Eight great new directions for the home cook
Take back the kitchen with an exploration of multicultural foods and flavors
This time last year, everything that we knew and loved about dining and cooking was upending. We fought for our groceries, coveted everyday staples, hoarded provisions and struggled to make meals as the world grew terrifying.
A year later, we’re emerging from cocoons — hungry, more curious, eager to re-indulge in the familiar while coveting multicultural foods and flavors. Spring has sprung, and with it comes new opportunities to rediscover culinary pleasures.
Home cooks who became brave pioneers in their own kitchens are now being rewarded by a slew of new cookbook titles that bring simple comforts and enticing new foodways to the table. It’s time to get excited in the kitchen again.
“Vegetable Simple” By Eric Ripert
The acclaimed chef, known for his way with fish at Le Bernadin, turns his exacting eye and light hand on vegetables. His deep dive was born from changes both in his work and personal life: Le Bernadin has shifted to more vegetable-focused plates, while the chef has incorporated more vegetables into his diet. The result is a book featuring a collection of recipes that are almost shockingly simple.
“Come on Over!: Southern Delicious for Every Day and Every Occasion” By Elizabeth Heiskell
A Mississippi caterer and author of two bestselling cookbooks, Heiskell knows the Southern larder. When she’s not working or doing segments for the “Today” show, this is what she’s cooking — comfort fare such as chicken and dumplings, spaghetti pie, squash casserole, cobblers, and grillades and grits. Her grandmother’s recipe for Fireside Dip (made with Ro-Tel and two cans of Hormel hot beef tamales, served with Fritos) is the kind of folksy fare anyone could fall in love with.
“Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown” By Brandon Jew and Tienlon Ho
History and respect for the origins of Chinese American food are at the heart of this touching cookbook from a Michelin-starred San Francisco chef whose culinary directive reflects both modern impulses and old-school familial know-how, courtesy of his Chinese grandmother, who cooked without recipes, only memory, taste and feel. Its recipes are not for beginners, but it’s inspiring for devoted foodies.
“Cook, Eat, Repeat: Ingredients, Recipes, and Stories” By Nigella Lawson
It’s nice to be back in the kitchen with someone so attuned to the glorious meditations of what Lawson calls the rhythms and rituals of cooking. Her recipes drive her to poetic discourse on the physical and emotional threads woven into day-in/ day-out cooking. She can spend pages on the lusty magic of anchovies or rhubarb’s inherent sorcery. It can be heady stuff, but perhaps necessary, as home cooks begin to re-indulge.
“The Twisted Soul Cookbook: Modern Soul Food with Global Flavors” By Deborah VanTrece
Sure, soul food — rooted in Black culture — may take its name from the fact that “it comes from the soul and feeds the soul,” VanTrece writes. But in a modern, multicultural world, it is much more. And that’s what VanTrece, a former flight attendant turned chef (and owner of Twisted Soul Cookhouse & Pours in Atlanta), shows in her engaging debut cookbook, which recognizes the global possibilities of 21st-century soul while still pay homage to its African American roots.
“Come on Over” By Jeff Mauro
The “Food Network” chef and co-host of “The Kitchen” celebrates the pleasures of family and friends using the words his mother used to call people to the table. The cookbook is a rousing invitation to dine on simple, hearty, familiar fare inspired by his upbringing. Mauro may have made his name with sandwiches, but here, he demonstrates an easy-tolike breadth with recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and snacking.
“Milk Street: Tuesday Nights Mediterranean” By Christopher Kimball
Here, from the busy team at Milk Street, are 125 recipes, drawn from the food cultures of Northern Africa, Southern Europe and the Levant — big on flavors, mostly short on ingredients. Divided into fast (45 minutes), faster (35 minutes or less) and fastest (under 25 minutes), the recipes deliver bold culinary strokes full of bright flavors and uncomplicated ease.