All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, by Ruby Tandoh

How many of these do you have in your pantry? Preserved lemon, cumin, za’atar, sumac, gochujang, sriracha, Aleppo pepper, dates, rose harissa, hot honey, whipped feta…and do you really know how they got there?

With a light touch, Great British Bake Off finalist Ruby Tandoh takes readers of All Consuming on a tour of obvious and hidden forces that influence your next move when you step into your kitchen. She looks at how, over the past 75 years, we talk and think about food—from food influencers (ugh) to “content creators” (ugh ugh) to magic wellness drinks (ugh ugh are you kidding me), with a hefty dose of manipulation from supermarkets, TV, hype restaurants, and others with all levels of expertise.

Having fallen in love with cookbooks at a young age, I was most drawn to Tandoh’s deep look at them and at recipe creation generally.

“Craveable, suckerpunch recipes”—in a year-plus of returning to cookbook reviewing, I’ve not seen a better description of what authors seem compelled to write now. Sometimes it’s fun, inspiring, and deeply delicious. Sometimes, it’s just exhausting.

No longer, Tandoh writes, can a recipe promise to be simply practical, possible, or authentic. Instead, it must be the thing that “will make you see God.” And apparently we see God in a lot of words that end in y—creamy, dreamy, lemony, buttery, crunchy, chewy, crispy.

But the reality is that much of the time, cooks read new recipes, get excited about a new-to-them ingredient, and then return to their old favorites, maybe with a dash of one of the trendy ingredients thrown in.

And while I know many, if not most, readers will just read recipes far more than they’ll ever make them, I approach each review with the assumption that the author genuinely wants you to cook each recipe. But with so many of the new books I peruse (most of which I don’t write about, or give scant space to), I come away deeply skeptical that indeed, that was the intention—a feeling Tandoh reinforces.

And then there’s social media’s insidious influence on cookbooks, how we eat, and food photography, and how it eats away at your brain. She notes that as the landscape shifted from the explosion of blogs to hyping the latest food fad on Instagram, “you shared a photo of the food with an explanatory caption, rather than a blog post about the food with an illustrative photo. This allowed you to bypass thinking altogether and just look: burgers, hotdogs, fries, pizza, ice cream, cake, bubble tea—all those foods that instantly register as delicious.”

When I shifted away from food writing many years ago as I struggled with the point of writing new recipes—for sure, it was fun, but it was hardly living up to my expectations that my work would somehow contribute to making the world a better, safer, kinder, or more equitable place—I still viewed guiding people to be better cooks as valuable.

But with so many eyeballs glazing over now on food ridiculousness by people like Nara Smith, to whom Tandoh devotes several pages, it’s no surprise that even Tandoh confesses that she has lost almost all curiosity about cooking, and that she, a cookbook author, has caught cookbook fatigue.

There’s much more here, including chapters on the “ice cream age,” on the fast-food burger bar Wimpy in Britain (which fascinated me on a trip to England when I was 9), and on the very different restaurant travel guides written by Duncan Hines and Victor Hugo Green beginning in 1936. She sets us straight on some origin stories (no, Elizabeth David didn’t transform British cooking—though she did transform British cookbooks by sparking the notion that “a cookbook can, and even should, be a work of fantasy”), and lays a good bit of credit/blame at the feet of Yotam Ottolenghi, where “cooking is modular and iterative.”

All Consuming will consume readers’ time and provoke their thinking—in this case, just as intended.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on any of the titles above.

*The Talisman of Happiness, by Alda Boni

First published 100 years ago in Italy and never out of print, The Talisman of Happiness is traditionally as common in Italian kitchens and wedding gifts as The Joy of Cooking in the U.S. Now available for the first time in a full English translation, with nearly 1,700 recipes, the book will appeal most to confident cooks who need only a modicum of hand-holding for success.

A fascinating artifact of regional recipes across the country, from a notably limited set of ingredients, The Talisman of Happiness provides many brief (sometimes deceptively so) recipes that beginners should take on with trust in the results, and in themselves. But today’s cooks are conditioned to expect far greater detail and precision.

The ingredient list for a recipe for swordfish with tomato, for example, provides specific amounts for only three of its 13 ingredients—6 swordfish steaks, 6 tomatoes, 1 onion, versus simply “celery,” “white wine,” “parsley”—leaving the directions to call for the still-imprecise “the chopped celery,” “the crushed garlic,” “a lot of parsley.” Other recipes, such as Neapolitan skewers, call for putting skewers in the pan “to fry with plenty of oil”—but does that actually mean deep-frying? And all of the skewer lack consistency on oil temperature, citing variously “with plenty of oil,” “in a lot of hot oil,” “in plenty of very hot oil,” “in plenty of hot oil,” and and “in plenty of boiling oil.”

Maybe nervous cooks should pretend to be their great-grandmothers, cooking successfully with instructions just like this from their grandmothers.

With so many old favorites to choose from, cooks open to experimentation will find plenty of sweet spots between inspiration and frustration. Think arancini, simple fish and seafood, meatballs, meatloaf, fried eggplant, pizza, calzones, minestrone, bruschetta (calling for not the “rustic bread” we expect now but “12 slices sandwich bread”), candied orange cake, Neapolitan Easter pie, and zabaglione pudding, to name just a few, alongside many less-familiar foods worth getting to know.

*Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste The Nation and Beyond, by Padma Lakshmi.

Drawing on stories and recipes from Padma Lakshmi’s TV show Taste the Nation plus her own immigrant experience, Padma’s All American pushes back on anti-immigrant fury to highlight the stories of Thai, Lebanese, Gullah, Peruvian, Apache, and other cooks whose recipes make up the true “All-American” palate.

From jollof rice to sweet and sour cabbage to spicy goat bites, green papaya salad to Afghani leek and scallion dumplings to chicken with sumac and agave, Lakshmi provides deeply flavored, clear recipes that are largely doable for average cooks, though not necessarily quick.

Attractively photographed (especially if you want lots of Lakshmi photos), with heartfelt, poignant profiles of people from her show, the book makes a strong argument for breaking out of culinary ruts to appreciate all the flavors of our melting pot.

Galette! Sweet and Savory Recipes as Easy as Pie, by Rebecca Firkser

This book slipped past as much notice as it deserves when it came out in June, but what a sweet discovery now. Rebecca Firkser offers 50 recipes and many tips for these flat, free-form, rustic tarts with a pleated rim, based on one crust recipe with variations such as cocoa, cornmeal, and buckwheat. Interesting flavor combinations invite riffing, and absent the fear that true pie seems to strike in so many hearts, cooks will find galettes appearing weekly for supper or dessert.

Chapters on stone fruit; apples, pears, and citrus; berries; chocolate and other non-fruit options; winter squash and roots; nightshades and summer squash; greens and alliums; and pantry-staple galettes each offer five or six recipes.

A sweet sampling: apricot and pepita-sesame frangipane; sour cherry and Campari; pear with sumac and ginger; preserved lemon curd; minty blueberry-chamomile; figgy miso; and cocoa and toasted pecan.

On the savory side: buttered, salted radish; roasted and raw fennel; spicy eggplant Parm; scallion and asparagus with miso; sticky onion with anchovies and black olives; marinated artichoke and tomato; and chopped mushroom and kimchi. Firkser also provides useful templates for “anything goes” sweet and savory galettes.

Of course, it all starts with the crust, for which Firkser walks bakers through hand-mixing and food processor options, shaping, and extras (a crumble topping and sweet and savory toppings and sauces). She offers additional instructions for individual, muffin tin, and supersized sheet-pan galettes, as well as some formed in a tart pan to provide more structure.

One quibble: Her doughs require at least a two-hour chill before being rolled out (then back in the freezer, filled, for 10 minutes before baking). But as long as bakers work quickly and start with cold butter and ice water, it can be far quicker to immediately roll out the dough, then chill it to allow the gluten to relax, with no appreciable change in the final quality. Chilling a dough to a firm state only to wait for it to soften enough to roll out has never really made sense.

One of the tart pan options, the not-quite galette des rois, fills a crust with a delicate frangipane quickly stirred together from almond flour, eggs, butter, and amaro or other liquor. A recipe test using the suggested buckwheat crust variation produced a crisp crust with a tender rum-spiked filling nicely offset by a sprinkling of flaky salt. The tip here to place the tart on a preheated sheet pan is especially valuable for avoiding a soggy bottom (a problem usually solved for pies by prebaking the shell, but not an option for a galette).

The sweet cherry and lime galette, also in a buckwheat crust, includes a hit of grated ginger that pumped up the impact and tasted as appropriate in cool weather as warm. Once the crust is made, everything comes together quickly, goes light on the sugar (1/3 cup in the filling, with more for sprinkling on the crust, which can easily be omitted), and takes advantage of frozen fruit for year-round baking—typical for many of the recipes here.

*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.

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Dorie’s Anytime Cakes review, take 1. And … action! Flipping through book, writer dashes off opening line: Conversational, sometimes whimsical, eminently doable recipes from a beloved cookbook author—even before testing any recipes, you know this book will be a winner. Cut!

Dorie’s Anytime Cakes review, take 2. And … action! Cookbook reviewer tests six recipes in a day, tasting them all late at night. Reviewer stares at the plate, underwhelmed. Is it possible she will have to write a negative review of this lovely book, with fool-your-eye illustrations instead of photos and Dorie Greenspan’s usual confidence-inspiring recipe style? Reviewer heads to bed, with the first lyrical draft dashed. Cut!

Dorie’s Anytime Cakes review, take 3. And…action! Cookbook reviewer drags herself from bed following a restless night of half-formed lines drifting through her dreams, cuts new slices of cakes, and begins (in a very Greenspanish word) nibbling. First bite, shakes her head no. Second and third cakes, a slow nod. Fourth cake, a slight smile. Fifth cake, slight smile plus a nod—and a flashback to the savory muffins of the previous evening, with a full smile forthcoming. Cut!

Crew, take a break—we’re going with take 3.

Here’s the good and great: Reading Dorie Greenspan’s writing brings simple joy—her enthusiasm, warmth, straightforward instructions, and options for playing around with recipes will keep readers turning the pages.

Recipes come together quickly, often without special equipment (stand mixers, processors) and with ingredients bakers will have on hand. While many have glazes and some have frostings, these are generally true to “anytime”—cakes for casual get-togethers and snacking, not high celebrations.

Realizing the photos are in fact illustrations will make readers linger over them, trying to figure out how they were done.

The not-so-great: Too many of the tested recipes were simply so-so.

They were, to be sure, better after sitting overnight, allowing the flavors to settle in. But did any scream “bake me again, share me with friends, and dogear this page”? No.

Breton buckwheat butter cake: Dry and overly salty (even when the saltiness is supposed to be the point), this was also the least-liked of the tested recipes—one-dimensional and, aside from the salt, bland, with its tinge of nutmeg overwhelmed by the salt. Greenspan says to go with under-baking if in doubt about whether it’s done, and significant under-doing it may have helped here (and elsewhere—several recipes came out too much on the dry side, even for this inveterate under-baker).

Olive oil and orange grab-and-go cake: Flavored simply with the zest and juice of one orange and a splash of Campari or Aperol for a bitter edge, this oil and yogurt cake was fine, but bland. The “playing around” suggestions to frost it or split and spread it with orange marmalade plus frosting might go a long way to improve matters, but the simple version should be stronger on its own.

Bourbon brown-butter cake: More like a quick bread, this loaf cake comes together quickly and bumps up the flavor with its combination of browned butter, toasted pecans, and a dash of bourbon. Greenspan describes it as a “quiet flavor of bourbon-tinged caramel”—while there’s no actual caramel here, the flavor does approach something both quiet and a bit more complex.

