Key Cookbooks for Every Palate

Cookbooks to try no matter your level of expertise

DINE

For Living

Dec 20 2021 | min read

Cookbooks to try no matter your level of expertise

Photo of Everything I Want to Eat via Amazon

Today, we’re rounding up a selection of our go-to cookbooks featuring an array of cuisines, meant for all levels of home chefs. All of the following cookbooks offer thoughtful techniques for learning new skills and cooking methods, as well as approachable recipes rich in flavor. As always, please consider supporting local bookshops with your purchases whenever possible.

Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden

In Six Seasons, McFadden channels both farmer and chef, highlighting the evolving attributes of vegetables throughout their growing seasons: an arc from spring to early summer to midsummer to the bursting harvest of late summer, then ebbing into autumn and, finally, the earthy, mellow sweetness of winter. Each chapter begins with recipes featuring raw vegetables at the start of their season. As weeks progress, McFadden turns up the heat— grilling and steaming, then moving on to sautés, pan roasts, braises, and stews. His ingenuity is on display in 225 revelatory recipes that celebrate flavor at its peak. In USA Today’s article, 8 Cookbooks for People Who Don't Know How to Cook, they say: "Of the many vegetable-focused cookbooks on the market, few espouse the dual goals of starting from square one and of deploying minimal ingredients for maximum enjoyment. Joshua McFadden's guide excels at both. These are recipes that every last relative around your holiday table would use because they're umami-rich and can be made on a weeknight."

Everything I Want to Eat by Jessica Koslow

The debut cookbook from Jessica Koslow, award-winning chef of LA’s popular restaurant Sqirl, featuring more than 100 fresh, market-driven, healthy, and flavorful recipes. Koslow and her restaurant are at the forefront of the California cooking renaissance, which is all about food that surprises us and engages all of our senses: it looks good, tastes vibrant and feels fortifying yet refreshing. In Everything I Want to Eat, Koslow shares 100 of her favorite recipes for health-conscious but delicious dishes, all of which always use whole foods that also happen to be suitable for vegetarians, vegans or whomever you’re sharing your meal with.

Salad for President by Julia Sherman

Salad—with its infinite possibilities—is a game of endless combinations, not stifling rules. And with that in mind, Salad for President offers a window into how artists approach preparing their favorite dishes. Julia Sherman visits sculptors, painters, photographers, and musicians in their homes and gardens, interviewing and photographing them as they cook. Utterly unique in its look into the worlds of food, art, and everyday practices, Salad for President is at once a practical resource for healthy, satisfying recipes and an inspiring look at creativity.

Cooking At Home: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying About Recipes by David Chang & Priya krishna

David Chang came up as a chef in kitchens where you had to do everything the hard way - but his mother, one of the best cooks he knows, never cooked like that. Nor did food writer Priya Krishna’s mom: Dave and Priya set out to think through the smartest, fastest, least meticulous, most delicious, absolutely imperfect ways to cook.

Cooking for Artists by Mina Stone

Chef Mina Stone has been cooking delicious lunches at Urs Fischer's Brooklyn-based art studio for the past five years and producing private gallery dinners in the New York art world since 2006. Cooking for Artists presents more than 70 of Stone's family-style recipes inspired by her Greek heritage and her love of simple, fresh, seasonal food.

Penang Local: Cult Recipes From the Streets That Make the City by Aim Aris & Ahmad Salim

Penang is an explorer’s dream and a food-lover’s paradise. It’s the nasi lemak or kaya toast eaten for breakfast, served with a hot cup of kopi ‘O’ (black coffee), at one of the city’s bustling food courts. It’s the rejuvenative laksa after a morning’s sight-seeing, followed by a cooling cendol in the afternoon heat. It’s the char kuey teow prepared in a flash at one of the many late-night hawker stalls, washed down with local beer.

The Essential New York Times Cookbook - 10th Edition

Ten years after the phenomenal success of her once-in-a-generation cookbook, former New York Times food editor Amanda Hesser returns with an updated edition for a new wave of home cooks. She has added 120 new but instantly iconic dishes to her collection of more than a thousand recipes, including Samin Nosrat's Sabzi Polo (Herbed Rice with Tahdig), Todd Richards's Fried Catfish with Hot Sauce, and J. Kenji López-Alt's Cheesy Hasselback Potato Gratin. Devoted Times subscribers as well as newcomers to the paper's culinary trove will also find scores of timeless gems such as Purple Plum Torte, David Eyre's Pancake, Pamela Sherrid's Summer Pasta, and classics ranging from 1940s Caesar Salad to modern No-Knead Bread. Hesser has tested and adapted each of the recipes, and she highlights her go-to favorites with wit and warmth. As Saveur declared, this is a "tremendously appealing collection of recipes that tells the story of American cooking."

