, with co-author Meredith Erickson, still share spectacular recipes like lapin a la moutarde, rabbit with mustard seductively smothered with a hemp crust, but how-to make cough drops, soap and bouillon cubes too. Plus you can pin the stunning 16-page fold-out aspirational apocalyptic pantry guide to the wall of your bunker. —
‘THE FLAVOR MATRIX’
Did you know that you can pair olives with chocolate, or green beans with pineapple? Those are just a couple of the surprise findings in this book, which used IBM’s Watson supercomputer to compare chemical compounds in various foods and then calculate which ingredients share similar traits. The results are presented in an intuitive color-coded matrix, allowing you to quickly browse the results. It’d be hard to ever run out of cooking inspiration with this book on hand.
‘SISTER PIE’
Lisa Ludwinski’s “Sister Pie” is everything you want in a pie cookbook: careful directions, baker’s secret tips, inspired combinations (apricot-raspberryrose, strawberry-pistachio) and a you-can-do-it attitude. Named for her 6-year-old Detroit bakery, part of the city’s food renaissance, “Sister Pie” gives more — Ludwinski’s scrappy origin story and community-minded philosophy, including the triple bottom lines of “working to support our employees, our environment and our economy.” Somehow, learning her tricks for cutting butter right in the flour and her dramatic crimping technique are all the more sweet.
Joseph Hernandez
— Jennifer Day
Kindelsperger
— Nick
Louisa Chu
— N.K.
— Joe Gray
‘COCKTAIL CODEX’
This sophomore effort by the team behind world-renowned cocktail bar Death & Co. does not slump. Indeed, this book is a must for cocktail fans looking to bone up on the whys before getting into the hows. Deconstructing the craft of cocktails, the authors focus on six “root” cocktails, so-called because, they argue, all others derive their architecture from these: the old-fashioned, the martini, the daiquiri, the sidecar, the whiskey highball and the flip. Through flowcharts, testimonials, diagrams and arresting photography, “Cocktail Codex” details cocktail craft with exacting precision, a must for amateur and pro mixologists alike. —
J.H.