Moko cake-o: A takeoff of a cookie from a Paris restaurant, this loaf cake combines a bit of rye flour, poppy seeds, chopped chocolate, and dried cranberries for a happier result. The crunch of the seeds with the tang of cranberries and pools of chocolate, plus yogurt, oil, and butter to keep things moist, edged this recipe closer to the “make me again” category.

Olive oil dunking Bundt: Flavored with orange zest, rosemary, orange-blossom water, and olive oil, plus the suggested addition of candied peel, slices of this cake, Greenspan says, stretch and pull like pannetone. That didn’t seem to be the case with the test recipe, but the cake was moist enough (though less so than the illustration would suggest) and relatively flavorful. Because Greenspan included a glaze only as an option, the recipe was tested without it, but the orange juice-powdered sugar topping may have been a better bet for both flavor and texture.

Pop-the-cork nibblets: For an alternative to the gougères she usually greets dinner guests with, Greenspan devised mini muffins with salty blue cheese and sweet prunes, plus a touch of Parmesan. These were the best recipe of the bunch, mixing up quickly and pairing nicely with a chilled white wine. While better after cooling for 15 minutes, these were the only cakes that didn’t need overnight improvement.

Greenspan is generally specific in measurements, but where she isn’t leads to frustration. Despite saying in her introduction “I can’t emphasize enough how important measuring is in baking and how easy your baking life will be once you make a habit of using a scale,” she gives no quantities when she calls for sprinkling fleur de sel over cakes—easily leading to oversalted sweets.

And while she gives weights for most ingredients, she annoyingly uses milliliters for some wet ingredients that would be so much better given in grams. Why make a baker measure out oil or honey into a cup or tablespoon rather than pouring straight into a bowl set on a scale?

Chapters fit her whimsical style, divided by round, loaf, Bundt, baby (cupcakes and their ilk), and salty cakes, plus “cakes with corners” (square cakes and bars).

Sweet recipes include a brownie cake, a pudding puff cake (scoops of pâte à choux baked into a round, halved and filled with chocolate pudding like a large eclair), banana cappucino cake, cocoa-cherry thyme loaf cake, chocolate orange drizzle cake, Brazilian carrot cake, coffee-chocolate chunk Bundt, black sesame bars, coffee-crunch coffee cake, Greek orange cake, caramel-nut chocolate upside-down cake, buttermilk cupcakes, variations on vanilla madeleines, and bran-berry muffins.

Savory cakes were often the more intriguing recipes, including “fauxcaccia” squares, apple-cheddar corn cake, miso-cheddar scone cake, and seaweed and furikake muffins.

Quick takes:

Dorie’s Anytime Cakes, by Dorie Greenspan. 320 pages. Published by Harvest, 2025.

Organization: Chapters for round cakes, loaf cakes, Bundt cakes, cakes with corners, baby cakes, salty cakes, and frostings/fillings.

Ingredients measurement methods: Generally listed by both volume and weight, with the exception of some liquids.

Photos: No photos, but nicely done photo-like illustrations for each recipe.

Index: Appears generally comprehensive (though a spot check for ginger zucchini cakes showed no listing under zucchini).

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on this title.

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How’s your freezer space looking? Does it have room for about 400 batches of jams, pickles, chile crisps, chutneys, kimchi, and relish? Because while the concept of Cold Canning is not new—simply freezing or refrigerating your preserves rather than hot-water processing—this compilation of 425 recipes will have you headed to the kitchen.

Of course, some of us love traditional water-bath canning; The warm feeling you get from bejeweled jars stacked tall on pantry shelves outweighs the sweaty-hot feeling of standing over a steaming stockpot. But to make that worth the time often means canning large batches, which fits fewer households’ needs with every passing year.

Most of the recipes in Cold Canning instead yield just several cups and take little prep time. That means it’s even more fun—though with caveats—to experiment with many recipes here, so long as your freezer can hold out.

Start with the basics: jams, jellies, preserves, and marmalades. Authors Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough don’t spend time fretting over whether jams should be made without commercial pectin; they just go for it, for less sugar, shorter cooking and fresher taste, and consistent results. Most of their jam and preserve recipes follow a simple outline: Stir together granulated sugar and a few tablespoons of less-sugar pectin powder, mix with fruit in a saucepan, boil for a minute, fill half-pint jars, freeze.

So within a short afternoon in the kitchen, you might jar up three to five half-pints each of raspberry jam, blueberry jam, cherry preserves, three-berry jam (blueberries, blackberries, raspberries), and a blueberry chia seed jam for good measure. And how about using more blueberries for a thick blueberry-onion jam to dollop onto tonight’s bratwurst?

With frozen fruit an option for many of the recipes, these make quick delights year-round. In that afternoon of testing, all those jams came out well—thick but not rubbery, and easy to play with by adding herbs, spices, extracts, and citrus zest. Keep going with strawberry preserves, apple cardamom jam, sweet or sour orange marmalade, blood orange marmalade, and triple-citrus marmalade; without much work, you could throw a scone party for a crowd with jar upon jar of toppings.

Then move to the savory side—try the spicy, lemon-tinged ginger jam to go with biscuits and with—or in—a cup of tea, or the onion-bourbon jam to spread on a burger or add to a cheese plate. Both of these also came out well in tests.

But that’s just the beginning. Move on to salsa macha (coconut-pecan! cherry-pistachio!), chutney, pickles, relishes—possibly pause at the fennel relish or carrot-ginger relish—preserved vegetables, sauerkraut, kimchi, infused oils, sweet sauces, and chile crisps. Tests of three chile crisps—one with star anise and smoked paprika, another with sumac and cinnamon, and a third with gochugaru and hefty doses of scallions, garlic, and ginger came out well, to make a rice bowl or fried eggs happy; also try the authors’ suggestion to mix the sumac-cinnamon crisp with honey and spread it on rye crackers.

But—the caveats: First, look out for issues with ingredient amounts. That gochugaru crisp called for ½ cup gochugaru flakes—but said that equaled 136 grams. (More like 36.) And while one recipe called for “¼ cup (20 grams)” Aleppo pepper flakes, another called for “½ cup (60 grams)” of the same flakes. One typo I understand. But when I hit more than one in a random sampling of recipes, it makes me wary of all the recipes. So cooks should judge before jamming.

Another issue: The recipe for persimmon jam calls for “vaguely soft” Fuyu persimmons; the headnote calls for “a firm texture but with some give in the skin.” Go for more than vague, though, and move past a firm texture; tested with persimmons that were apparently on the wrong side of firm, this never became a luscious jam, even with extremely extended simmering in extra liquid. It ended up as something approaching a meh-flavored preserve that could be used over yogurt.

Keeping those warnings in mind, if you get a canning hankering, you’ll surely find something here to fit your mood and pantry. While often not cutting-edge recipes, the variety of standards plus some more unusual flavors makes Cold Canning worth your shelf and freezer space.

Quick takes:

Cold Canning: The Easy Way to Preserve the Seasons Without Hot Water Processing, by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough. 448 pages. Published by Voracious, 2025.

Organization: By type of recipe (such as sweet jams, savory jams and chutneys, pickles).

Ingredients measurement methods: Ounces and grams for dry/solid ingredients, cups and milliliters for liquids.

Photos: Photos of some recipes or the recipes in use.

Index: Comprehensive.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Pepper’s advice: Stay cool, lay low, and everything will be fine.

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*Sabzi: Vibrant Vegetarian Recipes, by Yasmin Khan

The author of Zaitoun, The Saffron Tales, and Ripe Figs, Yasmin Khan produces beautiful cookbooks, with sumptuous photos and illustrations that actually add meaning, unlike much food photography. In her latest, named for the Persian word for herbs, Khan pulls together recipes from the Middle East, Mediterranean, and South Asia for breakfasts, salads, mezzes, soups, mains, and desserts.

The breakfast chapter is the weak link here—truly, no one needs to be told anymore how to make avocado toast, or how to top toast with ricotta, figs, and honey. The granola is a completely standard recipe with no interesting tweaks, and even your grandma probably knows by now how to make overnight oats.

Move along, then, to the salads—which will grab you from the opening recipe, mixing roasted broccoli and radishes with lentils in a curried tahini sauce, all topped with dates. A pilaf with roasted cauliflower, sumac, dried cherries, and a yogurt sauce offers a good introduction to freekeh. Spicy tomatoes with walnuts and pomegranates seems misnamed—with just a touch of pomegranate molasses and mild chile flakes—but still brings in big flavors with walnuts, mint, and sumac.

Mezze recipes include roasted carrots over a swirl of hummus-like lentil-tahini puree, topped with a basil-parsley paste; Punjabi spiced vegetable medley; and a dip of labneh topped with persimmon flavored with harissa. Main courses include smoky chickpeas with orzo; eggplant fesenjan; mung bean, spinach, and tomato dal; lentil and mushroom ragu; and eggplant and lentil tahchin (a layered rice cake).

Like the breakfast chapter, desserts offer less of interest overall, but include an intriguing dark chocolate and dried lime tart.

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*Sesame: Global Recipes & Stories of an Ancient Seed, by Rachel Simons

If you’ve ever found yourself with a large, barely used jar of tahini on the shelf, then open Sesame. Written by the owner of Seed + Mill, a small shop focused on tahini and halva in New York’s Chelsea Market, Sesame offers up a solid, if not especially unusual, variety of recipes for seasonings, breakfasts, dips, crackers, salads, vegetables, main dishes, and sweets.

Why “not especially unusual”? Well, start with smoothies and granola, or move on to roasted potatoes and carrot salad, mushrooms on toast, sesame noodles, and benne wafers—and truly, has it become illegal to publish a cookbook without a focaccia recipe? But the granola recipe includes the interesting touch of espresso, the potatoes get served with muhammara spiked with tahini, and the salad coats carrot ribbons in a dressing with ground sesame seeds, sesame oil, dashi powder, and mirin.

Look out for recipe issues; though this may be an anomaly, the pear and pistachio breakfast loaf with sesame streusel caught my eye for the streusel’s lack of sesame in either the ingredient list or the instructions.

*The Simple Dinner Edit: Simplify your cooking with 80+ fast, low-cost dinner ideas, by Nicole Maguire

Looking for fresh ideas to get dinner on the table, without breaking the bank? And do you love chicken? The Simple Dinner Edit provides a decent selection of recipes to get you started, though without much new in the way of ideas for saving money.

A page of supposed tips on saving money offers little more than advice to take inventory of your pantry and make a grocery list. Batch-cooking, prepping produce as soon as you bring it into the kitchen, and understanding how to store produce to make it last also get a nod. She does provide useful tips on using leftovers or making extras to use later, plus how to freeze leftovers.

Based in Sydney, Maguire shows the influence of some prominent cuisines in Australia, with dishes such as Hainanese chicken, coconut dal, braised sticky soy pork belly, barbecue brisket, Panang coconut and peanut beef curry, and chicken laksa. Other recipes include nachos, quesadillas, roasted pumpkin soup, spanakopita pie, sesame chicken, peanut butter pork and noodles, teriyaki chicken bowl, spring roll salad with sticky pork and noodles, and tuna bowl (with canned tuna) with miso dressing. The book offers chapters on stovetop and oven dishes, pasta, rice and noodles, salads, long-cooking meals, and “fun”—recipes intended to share with a crowd (though most serve only four people) and be eaten with your hands.

One warning: If you don’t prefer poultry, don’t get this book—the index lists 31 recipes under chicken, out of about 80 total.

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*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on any of the titles above.

*Linger, by Hetty Lui McKinnon

As the mother of three young children, Hetty Lui McKinnon started her culinary career by making and delivering salads from her bike basket in Sydney, Australia. Although she moved well on from salads—becoming an award-winning cookbook author and frequent New York Times contributor—McKinnon retained her love for salad and a vision of how sharing salads around a table could bring people together to linger and find community, especially post-pandemic.