Honey & Co. at Home: Middle Eastern Recipes from Our Kitchen by Sarit Packer & Itamar Srulovich

From breads to bakes, salads to sweets, there is something for everyone in this celebration of Middle Eastern cooking. Wholesome, fresh, and seasonal ingredients are organized into chapters For Us Two, For Friends, For the Weekend, For a Crowd, and For the Kitchen. Enjoy authentic recipes like Jerusalem sesame bread filled with harissa and lemon chicken, tuck into a crisp salad with saffron-poached pears with walnut tahini, or delight in a fish pastille, among many more.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat

A visionary new master class in cooking that distills decades of professional experience into just four simple elements, from the woman declared "America's next great cooking teacher" by Alice Waters. In the tradition of The Joy of Cooking and How to Cook Everything comes Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, an ambitious new approach to cooking by a major new culinary voice. Chef and writer Samin Nosrat has taught everyone from professional chefs to middle school kids to author Michael Pollan to cook using her revolutionary, yet simple, philosophy. Master the use of just four elements: Salt, which enhances flavor; Fat, which delivers flavor and generates texture; Acid, which balances flavor; and Heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food--and anything you cook will be delicious. By explaining the hows and whys of good cooking, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach and inspire a new generation of cooks how to confidently make better decisions in the kitchen and cook delicious meals with any ingredients, anywhere, at any time.

Photo via Violaine et Jérémy & Molly Baz

Cook this Book by Molly Baz

Molly breaks the essentials of cooking down to clear and uncomplicated recipes that deliver big flavor with little effort and a side of education, including dishes like Pastrami Roast Chicken with Schmaltzy Onions and Dill, Chorizo and Chickpea Carbonara, and of course, her signature Cae Sal. But this is not your average cookbook. More than a collection of recipes, Cook This Book teaches you the invaluable superpower of improvisation though visually compelling lessons on such topics as the importance of salt and how to balance flavor, giving you all the tools necessary to make food taste great every time. Throughout, you’ll encounter dozens of QR codes, accessed through the camera app on your smartphone, that link to short technique-driven videos hosted by Molly to help illuminate some of the trickier skills.

To Asia, With Love by Hetty McKinnon

For bestselling cookbook author Hetty McKinnon, Asian cooking is personal. McKinnon grew up in a home filled with the aromas, sights, and sounds of her Chinese mother’s cooking. These days she strives to recreate those memories for her own family—and yours—with traditional dishes prepared in non-traditional ways. It’s a sumptuous collection of creative vegetarian recipes featuring pan-Asian dishes that anyone can prepare using supermarket ingredients.

Dining In by Alison Roman

Vegetable-forward but with an affinity for a mean steak and a deep regard for fresh fish, Dining In is all about building flavor and saving time. Alison's ingenuity seduces seasoned cooks, while her warm, edgy writing makes these recipes practical and approachable enough for the novice. With 125 recipes for effortlessly chic dishes that are full of quick-trick techniques (think slathering roast chicken in anchovy butter, roasting citrus to ramp up the flavor, and keeping boiled potatoes in the fridge for instant crispy smashed potatoes), she proves that dining in brings you just as much joy as eating out.

Moon Juice Manual by Amanda Chantal Bacon

A practical and yummy field guide to cooking and healing with adaptogens, featuring prescriptive recommendations and functional recipes for optimizing beauty, brain, spirit, sex, and sleep. This is your welcome into functional comfort foods made with adaptogens: a reference manual for next-level mind-body health. Adaptogens are stress-busting herbs and mushrooms that can help the body find balance in the face of daily stress. Used for centuries in Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine, their benefits are now being clinically studied and confirmed by Western science.

That Sounds So Good: 100 Real-Life Recipes For Every Day Of The Week: A Cookbook By Carla Lalli Music

100 recipes to match every real-life occasion from the beloved Bon Appetit food editor at large and James Beard Award-winning author of Where Cooking Begins. Everyone deserves to have recipes up their sleeves that they turn to again and again, and Carla Lalli Music believes that these recipes should not only match what's in your pantry, but also should fit every mood and scenario that life throws at you. Since Carla knows that we only cook what we have time for and choose recipes based on what's going to be realistic on a given day, the recipes in That Sounds So Good are organized by situations that we all find ourselves in: ages-quick stovetop suppers and one-pot/one-pan meals for weeknights, nourishing salads and grain bowls if you want to be a little cleaner, and lazy lunches and all-day stews for the weekend.

Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish

There are few things more satisfying than biting into a freshly made, crispy-on-the-outside, soft-and-supple-on-the-inside slice of perfectly baked bread. For Portland-based baker Ken Forkish, well-made bread is more than just a pleasure—it is a passion that has led him to create some of the best and most critically lauded breads and pizzas in the country. In Flour Water Salt Yeast, Forkish translates his obsessively honed craft into scores of recipes for rustic boules and Neapolitan-style pizzas, all suited for the home baker. Forkish developed and tested all of the recipes in his home oven, and his impeccable formulas and clear instructions result in top-quality artisan breads and pizzas that stand up against those sold in the best bakeries anywhere.

Where Cooking Begins by Carla Lalli Music

The indispensable recipes and streamlined cooking techniques in Where Cooking Begins are an open invitation to dive into Carla Lalli Music’s laid-back cooking style. The food editor at large at Bon Appétit, her intuitive recipes are inspired by the meals she makes at home for her family and friends and the joy she takes in feeding them. Here, too, is her guide to the six essential cooking methods that will show you how to make everything without over-complicating anything—and every recipe includes suggestions for swaps and substitutions, so you’ll never feel stuck or stymied.

We hope you were able to discover a new cookbook to add to your kitchen shelves: you truly can’t go wrong with any of the above.