Now, in Linger, a warm, gentle book, McKinnon offers about 100 recipes for salads of all sorts, with an “anything can be a salad” take on the word. (Sadly, the book offers few new takes on her delicious dumpling salads, such as this summer-perfect dumpling tomato salad; there’s no entry “dumplings” in the index, but there is one recipe.)

Twelve chapters each provide a complete menu, generally serving four to six people, though cooking any of these menus would be a feat for most hosts, with recipes for around seven salads plus desserts and breads. (McKinnon writes that she expects most people will cook the recipes singularly.) Each chapter opens with a quietly thoughtful, personal essay and a QR code to a playlist curated by her daughter.

The first menu, for example, includes ginger-roasted kabocha with black rice and ginger-miso dressing; a vegan prosperity toss; charred gai lan with black-eyed peas and chile crisp vinaigrette; curry potato and pea dumpling salad; yo po spicy rice cake salad; soba noodles with crunchy vegetables and fu yu sesame sauce; and hot and sour potato salad.

Although McKinnon says in the introduction that one benefit to salads is they can be largely prepped ahead of time, she offers few do-ahead pointers in most recipes or any day-by-day timetable for preparing so many dishes. While the recipes are rarely complicated, not all the ingredient lists are short nor the work quick—those dumplings, for example, are homemade, not purchased as in the Times tomato salad. (Also, why in a menu of recipes that mostly serve two to four, does the dessert serve eight? Generally, the menu concept felt like it came close but didn’t quite work here.)

Those issues aside, these are, as usual for McKinnon, recipes that will propel many cooks straight to the stove. Oyster mushroom shawarma with farro and lemon cashew cream; fennel salad with pickly dressing (with fennel, apple, grapes, almonds, and raisins); pan-fried mapo tofu salad; bibimbap-style gnocchi with gochujang vinaigrette; peaches and cream with chile crisp; Gruyère, jalapeño, and scallion mochi balls; black sesame tofu Basque cheesecake; and tofu bread rolls make up a very short selection of the eye-catching, mouth-watering recipes here.

The Complete America’s Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook, 2001-2026, by America’s Test Kitchen

I felt weary just looking at this book, even before hefting all 7 pounds of it. With 1,400 recipes and all the product recommendations from 2001 to a year we haven’t even gotten to yet, in a small point size despite taking up 1,120 pages, this might stay on the shelf more often than not. But the show’s many devoted fans may be thrilled to have every single thing they ever saw in one reference book.

The recipes, while rarely cutting-edge, are reliable, provide useful troubleshooting advice, and often feature interesting, well-tested tweaks, such as brining ground meat in baking soda and salt to keep it tender and juicy, or briefly cooking fried chicken in minimal oil before finishing it in the oven (but if you’re a Southerner who knows good biscuits, skip the misbegotten tweak of melted butter in the breakfast chapter). And, if you’ve been reading anything else on Cook These Books, you’ll guess how I felt about the inconsistency in measures, with some recipes using cups and table/teaspoons only, and some also including ounces for some but not all ingredients (such as chocolate hazelnut spread, offering weight by ounces for the sugar and cocoa but not the nuts).

That homemade Nutella was fine but not outstanding; go well beyond the time given in the final step of processing to get a truly glossy spread, for the best texture. The choice of bread flour instead of all-purpose was a good one in the no-knead brioche dough (tested in brioche à tête instead of full loaves). Although it’s a no-knead dough, don’t skip the folding steps for a tighter crumb.

*Sally’s Baking 101, by Sally McKenney

I ended up of two minds about this book. While the recipes were decently detailed, sometimes more so than usual, and were labeled by skill level, it didn’t really seem to deserve the “baking 101” moniker.

The opening recipe, for chocolate chip cookies, includes a tips for success section, but that isn’t standard. In many places new bakers would appreciate more tips, such as the recipe for pepper-Parmesan cookies, which calls for rolling the dough into a slice-and-bake log. As simple as these always look, the logs can be frustrating—no matter how well you think you’ve rolled a compact, perfectly round log, you can end up with center fissures and lopsided, sort-of square cookies.

But many of the standards are here—shortbread, strawberry crumb bars, cheesecake squares, brownies, sugar cookies, marble cake, apple pie with salted caramel sauce, lemon curd tart, popovers, bagels, rough puff pastry dough, cinnamon swirl quick bread, and banana Nutella muffins, stromboli, and cinnamon raisin swirl bread.

*Plant to Plate, by Gaz Oakley

From a kitchen garden in Wales, Gaz Oakley has focused in his first cookbook on commonly grown vegetables and fruit, including carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, beets, apples, and strawberries. Even if your kitchen garden is actually the local farmers market or supermarket, you’ll find recipes to take your imagination far afield from everyday produce.

A strawberry and watermelon salad tosses the fruit with a paste of onion, ginger, tahini, za’atar, miso, chili flakes, and vinegar, then bakes the fruit to concentrate the flavors before serving them over pearl couscous mixed with green tomatoes and pistachios. Homemade dried strawberries and dried lavender flavor stovetop-cooked Welsh cakes (somewhat akin to a scone).

Hummus, steamed spinach, and spice-infused milk flavor mashed potatoes topped with black beans cooked with, among other things, cumin, oregano, thyme, bay, celery salt, ancho chilies, soy sauce, miso, and dried mushrooms. Taking inspiration from massaman curry, cream of tomato soup is far from the ordinary, flavored with fennel and lemongrass as well as ginger, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, peanut butter, nori, and coconut milk (again, among other ingredients!).

Or how about a beet and cardamom “ice cream” made from coconut milk and flavored with maple syrup? Oakley includes many recipes for fermented foods, such as tomato and nasturtium kimchi, fermented nut (think cashew “cheese”) stuffed squash flowers, and strawberry kombucha.

*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.

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Following Covid isolation, many cookbook authors seem to have had the same idea: Dinner parties! That’s coming to fruition this fall.

Eat Small Plates marries the Israeli and Ukranian backgrounds of Ben and Zikki Siman-Tov to offer up a cheerful, accessible way to host friends regularly, with a table laden with small plates to share. They provide advice on food to offer as soon as guests arrive, sample menus, and an array of dips, breads, salads, and vegetable dishes. Their short list of seafood and meat options includes many raw ones, such as tuna nectarine tartare, Arabic ceviche, and mackerel, cucumber, and arugula crudo. Many of the same ingredients pop up repeatedly, including beets, cucumbers, and eggplant, in recipes that skew light and healthy without feeling abstemious. Think amba, chopped liver, beet and goat cheese dip, beet and cherry salad, chicken shawarma salad, a salad of pears, mustard greens, mint, and challah croutons, and shrimp in grated tomato butter. Cilantro pistachio artichoke dip made a quick, lusciously smooth spread of an unexpected ingredient combination for bread or bagels (with a few modifications—I used roasted and salted pistachios to speed up the recipe, which called for roasting raw pistachios, and I subbed regular canned artichokes plus oregano and lemon zest after realizing I failed to buy marinated artichokes). Nine recipes for sweets close the collection.

*Let’s Party, by Dan Pelosi

Continuing on the dinner party theme, Dan Pelosi organizes 100-plus recipes into 16 themed dinner party menus—including Thanksgiving, breakfast for dinner, an Oscar-watching (or Olympics, or Super Bowl) party, a cookie swap, a cookout, and “Joyuary.” He walks readers through a week-ahead timetable for each menu, with advice on cleaning, decorating, and creating a guest list. The very bubbly Pelosi celebrates abundance: Each recipe is meant to serve six to eight people, and each menu has about six dishes. Fewer recipes in here feel as interesting as those in Eat Small Plates, but they make up solid menus of appealing food. The one menu that readers might either love or hate? The pumpkin carving party, with seemingly enough pumpkin and calories to get you through a full hibernation—with a cheese ball with pumpkin puree, roasted squash with crispy chickpeas and feta, pumpkin cider-braised pork shoulder, ravioli dressed in creamy pumpkin sauce, and ginger pumpkin pie, the only respite from pumpkin in this menu is the salad.

*In for Dinner, by Rosie Kellett

Using her London experience of communal cooking with six housemates, who each chip in about $30 a week for groceries and take turns cooking each night, Rosie Kellett focuses In for Dinner on affordable recipes for six to eight people. This book will especially appeal to 20-something cooks newly on their own, but in today’s economy, the recipes will find a wide audience. Chapters broken down by breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sweets offer mostly vegetarian dishes (many of which can be made vegan, and many of which are also gluten-free), plus a few with fish. They include plenty of tips on making dishes ahead, scaling recipes up or down, cooking for large groups, and keeping costs down (such as highlighting other recipes to use up leftover ingredients like an egg white). Affordable doesn’t mean boring; Kellett offers cheddar, jalapeno, and chive cornbread with maple harissa butter; savory corn French toast with cherry tomato salsa; citrus mackerel spaghetti with pangrattato (breadcrumbs); hasselback potatoes with massaged kale and a miso almond sauce and lemon salsa; brown sugar vanilla blackberry sheet cake; and masala chai shortbread. Do the recipes work? Most look reliable, but I noted issues in her sourdough recipes. A pikelet recipe clearly intends, from both the headnote and a page about sourdough, for cooks to use sourdough discard, but it calls simply for sourdough starter; sourdough pancakes had a similar issue.

*Nights and Weekends, by Alexis de Boschnek

Subtitled “recipes that make the most of your time,” Nights and Weekends aims to help readers get dinner on the table with fast, accessible, flavorful meals. Weeknight recipes lean on pantry staples and a few ready-made ingredients, using as few pans and utensils as possible and simple shortcuts to pare a few seconds or minutes off the prep, such as slicing an onion instead of dicing it. As an impatient cook, I’m always looking for speed and ease in my own kitchen, and I notice when cookbook authors fail to get from point A to B as easily as possible. This book opens with a simple recipe for crab pasta with pistachios and olives, topped with a hefty cup of chopped mint—an intriguing combination for a 15-minute supper. (De Boschnek notes that canned tuna can sub for the crab.) Other interesting options include tofu in miso butter sauce with corn and scallions, roasted broccolini and banana peppers with hazelnuts over ricotta, and halloumi fattoush. Cooks will appreciate even the ordinary recipes, such as udon noodles with peanut sauce or roasted tomato and red pepper soup, for their emphasis on ease and speed. Recipes nicely skew toward vegetarian options. The meat chapter is somewhat less interesting, but the fish chapter perks back up, opening with chile crisp salmon with a quick salad of pickled carrots, cucumber, and fennel. In the “weekends” section, simple starters include soy-blistered shishitos, fried okra, gochujang almond butter dip, and salmon ceviche with cucumber and Tajin. Brunch and dinner recipes follow; most take more time than the weeknight section but are not complex. They include French onion soup strata, crepes with mushrooms and gremolata, tofu schnitzel with braised cabbage, and slow-roasted salmon with grapefruit and crispy shallots. Desserts such as lemon bars, apple crumble, and chocolate mousse make up the least interesting chapter.

*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on any of the titles above.

Without going into detail, Nosrat explains that she dealt with the deaths of several people close to her; pandemic isolation right after settling into a new home, coming off long years of work travel; and depression, all pointing her to a calmer existence focused on time with others. So she figured out what recipes and casual cooking guidelines qualified to her as “good things” worth putting into a cookbook.

In so doing, Nosrat has written a warm, colorful book that may give cooks, especially newer ones, the kitchen confidence she envisions for themselves and friends.

Good Things seems best suited for readers who are advanced beginners. Nosrat gives them a nice runway, from simple explanations of how to boil, roast, or sauté vegetables, to slightly more challenging pita, to full-on homemade lasagna noodles.

Experienced cooks will find fewer wholly unexpected recipes, but they will still find plenty of tips tucked in amid the familiar. One example stood out on a first skim of the book: It seems to have become a rule that every new book must include a cacio e pepe pasta, but Nosrat has picked up the method of whizzing up a cheese paste in a food processor to toss with noodles and some of their cooking water—a more foolproof method than the frantic stirring most recipes require.

The book is organized by chapters with uninformative names (“Good Things Come in Small Packages” turns out to be condiments and building blocks for other recipes; “Good Things to Keep Up Your Sleeve” is recipes from pantry staples). Given that, it’s frustrating not to have a list of recipes at the start of every chapter, a now-common format that would be especially appreciated in a book with chapters that can run to 50 pages.

Noting her distaste for traditional recipes, Nosrat flips between many full, standard-format recipes and shorter, paragraph-style ones. Both work; the more-casual paragraph format easily walks a cook through a recipe without breaking everything out into sometimes-stilted steps. (The Joy of Cooking owners will recognize the style.) It would have been better, though, to boldface not just the ingredient but the amount as well (6 garlic cloves, not 6 garlic cloves).

But there are multiple irritations in here. Maybe they trace back to her antipathy toward traditional recipes, but they felt sloppy at best and disrespectful of readers at worst:

• Recipe writers usually try to signal to readers when an ingredient is used in multiple ways, either by listing its uses separately (putting butter amounts under both “batter” and “frosting”), or saying “4 tablespoons butter, divided.” Nosrat does neither, making it far too easy to miss the amount within the instructions and plop in all of an ingredient at once.

• Her inconsistency in calling for an ingredient by weight is so consistent that it becomes almost comical—to wit, a recipe for whipped tahini that calls only for “½ cup tahini,” but “1 teaspoon (3g) kosher salt.”

• Sometimes recipe instructions lack clarity or seem to require more steps than necessary. A chicken recipe calls for the bird to be salted in advance, pointing readers to another page, but that offers only the general concept, with few details (how much salt? Refrigerate? Uncovered or not? Wipe off the salt before cooking?). A spicy tuna pasta’s instructions for cooking the sauce get interrupted by instructions to add the pasta to the boiling water, cook for 7 to 12 minutes, reserve some cooking water, and drain the pasta. But there’s no “meanwhile” anywhere in that paragraph or the next one—and the next begins with adding a can of tomatoes to the sauce and ladling a little of the cooking water into the can to rinse it. So, are cooks supposed to just stand around for 7 to 12 minutes—while the interrupted sauce continues to cook?

• And readers may wonder if the page designer had any cooking experience. Presumably not, or they would have understood how exceptionally annoying it is to have a headnote take up an entire page—alongside which runs the ingredient list, forcing cooks to continually turn back a page from the instructions to the ingredients. This happens mercifully less often than the other annoyances, at least.

Overcome those obstacles, though, and some delicious creations will emerge.

Take a morning to put together some of Nosrat’s simple building blocks; your future self will thank you. Prep that whipped tahini, fluffy and light, alongside some whipped ricotta, and spread on a serving platter for an excellent, quick base for roasted vegetables (the tahini was even better with not just the lemon juice called for, but the zest of the lemons as well).

Marinated feta cubes—bright with lemon (or kumquats if you’re lucky enough to have a supply), chile, bay, and peppercorns—perk up any simple green salad. Dark-roasted, roll-cut carrots became a full-flavored side dish when tossed in a creamy lemon-miso dressing thickened with aquafaba and flecked with poppyseeds. (That dressing led to questions about unnecessary steps; in a moment of recipe-testing distraction, all the ingredients went into the immersion blender cup, instead of Nosrat’s two-step process of mixing up an aquafaba “mayonnaise” first and then drizzling in a lemon juice-miso mixture. Maybe her longer method would have produced something even smoother or fluffier, but hey, it’s just dressing—and it was still one of the best of the tested recipes.)

Nosrat’s Roquefort dressing took advantage of an often-underused ingredient: water. To get the dressing—thick with cheese, sour cream and olive oil—to your desired runniness, simply add water. It’s easy to imagine many newer cooks trying to thin it with more oil or vinegar instead of this simplicity.

The tuna pasta, meant to be assembled from pantry staples, boosted a sauce of onion, garlic, and canned cherry tomatoes with the oomph of anchovies and Calabrian chile paste. Here, too, the instructions may frustrate a cook—it’s an early step in the saucemaking that calls for chile paste “to taste” with zero quantities suggested. How should a cook know at that point even where to begin? Parmesan, lemon, and canned tuna round out the flavor, though tasters wished for one more can of tuna to balance all the pasta.

A short chapter of basic breads includes focaccia, pita, and sesame flatbreads. Honey-oat dinner rolls kept moist with a cooked porridge of ground oats plus sour cream worked fine; take note of how dark the rolls are in the accompanying photos—necessary for fullest flavor.

In a chapter devoted to chicken recipes, a Dutch oven braise of a whole chicken over pearl couscous flavored with torn Medjool dates and preserved lemon paste proved a real standout. With garlic, onion, and a hefty dose of cumin as well, the dish took on layers of sweet-salty goodness. While not a weeknight meal given the long cooking time, this packed a bunch of punch for relatively little effort.

About that preserved lemon paste: It’s still a relatively uncommon ingredient, so making the paste may be one of the book’s best takeaways, pureeing preserved lemons (both peel and flesh) with optional turmeric for a sunny condiment that’s even easier to use than whole preserved lemons. It proved its worth in both the chicken and a lemon cake, where the paste combined with labneh to create a tangy, tender cake with complexity.

Despite some interesting recipes like that, the dessert chapter was the weakest overall (honestly, did you really need another banana bread recipe?). Also good, though, were tender-crisp cardamom shortbread rounds, despite looking at first glance far too heavy on the powdered sugar—until a reread of the weird yield revealed that it makes 120 cookies (“Makes 40 little cookies plus enough dough for 80 more”).

Quick takes:

Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love, by Samin Nosrat. 464 pages. Published by Random House, 2025.

Organization: Chapters on building blocks, appetizers and drinks, salad dressings, pantry dishes, vegetables, dishes for dinners with friends, breads, and desserts.

Ingredients measurement methods: Comically inconsistent.

Photos: Most recipes have accompanying photos.

Index: Decent, could have been better; for example, Burnt Honey Hot Fudge, despite the recipe page being labeled as “sauces and preserves,” gets no index listing under “sauces.”

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Pepper thinks sharing your food is a lip-smacking good thing.

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Aiming to make cooks better, instead of a hard-to-define “good,” Australian author Alice Zaslavsky’s latest book is part of a trend (see: Good Enough) to reassure readers they are, in fact, good enough.

In Better Cooking: Life-changing skills & recipes to tempt & teach, she offers 70 recipes written with verve, plus a “bonus bits” section following each recipe. This vibrant book often succeeds, but when it falls short, cooks striving to be better may blame themselves, rather than pointing a finger, deservedly, at the recipe.

The bonus bits provide a mix of tips, recipe riffs and substitutions, shortcuts, ideas for using up every bit of an ingredient, details about an ingredient, skill, or kitchen gadget, and ways to use up a less-common ingredient. For experienced cooks—and cookbook authors—this is where things get fun, and riffing will make cooks “better.” The opening recipe for avocado toast with black garlic and poached egg, for example, provides several substitutions, ideas for spicing up the poaching liquid, and an explanation of black garlic.

Recipes run a gamut of cuisines with a tilt toward Italian. So risotto follows broccoli cassoulet, followed by shrimp, macadamia, and asparagus stir-fry, then loaded potato latkes, then pantry puttanesca. In another chapter, “not quite niçoise” follows five-spice tempura follows fried green falafels follows garden focaccia.

The book follows the annoying style of cutesy but unhelpfully named chapters for cooks who need to find something specific quickly (all chicken recipes) or grasp the point of a chapter. What is “on autopilot” to one cook may feel to another like a complicated “loosen your shoulders” recipe.

Deviled tuna egg sandwiches feature in the slapdash chapter, but they’re not especially quick (mince celery, mince shallot, boil and peel eggs, mince cilantro or dill), and several things seem off. Take seriously Zaslavsky’s “or to taste” on the Kewpie mayo; you will want far less than she calls for, because with runny eggs and canned tuna, the full amount makes this simply soggy. A bigger issue is with the egg timing; these eggs are truly runny in an unappealing, soft-boiled goo that contributed to the sog despite the hefty dose of celery. The underlying concept, though—spiking the salad with a punch of curry powder—could work with adjustments.

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Meatball soup lacked punch despite the mix of Italian sausage, raw rice, Parmesan, currants, and pine nuts in meatballs poached in tomato broth. The recipe needs enough liquid to cook the pound-plus of meatballs, but the paltry amounts of onion, red bell pepper, paprika, and black pepper lost the flavor fight against 14 ounces of canned tomatoes, 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, 2 cups of chicken stock, and 6 cups of water. A small bouquet garni of a few basil stalks, oregano, and bay leaves stayed in the pot only long enough to bring all the liquid to a boil, leaving barely a whisper of itself. Zaslavsky warns against adding salt to the soup, but it desperately needed more—even to this cook, who generally undersalts food.

A plum muffin recipe produced better results, but not without frustration. Made with a mixture of almond meal and flour, these were tested with a suggested substitute of blueberries for plums. In the original, a plum half is nestled, cut side up, into each cup of muffin batter. In the “recipe riffs,” Zaslavsky calls for frozen berries because they hold their shape “under the duress of folding and baking.” Wait, who said anything about folding? With no more instruction than that, it’s unclear how many berries to aim for; 10 small berries atop the center of the batter seemed to mimic the plum halves. With that, these muffins were light, delicate, and cinnamon-spiced—but they needed more berries, either nestled or folded. It’s great to try for a breezy tone that suggests a “trust yourself” approach for new cooks, but an editor should have watched for it to go awry.

With both good directions and spicing, cacio e pepe risotto proved more successful. This basic risotto gets spiked with crème fraîche and a healthy helping of “CP butter” made by mashing together butter, Parmesan, garlic, pepper, salt, and parsley. There’s no good reason for the recipe to make more of the butter than needed for the risotto, but it does; the extra provided a pleasant result in a recipe for roasted zucchini heaped with buttered breadcrumbs, set over a sauteed mixture of the scooped-out zucchini innards, currants, lemon, and parsley. It would have been nice, though, if either the index or the risotto recipe referred cooks to to the zucchini recipe to use up the butter.

In a final recipe test, taco rice succeeded in creating what it promised—taco-spiced ground beef plus shredded cheddar and corn chips over sushi rice—but cooks might think twice about whether their mouths really want this Hawaiian combo of spicy meat over sugary, vinegary rice.

Quick takes:

Better Cooking: Life-changing skills & recipes to tempt & teach, by Alice Zaslavsky. 319 pages. Published by Appetite by Random House, 2024.

Organization: Chapters are intended to go from easy to more complex, titled Slapdash, On Autopilot, Making the Most of It, Loosen Your Shoulders, and Seriously Good Sweeties. Each of the 70 recipes is followed by a “bonus bits” section of tips, tricks, and recipe riffs.

Ingredients measurement methods: A mix—sometimes by ounces as well as grams and volume measurements; other times lacking helpful weights (such as calling for 2–3 bunches of bok choy but failing to give even a range of weight for it). And for a book aimed at less-confident cooks, sometimes measurements are ignored entirely, such as calling just for steamed rice under “To serve” in a fish recipe. Giving at least a range (“2 to 4 cups steamed rice”) would have been simple even if there wasn’t space to give cooking instructions.

Photos: Photos accompany each recipe, sometimes showing details of a recipe instead of the finished dish.

Index: Thorough in many ways, but with some frustrating omissions. As noted above, it leaves out some obvious entries, such as another main use for the cacio e pepe butter. There’s no listing for “gadgets” despite many recipes having a “gadget spotlight.” And while it lists many recipes by ingredient (such as a long list under lemons), others that seem like obvious inclusions don’t make the cut—for example, no listing at all for the Italian sausage that is the main ingredient in the meatball soup.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on any linked titles.

*Baking Across America: A Vintage Recipe Road Trip, by B. Dylan Hollis

B. Dylan Hollis decided to map out a road trip across America using his collection of vintage community cookbooks as a guide; in this retro-themed, Betty Crocker-pink book, he follows that with the hook of baking and photographing half the recipes on location—peach cobbler in Georgia, pralines in New Orleans, Boston Cream Pie in Boston.

That starting point means the recipes here are standard regional specialties largely from the heyday of industrialized food in the 20^th century—think hefty doses of shortening, Jello-O and instant pudding, Cool Whip, canned pie filling, imitation flavorings, and lots of sugar. Many, though, stay with more simple, less processed ingredients. Lacking your own community cookbook collection, Baking Across America provides a decent look at some of the most common creations, pairing them with a few paragraphs of history about or related to each recipe.

Thus you get cranberry quick bread, shoofly pie, black & white cookies, hush puppies, hummingbird cake, Texas sheet cake, bourbon bread pudding, buckeyes, kringle, gooey butter cake, runzas, huckleberry ice cream, bizcochitos, prickly pear cheesecake, nanaimo bars, and baked Alaska.

Hollis made his name on social media, and this bubbly book fits that feel, with its strings of photos of a posing Hollis that his fans will appreciate.

*The League of Kitchens Cookbook: Brilliant Tips, Secret Methods & Favorite Family Recipes from Around the World, by Lisa Kyung Gross and the Women of the League of Kitchens Cooking School

In New York City, Lisa Kyung Gross founded the League of Kitchens in 2014, offering cooking classes in the homes of recent immigrants from around the world. The intimate setting of the women’s homes and introduction to a variety of cuisines proved popular, imparting cultural context and wisdom along with recipes. This lovely, hopeful book compiles their stories and very detailed recipes, including some from Persia, Argentina, Greece, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Mexico, Burkina Faso, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Japan, and Nepal.

When even a simple corn and shrimp fritter recipe runs two and a half pages, cooks may feel too overwhelmed to bother. But Gross explains that the goal is to give readers the same experience as being in a class. To that end, an ingredient list will not say “1 onion, chopped” but simply call for an onion and detail how to chop it in the instructions. Notably, the recipe will also specify ounces and grams for that onion, unusual even for books that list both volume and weight. Additionally, to help cooks avoid having to flip back a page or two, the instructions repeat the amount for each ingredient.

Reading the recipes, cooks may be struck by how much all cuisines have in common. Those corn fritters are marked by the inclusion of a hot pepper and lime leaves from a specific Indonesian tree, but otherwise are typical of fritters found around the world. Lebanese green beans stewed with tomatoes and garlic bear a strong resemblance to long-cooked green beans in a typical meat-and-three plate in the southern U.S. Afghan red beans in gravy feel likewise familiar, but with the twist of a topping of sliced raw onion tossed with lemon juice, dried mint, and dried and fresh chiles. As with many of the recipes, this one also includes specific tips and techniques that the instructors insist makes a difference in the final taste, such as blanching the beans before a long, slow cook in preheated water.

Cookbook readers have come to expect a plethora of photos no matter how big or small the book, leading to a deadening sameness in so many books, and a lack of imagination for cooks to envision how they want their own version to look. But the photos here make a better argument for their inclusion, instructing and creating a warm sense of place in the women’s kitchens.

*Garlic, Olive Oil + Everything Mediterranean: Simple Recipes for the Home Cook, by Daen Lia

“Everything Mediterranean” is too big of a claim for this book. Drawing on blogger and social media influencer Daen Lia’s Spanish and Italian heritage, with chapters on garlic, olive oil, butter, bread, crumbs, and eggs, many of the recipes offer little that’s truly new—such as ricotta gnocchi with pesto or mussels with French fries. But, especially for newer cooks, it offers a reassuring tone, multiple ways to use up its building-block recipe, and tweaks to some standards that more experienced cooks will appreciate.

Lia opens with a recipe for garlic confit (garlic cloves submerged in olive oil and cooked at a low temperature for two hours) that she uses in 14 other recipes, including mixing them into a quick version of puff pastry. She uses the same technique for cherry tomatoes, olives, and salmon.

Pasta with vodka sauce tweaks the usual by calling for tomato paste instead of the more common can of tomatoes and adds a half-stick of butter at the end on top of the cup of cream for an extra-rich sauce. Slow-roasted lamb shoulder uses a paste of garlic, oregano, and anchovies for a flavor boost.

Other recipes include smashed potatoes; garlic bread; garlic confit ragu Bolognese; chicken pot pie; roasted chicken rubbed with olive oil and seasoned with fennel seeds; fennel and lemon risotto; roasted snapper with green anchovy butter; focaccia; no-knead bread; breadcrumbs tossed with parsley and rosemary; mac and cheese; Caesar salad with croutons cooked in bacon fat; and spinach, feta, and pine nut quiche.

Along with the small “also used in” notes (such as using the salmon confit as a filling for her bagel recipe), some recipes offer “serve with” suggestions to pair recipes for a more complete meal, such as her grilled peach salad and roasted snapper.

*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on any of the titles above.

In today's "What I'm Reading," quick looks at Baking Across America: A Vintage Recipe Road Trip; The League of Kitchens Cookbook: Brilliant Tips, Secret Methods & Favorite Family Recipes from Around the World; and Garlic, Olive Oil + Everything Mediterranean: Simple Recipes for the Home Cook. Read the column and find links to the books at What I'm Reading: July 2025.

“For me, cooking for one is all about joy,” Wilkinson writes. “The joy of choosing what you fancy, the joy of taking the time to make something only you need to find delicious and the joy of eating alone, finding a moment for yourself and your food.”

By restricting each recipe to cooking in one vessel, Wilkinson also restrains her ingredient lists, keeping a sense of ease and joy while fitting in vegetables, carbs, meat (sometimes), and seasonings. The recipes don’t aim to be groundbreakingly unusual (and are often frankly inauthentic versions of international recipes), but Wilkinson thoughtfully pulls flavor and texture from the few components. While many recipes are mildly seasoned—maybe too much so—she calls on ingredients that punch above their weight, such as chili crisp, jerk seasoning, preserved lemon, and masala curry paste.

So a baked dish mixes gnocchi, cherry tomatoes, an ear of corn, broccoli, masala curry, and cashews, topped with coconut yogurt and cilantro—11 ingredients, five or 10 minutes of chopping, and 20 minutes under the broiler. That’s on par for the effort most of her recipes demand. (Note, though, that some call for ingredients that may be a challenge to find at an average supermarket in the U.S., such as small amounts of fresh pasta.)

Chapter titles, somewhat arbitrarily, divide recipes by “comfort,” “fresh,” “simple,” “special,” and “sweet.” Comfort goes heavy on pasta, curries, and classics such as cottage pie and mac and cheese topped with fried onions. Fresh recipes lean into salads, including a fresh peach and burrata orzo salad sparked with cherry tomatoes, mint, and basil, perfect for steamy days that need a barely-on stove. Simple includes a green linguine that incorporates the creaminess of an egg and cheese with broccoli and spinach.

A zucchini “carpaccio” layers ricotta, thin slices of zucchini, lemon juice and zest, and olive oil-crisped capers, butter beans, and panko. Five main ingredients take the punch of pancetta and silkiness of egg yolk and butter to create a rich bowl of risotto carbonara. Creamy scrambled eggs fold in tangy cottage cheese; take Wilkinson up on her suggestion to top these with chili crisp and scallion.

A straightforward sheet-pan supper of sausages and potatoes gets a lift from cherry tomatoes, red bell pepper, and leeks turned in a marmalade-mustard mix; an orzo dish of bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, green olives, basil, and preserved lemon pulls together these strong flavors nicely with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

A puff pastry croque madame proved less successful; the pastry is coated with a cream cheese and Dijon mixture, topped with ham, and sprinkled with Cheddar, with—supposedly—a small gap left for the egg to nestle. But the gap proved elusive, and the egg ran off the tart; the time required to cook the egg overcooked the cheese.

And a gyoza stir-fry requires an especially deft touch to toss and cook the the broccoli, pepper, and onion adequately without overcooking and breaking up the already-cooked gyoza in the pan. Nevertheless, this is a simple, filling dish with an appreciated sprinkling of chopped peanuts; many dishes have garnishes that make a big difference in the final flavor.

Wilkinson’s “special” chapter at first glance doesn’t seem much different from recipes in other chapters, but they may take a bit more time or splurging on ingredients. A straightforward mortadella and mozzarella sandwich goes up a notch with a one-portion homemade focaccia. Lobster spaghetti calls for two lobster tails, with lemon, tomatoes, cream, basil, and Parmesan. Salami and hot honey frying pan pizza uses homemade dough, while pork and kimchi steamed buns make the buns from scratch.

Sweets include puddings, a spoonable chocolate brownie, a skillet chocolate chip cookie, and several parfaits. A single cinnamon bun comes together in just a few minutes from a strip of puff pastry coated with butter, sugar, and cinnamon, braided and tucked into a ramekin or muffin cup.

Wilkinson suggests a few sizes of cooking vessels, though more specificity here would have been helpful. While she advises getting a small cast-iron skillet or two of 6.5 to 8 inches and a small pie dish, she offers no sizes for other items such as a saucepan or baking dish. The photo accompanying her sheet-pan marmalade sausage offers no clues to whether this is a regular half-sheet pan or (presumably) a quarter-sheet—potentially making a dramatic difference in results.

Wilkinson does try to help solo cooks avoid waste, by noting with each recipe another recipe that will use up a leftover ingredient—so if she calls for an egg yolk, she points you to a use for one egg white. She also structures her index by ingredient, to help with using up leftovers.

That seems especially important for ingredients such as puff pastry, when so little of a box may be used per recipe, but is difficult to divide while frozen and then can’t be refrozen. This takes readers only so far, though; after you’ve used 3 ounces of your fennel bulb, there are no other options for the rest in the index.

Of course, most solo cooks are not solo all the time, and the U.S. has 45 million two-person households. Happily for all of them, most of these recipes should double easily, either using a bigger pan or keeping the ingredients divided between individual dishes.

Quick takes:

One Pot, One Portion: 100 Simple Recipes Just for You, by Eleanor Wilkinson. 223 pages. Published by Clarkson Potter, 2025.

Organization: Chapter titles are Comfort, Fresh, Simple, Special, and Sweet; it was hard to tell what the difference is for the “simple” chapter, as many of the recipes are no quicker than in other chapters nor have shorter ingredient lists.

Ingredients measurement methods: A mix of ounces, cups, grams, and milliliters, all in one recipe—though frustratingly sometimes ingredients have no weight given, even an approximate one (such as just “2 pork sausages.”)

Photos: Every recipe has an accompanying, straightforward photo that nevertheless makes the point of plating food attractively even when it’s “for just myself.”

Index: Structured only by ingredient, excluding recipe titles.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

She may be happily single, but don’t even think about leaving Pepper home alone.

*Our South: Black Food Through My Lens, by Ashleigh Shanti

Recent winner of a James Beard award, Asheville chef and Good Hot Fish owner Ashleigh Shanti has written a lyrical, deeply personal book that takes readers through her mix of family history, personal experience, and the Black culture of the Southern and Appalachian regions that she wants to highlight: backcountry, lowcountry, midlands, lowlands, and finally, “homeland.” Filled with vibrant photos, Our South includes basics such as cornbread and stewed tomatoes and old (or old-inspired) recipes such as fermented sour corn or salt-rising bread with butter flavored with country ham and ramps. (Sour is a recurring theme in this book, as in vinegar-cured trout with pickled Granny Smith apples.)

Though most recipes are eminently doable, Shanti doesn’t shy away from challenging ones, such as rosin-cooked potatoes with spruce tip butter. It’s hard to imagine many readers actually making that, as it requires a pine rosin cooker, 5 pounds of rosin, and fresh spruce tips, along with cooking outside because the rosin is highly flammable, with toxic fumes. But, Shanti argues, this lesser-known foodway of Black culture, while a massive undertaking, deserves recognition and creates “the most pure, potato-y potato.”

The juxtaposition of that recipe with one, two pages later, for a bologna schnitzel sandwich with sour collards, and another a page later for spaetzle with squash—part of the melting pot of Appalachian cuisine—brings home the book’s “Black food through my lens” subtitle.

So many recipes will beckon readers. Here’s just a sampling, which doesn’t really do the book’s breadth justice:

A takeoff on vinegar pie, which she traces to Depression-era make-do foods—creates a cider vinegar version of lemon bars, drizzled with sorghum molasses. A lowcountry recipe for benne seed crab toast, served with yellow mustard mixed with sorghum molasses, miso, and gochujang, seems to incorporate new and old ingredients both robustly and delicately. Crab appears again as a filling for deviled eggs, drizzled with a roasted red pepper vinaigrette flavored with lime, sorghum molasses, cilantro, chives, and peanuts. A puff pastry croustade is filled with a simple mix of crawfish, cheddar, and Muenster.

Chunks of day-old cornbread go on a platter to soak up a pour of buttermilk and a thick fennel and blueberry vinaigrette. Country sausage and rice-stuffed eggplant gets served with a tomato and peanut gravy. And sweet potato consommé, flavored with cinnamon and cloves, allows Shanti to merge her culinary training with a standard Southern ingredient.

By Heart: Recipes to Hold Near and Dear, by Hailee Catalano

By Heart is not a book that seems to fit its title; these aren’t recipes you’ll come to know “by heart.” But they hold meaning for the author, and many may come to do so for readers, too. Hailee Catalano’s culinary school and restaurant training shine through in varied recipes that lack a through-line—except for being generally interesting and accessible.

She takes cooks through chapters on everything from pickles to salads to pizza to her grandmother’s Italian-American creations, and to sourdough and a few breads plus many flavored butters. While some recipes are simple enough to memorize (an eye-catching platter of watermelon radish and persimmon slices topped with ricotta salata), many are more involved or have longer ingredient lists, such as “mozzarella sticks” of zucchini blossoms, sunchoke clam chowder, and handmade goat cheese ravioli in a mushroom broth. But readers will appreciate the layered flavors.

A recipe for hot cherry pepper jam, for example, starts with a jar of sliced, pickled hot peppers, ups the ante with chopped Fresno peppers, and spices it further with fresh ginger. A tiny note below the recipe suggests topping ricotta with the jam, olive oil, and herbs for a focaccia dip, or using it to top pizza. (Many recipes have these tiny, easily overlooked notes—not the best design choice, since they often contain useful information better suited to a headnote, or at least a more prominent point size.)

She puts a peach vinaigrette seasoned with maple syrup and urfa biber on charred, twice-cooked sweet potato slices topped with mint leaves fried in brown butter.

One especially fun recipe, and the only one I tested, is her mortadella “nduja”—a paste of mortadella and prosciutto for cooks who lack access to true nduja. Rich and spicy with Calabrian chilies, the paste flavors a creamy pasta, topped with crunchy pistachios and scented with basil.

*Sweet Potato Soul Vegan Vibes: 100 Soulful Plant-Based Recipes for Healthy Everyday Meals, by Jenné Claiborne

The idea of actually being vegan holds little appeal for me; I would sorely miss cheese, eggs, and cream even if I left all fish and meat behind. But many recipes can feel “naturally” vegan, as this shows—a good option for cooks of all stripes.

A successful vegan, blogger Jenné Claiborne writes in all caps, is “HEALTHY, VIBRANT, AND COLORFUL.” But she notes that while vegan food is more accessible than ever, it’s also more processed than ever. Claiborne addresses how to eat healthfully, get plenty of protein and fiber, and limit processed or sugary foods while still enjoying what you eat.

So her recipes include chocolate pancakes, carrot and mango muffins, and banana pudding with a miso caramel alongside usual suspects like tofu, cauliflower, and mushrooms.

Of course, non-vegans won’t have all the required ingredients hanging around their pantries: Biscuits are made with spelt flour, while lentil-based breakfast sausages include vital wheat gluten, nutritional yeast, potato starch, and miso. But most of what Claiborne calls for are now standard in large supermarkets.

Even for non-vegans, the recipes will feel familiar, such as snack, salad, and soup recipes like roasted Brussels sprouts with cranberries; hummus; latkes made with beets and russet and sweet potatoes; broccoli salad; and chickpea tomato soup. Main dishes include jackfruit chili, curried red bean tacos, miso corn pasta, and pea pesto pasta. Even more unusual recipes don’t branch out too far, such as kale chips coated in a paste of sunflower seeds, dates, cocoa, and cayenne.

Zoë Bakes Cookies, by Zoë François

From a reliable author (who found fame with five-minute artisan bread recipes), Zoë Bakes Cookies hits a sweet spot of detail without overload. Newbie bakers, or bakers who want to see how varying technique or ingredients makes a difference, will find detailed explanations from Zoë François in her “cookie academy” section and notes on ingredients and equipment, but recipes are clear and concise for bakers who just want to get their ovens going.

François opens with her path to baking fame, which began improbably on a Vermont commune with little access to sweets and an effort to convince kids that carob was just as good as chocolate, moving on to a cute cookie cart during her college days, her bread bestsellers and beyond.

With chapters broken down by healthy cookies, holiday cookies, Jewish favorites, “wordly” cookies, chocolate chip and brownie variations, and midwestern cookies and bars, she winds through a lot of basics.

There won’t feel like a lot new here, and in many ways there isn’t—you can find recipes for rice crispy bars, rugelach, madeleines, Russian tea cakes, biscotti, alfajores, linzer cookies, and oatmeal cookies in countless other books, not to mention online.

But bakers can learn a tip or two in many recipes: For chocolate crinkle cookies, roll the dough balls not just in powdered sugar but granulated sugar as well; replace some all-purpose flour with spelt in cutout sugar cookies; add bitters to lemon bars. For a variation on flourless three-ingredient peanut butter cookies, use egg whites instead of whole eggs (these were, like all flourless peanut butter cookies, pleasantly crumbly-chewy, but I found they missed the bit of lift and lightness that baking soda often adds).

In some spots, the attention to detail falters a bit. For example, does she really mean fresh lavender buds for shortbread—and if so, why isn’t there an option to use dried? And while many doughs are rolled into logs for slicing, she gives no tips for success, surprising given that these are often harder to get picture-perfect than bakers expect.

Pro tip: Make her carrot cake whoopie pie cookies for the filling alone. I didn’t test it, but I didn’t need to—the combination of cream cheese, honey, and vanilla has been my go-to carrot cake frosting for decades, and while it’s trickier to work with minus the stiffening of gobs of powdered sugar, it’s light-years ahead in taste and texture.

*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on any of the titles above.

In Dinner, food writer and columnist for The Guardian Meera Sodha describes how several years ago, she lost her love for food while going through a depression (apparently—she doesn’t label it as such). She found her way back to enjoying food by deciding she would cook for pleasure, not work, and was drawn to dinner prep more than other meals. This book documents the recipes she most enjoyed making during that period.

Sodha organizes chapters by main ingredient (eggplant, broccoli, greens, eggs/cheese, fungi, onions, roots, squash, tomatoes), but includes listings up front of recipes by season and other categories as well, such as curries, rice, and salads.

Recipes have heavy Indian, Chinese, Malaysian, Thai, and Korean influences, and many suggest a simultaneously light and luscious product, such as an eggplant salad with wild rice sparked by a dressing of cilantro, garlic, chilies, sugar, soy, citrus, and basil and mint. They pleasingly layer flavors, as in eggplant baked with chickpeas and spiced with Urfa biber and topped with tahini-spiked yogurt, mint, and pepper. (Chilies of some sort show up consistently.)

I appreciated how even a simple pasta dish still gets in plenty of healthful ingredients; I’ve noticed lately how often the New York Times seems to push main-dish recipes that sound tasty but lack much nutritionally—think with a gochujang or miso sauce, but no vegetables or protein. Sodha’s version of miso pasta purées nearly a pound of kale into the sauce. (Granted, she also includes a vodka gochujang pasta that will be more filling and satisfying than nutrition-packed.) And she puts interesting combinations together—eggy thin pancakes with a filling that combines kimchi and Gruyere might not be obvious to many cooks. Or how about shiitake rice with chipotle chili flakes and pecans, with pickled ginger on the side? Sodha’s recipes are often half a world away from what I usually cook, but just reading them makes my mouth water.

*Family Style: Elegant Everyday Recipes Inspired by Home and Heritage, by Peter Som

Fashion designer and recipe creator Peter Som’s book, celebrating the influences of his mother and grandmother on his cooking, takes traditional recipes from multiple cuisines and tweaks them with some sort of Asian influence: Fish sauce and chile crisp show up in many (maybe the majority) of his recipes.

For example, his deviled eggs start with tea eggs—marinated in a mix of soy sauce, Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, and black tea­—that get topped with a crisp herbed panko mixture, nori, bonito flakes, and dill and cilantro. Shakshuka incorporates soy sauce, fish sauce, and rice wine into the tomato base, then replaces the usual unadorned eggs with egg in a hole. Cinnamon toast includes miso and five-spice powder in the cinnamon topping; radishes get dipped in butter flavored with oyster sauce and black sesame seeds. His hummus stretches the concept til the band nearly snaps, blending roasted carrots, gochujang, miso, sesame oil, and five-spice powder with chickpeas and tahini. Likewise his Caesar salad—roasted cabbage with a dressing that includes yogurt, tahini, lemon, Kewpie mayonnaise, hoisin sauce, and anchovy paste, all topped with toasted panko, sesame seeds, lemon zest, dill, and chives.

*Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking, by Richard Hart and Laurie Wollever

Acclaimed baker Richard Hart, whose business partner in his Copenhagen bakery is Rene Redzepi of Noma, promises to help readers “see, smell, touch, and taste your way to great bread.” There’s science here, but Hart is less interested in geeking out over it than in trusting his well-trained bread-baking intuition. So while the book will appeal to advanced bakers—such as those used to thinking in baker’s percentages, which Hart lists for each recipe as well as ingredient weights—it won’t discourage ambitious amateurs.

Written explanations are clear and direct, but when that just can’t suffice, Hart includes QR codes for clarifying videos. Watching how he simply folds an upside-down ball of dough in half before putting it into a banneton—no elaborate shaping here—provided a useful technique to use with many loaves.

Recipe complexity runs the gamut, but all tempted me, including rye wrapped in fig leaves, rice bread, polenta bread, rosemary and lemon bread, pita, and focaccia (with the interesting trick of blitzing olive oil and water in a blender to emulsify them, then quickly pouring that over the risen focaccia instead of oil alone before dimpling the dough) as well as brioche, cardamom-scented milk buns, and a fascinating, many-page panettone recipe.

*Symon’s Dinners Cooking Out: 100 Recipes That Redefine Outdoor Cooking, by Michael Symon

Taken on its own (without watching Michael Symon’s Food Network show of the same name), this book would confuse a reader. Why would someone want to use a charcoal fire to cook pasta from start to finish, or a casserole, or cookies, or panna cotta, or to deep-fry clams? And would the recipes in here be all that unusual or interesting cooked indoors?

To the first question, I have no idea; to the second, sadly, not that much. I can come up with good arguments for a lot of grilling—it’s too hot outside to heat up the kitchen, or you’re on an extended car camping trip (these are not recipes for backpackers), or you want a hint of smoke in every course, including dessert. But otherwise, the appeal of cooking, say, spaetzle in boiling water on a grill—especially one lacking the temperature control of gas, which is definitely not given as an option in this book—escapes me. And I doubt my grandmother, were she still alive, would long to return to the days when she had to fry her doughnuts over a wood-fired stove.

So, clearly, I am not the audience for this book. But even setting aside the wish to cook with firmer temperature control, space, and speed indoors, the fact remains that many of these recipes seem fine, but nothing special.

*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on any of the titles above.

Martha: The Cookbook promises readers 100 of Stewart’s most-loved recipes, with brief anecdotes behind them plus photo collections showing her at favorite points throughout her life. Many of the recipes feel classic but slightly outdated—or maybe just classic, because even if you know should label some of these as passé, they still hold much appeal.

And while Stewart includes many old favorites, she shows herself to fit the label (and groan-inducing phrase for word nerds) of “lifelong learner,” happy to update what she’s always done with new techniques that others discover. That’s true from the first recipe, in which she credits J. Kenji Lopez-Alt for showing us the better way to boil an egg—which is, skip the boiling and steam it instead.

Stewart inspires strong feelings in others, positive and negative, as demonstrated in the reactions to a Netflix documentary about her. But what keeps coming through, in that show and this book, is her consistency: her exacting expectations of herself and others, her love of gardening, her belief in the power of a beautiful home and table, her not-small ego (though knowing what she has accomplished—the first female self-made billionaire—makes it hard to argue her right to that ego), and those classic recipes, all alongside a flexibility to adapt to any situation. That includes, of course, her time in prison, which goes unmentioned here, or a seemingly unlikely friendship and collaboration with Snoop Dogg.

So this book, like most of her others, is worth a read if:

• you love photos of colorful eggs;

• you are a relatively confident and somewhat experienced cook;

• you want recipes that work, aren’t too difficult, and are proven winners, but have tweaks you may not have come across;

• and/or photos of a glowing table with classic New England, old-money-ish silver serving trays (which might have come from Stewart’s Macy’s or Kmart lines) with champagne flutes filled with golden nectar, surrounded by a tin of caviar on a footed tray and gold-tinted plates of caviar-topped crepes, bring you joy.

To wit:

For lovers of pastel eggs and dreamers of their own country-manor-cute, perfectly clean, never-attacked-by-foxes-or-creepy-snakes chicken coops, Stewart has you covered with just enough satisfying photos. And her egg recipes cover some classics, such as a simple spinach and Gruyère omelet, or coddled eggs (steamed in coddlers or ramekins with mushrooms and a nice addition of Dijon and honey; these seem more consistently reliable than shirred eggs, and if you don’t have coddlers, try steaming in 4-ounce Mason jars instead of ramekins, using their lids instead of parchment paper rounds). Or try artichokes with poached eggs, smoked salmon, and hollandaise (for which she gives both classic and quick sauce recipes, with no explanation of why you’d choose one over the other). “Custard egg sandwiches” look frankly unappealing in the photo, a chunky square of egg custard plopped between two thick, barely toasted slices of milk bread with just a bit of watercress barely touched by rice vinegar. The baked custard, though, was creamy and souffle-light, with only about five minutes of prep time. If the full sandwich doesn’t appeal, a custard square atop just one piece of toast with a garnish of watercress makes a great alternative.

Well-written recipes that are best for cooks with a little experience and confidence: Stewart’s recipes generally fit on one page with enough detail to promise success. But some things are assumed, so this is still better for somewhat confident and experienced cooks. For example, a garlic confit recipe omits any instructions on getting the baked garlic out of the skins.

Classic recipes that work, with tweaks: These are exemplified in a gougères recipe, in which Stewart takes this hors d’oeuvres, amped up with Comté, Gruyère, and Parmesan, to another level through her recent discovery that the classic recipe is much better when you as much as double the eggs—no four eggs here, but eight, for especially light, open, airy crisp puffs. Other examples include orange-scented currant scones that boost the typical cream scone with Grand Marnier-soaked currants and a hefty dose of orange zest, or crisp vegetable flatbreads that take the typical Martha approach of turning a basic cracker into an Instagram-ready one, with an almost stained-glass design of sage leaves and onion, tomatillo, and cherry tomato slices. (Though not given as an option, if you have a pasta machine, try putting the dough through it for ease in getting these very flat.)

Among other tested recipes, none bombed or even came close to disappointing. Buttermilk sorbet was a classic lemon-scented Southern scoop, made easier to scoop with its touch of corn syrup. Lemon sugar cookies were perfect alongside (or outside, as a sorbet sandwich), though more lemon zest would never hurt. Onion rings, which employ both instant flour (Wondra) and beer, came out supremely light, crisp, and gently lager-flavored.

Photos evoking old-money New England: Ah, to be a billionaire.

Quick takes:

Martha: The Cookbook, by Martha Stewart. 303 pages. Published by Clarkson Potter, 2024.

Organization: Chapters on breakfast/brunch, soups/salads, cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, dinner, garden sides, and desserts, interspersed with photos and memories.

Ingredients measurement methods: C’mon, Martha. Here we say you are both consistent but open to change, learning, tweaking … and yet you still give measurements by volume only. We know you want your readers to succeed, and we know from your cocktail recipes that you know how to measure some things in ounces, so why won’t you evolve here?

Photos: It’s a Martha Stewart book. Need we say more?

Index: Fine, but note that it is only recipes—no references to the anecdotes.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Only Pepper knows her age, but she’s pretty sure she’s a classic.

Nathan’s charmed, mostly well-off youth reads as both a delight and protected from reality. While she was brought up with a moral code and expectations of a Reform Jewish family to lead an ethical life, much of what was happening around her seemed to make little dent. There’s a reference to segregation in one diary entry (she and a friend decided they didn’t like it), but the adult Nathan gives herself an easy pass as a 17-year-old visiting relatives in France in 1960, seemingly oblivious to their war-induced trauma.

Generally, the book skips past too many weighty thoughts. Names and juicy tidbits seem baked into every page, with Nathan in the thick of things. On one page she’s escorting Elie Wiesel around Jerusalem; on another she’s recounting the chance to meet Marilyn Monroe as a teenager.

The name-dropping begins in earnest by page 13—her father shares a sleeping compartment with Albert Einstein on a train from New York to Atlanta and suggests they are connected through grandfathers who were business partners—setting the reader up for all the names to follow. Nathan simply knew everyone who was anyone in the food world through her long, impactful career of food tomes (and these are tomes: this latest weighs nearly four pounds).

Barbra Streisand floats quickly in and out of a long paragraph about spending several days with David Ben-Gurion during Nathan’s time as the Jerusalem mayor’s foreign press attaché. Or there’s her close friendship formed at camp as a teenager with Kathy Boudin, the future Weather Underground driver of the getaway car from the Brink’s armored car robbery that killed three people, with whom Nathan reconnects after Boudin is released from prison.

She takes readers through her extensive travels, often but not always focused on finding Jewish food and cooks wherever she goes, as well as her books, experiences, and the people she encountered through other writing, such as time she spent interviewing M.F.K. Fisher as Fisher dealt with Parkinson’s near the end of her life.

The names, and the stories, just keep on coming; this is a book to take on in fits and starts, or it can feel like too much—especially when a life seems as charmed as hers, with so much seeming to work out so easily. That ease lasts until page 204—a one-page entry on “my first real encounter with sadness.” Even here, as Nathan recounts a pregnancy with twin daughters, one born stillborn and another who apparently lived only a short time, she does not allow herself to dwell—now or at the time. While never stating so outright, Nathan seems not to be a woman who wallows. “Nothing was really easy,” she says, somewhat unconvincingly while describing one of the many times her career leapt forward with solid support from others.

Her writing skips lightly through it all, with stories rarely taking more than two or three pages—making it easy for readers to dip in and out. She intersperses recipes throughout, opening with a chicken soup with matzo balls, progressing through many recipes from her German and Eastern European ancestors, then roaming through largely Jewish foods of the Middle East and well beyond, from Cuba to Vietnam—foods she encountered during her travels and jobs before and after she became a full-time food writer.

Nathan has much to be proud of in how she elevated awareness through her 10 cookbooks on Jewish and Israeli food, her magazine and newspaper food writing and interviews with famous chefs and food writers, her PBS television series, and the ways she gave back to her communities. That includes starting the now 50-year-old Ninth Avenue International Food Festival with a colleague in the mayor’s office (one of many jobs she seemed to simply fall into with the help of her many friends), garnering support from James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Edna Lewis, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy, and George Lang along the way.

So many other marquee names appear, from Julia Child to Rick Bayless to Lidia Bastianich. Tom Colicchio stops her from choking with a deft Heimlich maneuver. Hugh Hefner gets a mention as the major financial backer of Food & Wine magazine when it launched; Nathan was invited to pitch articles to the magazine thanks to a friendship formed when she returned to New York after grad school with its founders, Ariane and Michael Batterberry, whose offices were for a while the former Playboy offices.

Through all the name-dropping, Nathan is generally kind about nearly everyone she mentions (making it oddly stand out when she mentions inviting Paul Prudhomme to an event and points out she had to borrow a chair large enough to fit him from a hotel. While his weight was hardly a secret, why did it feel necessary to point that out?).

Among the enticing recipes, many of which no longer sound exotic but surely did when first she encountered them: white gazpacho with almond and grapes, crispy potato onion bread; eggplant rounds topped with tahini, yogurt, and pomegranates; chicken with sumac; spanakopita (one recipe that lacked clarity—if you use frozen spinach, should you cook it first?); and of course, challah—for which she includes two recipes and delightfully real photos that illustrate braiding techniques, in which her ropes are not all perfectly, evenly formed. Like those braids, her recipes are replicable for home cooks, with the second challah version producing a fluffy loaf redolent of anise seeds and tarragon. Potatoes add moisture, fluffiness, and keeping qualities to this worth-the-effort bread.

It's important to use wild mushrooms in her polenta with fricassee of wild mushrooms—wild being important given the lack of many other strong flavors. Just a touch of Gruyere in the polenta and a bit of garlic and a sprinkling of parsley make the mushrooms’ quality paramount.

A Persian cucumber salad with yogurt and walnuts is delicious and easy; dried fruit plumps during the chill time, producing a great balance of savory and sweet with the mint and dill, crunch from walnuts and radish, and juiciness from the cucumbers.

Nathan’s orange marmalade will make this jam feel doable even for novice preservers, and her cashew tapenade offers a simple, balanced mixture of pulsed cashews, thyme, garlic, honey, and olive oil to serve with crackers.

On the other hand, salmon with preserved lemon was tasty enough, but the lemon overpowers the salmon and seemed quite salty (consider reducing or omitting the brine, or rinse the lemon first).

As is often the case with memoirs like this, the most engaging writing and stories comes at the beginning and the end—learning how the author came to adulthood, to be the famous person we think we know. The early stories then often morph into a litany-checklist of the people met, travels taken, fame-building accomplishments met—interesting enough, especially in a memoir stuffed with famous people. But the book’s midsection, while providing an interesting one-woman history of the rise of restaurants and food writers in our culture, offers just gentle bits with little spice.

The ending, however, turns back to a graceful, quietly emotional telling of her final trips with her husband of 45 years, Allan, and his sudden death near the end of 2019. She describes her passage out of mourning in the midst of Covid lockdowns—first in New Orleans when a planned five-day trip to help her daughter post-surgery turns into 53 days of lockdown, and later in Los Angeles. She closes gently on a note of hope with, true to her nature, a visit to a date farm sparking her desire to write others’ food stories again.

Quick takes:

My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories, by Joan Nathan. 450 pages. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

Organization: 35 chapters take readers chronologically through Nathan’s life, with recipes interspersed.

Ingredients measurement methods: Volume always, with grams for many ingredients, but inconsistently (a stick of butter will be given in grams, but not 2 tablespoons’ worth; a recipe for “risotto” from ancient grains calls for freekeh, bulgur, and wheat berries only as 1 cup, no grams given).

Photos: Family photos throughout; color photos of some recipes.

Index: Comprehensive—for both name-drops and recipes.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Fame underwhelms Pepper.

Too often, food people proclaim that to bake requires scientific precision plus at least some understanding of the underlying science, but the legion of lazy and slightly haphazard cooks who nevertheless bake successfully know that’s bunk.

Of course, some recipes really do require precision, and the science is often pretty cool, but most recipes are flexible to some extent in both ingredients and amounts. While many bakers love using a scale to weigh their ingredients for speed and, yes, precision—and it’s deeply annoying that Tosi acts as though she’s doing readers a favor by not bothering to give weights—most of us have ancestors who baked successfully using just a coffee cup and a spoon.

Helping new and experienced bakers to adopt a give-it-a-whirl attitude seems like a gift in a world where blog commenters get so nervous about making any substitution that they’ll ask things like “will the recipe still work if I use pecans instead of walnuts?” In keeping with the Covid theme of bare grocery shelves that forced improvisation, Tosi leans toward fairly short ingredient lists, with tips and substitutions for most recipes.

So she notes for a skillet cake that bakers can use any vegetable that shreds—reassuring them that a standard carrot cake recipe works just as well with beets, parsnips, zucchini, sweet potato, or butternut squash. Or a mint filling for sandwich cookies can be replaced with caramel sauce, fruit curd, jam, fudge sauce, or frosting—and of course each of those recipes comes complete with its own variation.

Recipes run the gamut from building blocks such as flavored whipped cream, jams, lemon curd, and basic wafer cookies, to cakes, breakfast treats, breads, and snacks. These are not high-concept desserts, for the most part. Rather, sticking with breezy fun, Tosi offers up recipes such as gummy bears, pop rocks, graham cracker toffee, whipped cream flavored with cereal, pretzels, or doughnuts, and bar cookies made from store-bought cookie dough, Ritz crackers, crunchy cookies, mini marshmallows, Bugles, and sweetened condensed milk.

Recipes often take advantage of the inherent qualities of an ingredient to up the flavor ante, such as cookies that swirl together a chocolate chip brownie batter with a ground-pretzel blondie batter, for a classic salty-sweet combination.

The gummy bears aren’t, really—just fruit juice heavily set with gelatin—but it’s a nice change to know what’s in your candy and control the flavors. Some of her simplest recipes offer deep pleasure with that flavor control, such as very adaptable, four-ingredient brown sugar wafers. Crisp chocolate wafers, which could stand in for the late, lamented Famous Chocolate Wafers necessary for icebox cakes and crumb crusts, last for weeks in a cookie jar and could take experimentation with a variety of extracts or spices. (But one more weight complaint—this is the sort of spot where providing weights, for bakers who own scales, would have been so appreciated. The ability to drizzle honey straight into a bowl on a scale versus scooping it out of a tablespoon measure—twice—just shouldn’t be too much to ask.)

Sometimes, though, necessary details waft away with the easy-breezy. A citrus jam calls for using entire oranges, lemons, or grapefruits cut into chunks, but she fails to note the need to remove seeds before running them through the food processor. This isn’t OK in any recipe, but especially not a book like this whose aim is to give bakers confidence. Though the headnote says this is also a great way to use up squeezed citrus shells, she gives no hints at whether anything should be adjusted to make up for the missing juice or weight. And because of her attitude about weights, she leaves fruit amounts too wide-open to interpretation, calling for 3 large oranges or 5 lemons. Lemons vary widely, and what counts as a large orange? Probably the recipe works fine regardless, but would a mention like “about one pound” have been so painful? (She also notes it scales up “like a dream,” but with no mention of how much might be too much.)

To a lesser extent, details disappear when recipes don’t seem to match their accompanying photos, such as a chocolate jellyroll cake filled with ice cream. The photo shows a distinctive green swirl in the middle of the ice cream, but the recipe provides precisely zero hints about its provenance. (Admittedly, photos that include elements never mentioned in a recipe make this reviewer nearly as nuts as failing to give ingredient weights.)

One standout recipe among those tested: basic English muffins. Follow Tosi’s suggestion to refrigerate the dough up to two days for maximum flavor; the tested muffins got a 24-hour chill before shaping and baking. The dough seems like far too little for a dozen muffins, and they do come out on the smaller side, but these light, tender, craggy, crunchy (from the dusting of cornmeal) will stay fresh for days—if eaters can resist that long.

Quick takes:

Bake Club: 101 Must-Have Moves for Your Kitchen, by Christina Tosi and Shannon Salzano. 308 pages. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

Organization: Chapters include pantry basics; “dropoffable” desserts; breakfast baking; bread; cake; “snack aisle;” and “tabletop desserts.”

Ingredients measurement methods: Volume only, unfortunately.

Photos: Photos accompany every recipe, including an inset photo of ingredients that reinforces how few ingredients are needed for most recipes and the reliance on standard grocery-store components.

Index: Well done—comprehensive, listing recipes by main ingredients, name, and category (so English muffins appear under the letter E, and under bread, breakfast, and yeast—but not, appropriately, under muffins).

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Supervising cookbook reviewing is no breeze. Pepper needs naps.

Pretty Delicious: Simple, Modern Mediterranean Served with Style, by Alia Elkaffas and Radwa Elkaffas

Given that I’m not generally not drawn to social media influencers, I am not the target audience for this book from the Food Dolls, though I was intrigued by a book that pulls heavily from their Egyptian heritage and Minnesota upbringing. And some things in here strike me as silly, like the dessert bar cart that would apparently require dressed-up guests to bend over to floor level to scoop out some trifle. But many recipes seem solid, if not particularly unusual (tomatoes and whipped feta, baked oatmeal, roasted cauliflower or olives)—with more interesting recipes sprinkled throughout, such as falafel based on dried fava beans or quinoa tabbouleh with a lime vinaigrette.

I love the combination of watermelon, feta, and mint (usually with lime juice and a drizzle of olive oil); here, the feta is pureed with sour cream, heavy cream, and sumac. Sumac-dusted salmon cubes served over a tomato-cucumber salad and topped with mashed avocado should make a pretty and easy summer dish. Baked halloumi is described as pan-fried in the headnote, the sort of error that makes me nervous about overall accuracy. We enjoyed the one recipe tested, the upside-down banana bread (with a butter-sugar-walnut topping in the base of a loaf pan); take the note about baking it on a sheet seriously, as the topping does bubble up around the edge.

*Sweet Farm! More Than 100 Cookies, Cakes, Salads (!), and Other Delights from My Kitchen on a Sugar Beet Farm, by Molly Yeh

Given where author Molly Yeh lives, you get what you’d expect here: sweet recipes. Cakes take the spotlight, and if you don’t like American-style powdered-sugar frosting, you’re better off checking this book out of the library than buying it. (I’ve never understood the appeal of it—gritty, too one-dimensional, way too sweet—but I would happily eat my Swiss meringue buttercream by the spatula-ful.) Cookies likewise get sandwiched together with powdered-sugar frosting, or thickly topped with powdered sugar glaze.

Still, Yeh’s exuberance about classic, un-fancy cakes shines through, and even tempts me to make homemade sprinkles for someone I love who loves them. She makes a good argument for combining coconut oil and butter to keep things moist, and she writes reliable recipes that list all ingredients by both weight and cups. The book includes cookies; bars, cakes; some miscellaneous frozen things and drinks; Midwestern sweet salads that include a bit of fruit to qualify as salad but also whipped cream or Cool Whip, candy bars, Jello-O, and pudding; and a few things that she calls pies but mostly are not.

Justine Cooks: Recipes (Mostly Plants) for Finding Your Way in the Kitchen, by Justine Doiron

Let’s hit all the trends! That’s how I felt after paging through this book, which offers them up like a hit parade: Earl Grey granola! Green tea coffeecake! Miso in soup, but also pancakes! Jammy eggs! Preserved lemons! Cashew cream! Dukkah! Kimchi! Turmeric! Harissa! Sumac! Toast! Heirloom tomatoes! Shishito peppers! “Melty” eggplant! ACV Brussels sprouts! (Apple cider vinegar, if you’re not quite fully trending yet.) Salted cookies! More turmeric!

In fairness, the recipes often look tasty. I tested only one, Tiny Salted Tiramisu Cookies, which were neither tiny nor particularly tiramisu-ish, quite flat, and a bit greasy, though flavorful. But the book lacks any real sense of place—a sense that these are grounded in something beyond hitting on the trends. Without much of a unifying theme beyond recipes aimed at vegetarians and pescatarians, it wasn’t one I could imagine pulling off the shelf again.

Fat+ Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake, by Nicole Rucker

From the owner of the Fat + Flour Bakery in Los Angeles, this book at first glance seems not to offer much new. A whole chapter on banana bread? Pudding and cream pies that all start with instant pudding mix? Not very inspiring. But a closer look turns up Nicole Rucker’s vision for her recipes—to cut out anything unnecessary, from recipe ingredients to tools to steps.

She focuses on the reverse-creaming method, which she calls the cold butter method, in which dry ingredients are mixed together first, the butter is cut in, and then remaining add-ins and wet ingredients get briefly incorporated. As she notes, it saves time and helps newbie bakers avoid the question of how much creaming of butter and sugar is needed to get the correct fluffy result. The method comes into play in drop cookies, bars, bundt cakes, and dough for fruit and custard pies. Some of these recipes still sidle up to the trendy line (Earl Grey headlines two recipes, and dried fig leaves go in a shortbread, but miso gets a breather here)— most, though, are renditions of basics bakers love to come back to, and eaters love to get.

I won’t be trying those cream pies, since I don’t love the fake flavor of instant pudding. But that fig leaf-vanilla shortbread? Delicious, with the dried fig leaves offering a hint of coconut and a sparkling green top. I write that, though, with a bit of hesitation, because that’s the only recipe I tried, and it had one outright error. It calls for greasing the pan with oil before lining it with parchment, then sprinkling fig leaf sugar into the “prepared pan, and rotate the pan to coat the greased paper with sugar.” Unless you’re getting the sugar on the underside of the parchment, that’s an impossible trick. Also, it calls for two teaspoons/10 grams of ground, toasted fig leaves. My 2 teaspoons weighed nowhere near 10 grams, so it was unclear which measurement to go with, though the flavor of my 5 grams certainly came through.

*Salty Cheesy Herby Crispy Snackable Bakes: 100 Easy-Peasy Savory Recipes for 24/7 Deliciousness, by Jessie Sheehan

You’ll either find this book adorable or, if you’re allergic to cutesy, nearly unreadable. I’m admittedly in the latter camp (the repetition of “easy-peasy” and the like got grating fast), and too many of the recipes verge on over-the-top richness, but many sound just right for times when you have a craving or want something fun and flippant when friends are over. It opens with savory muffins that seem more heavy than appealing, moving into better-sounding biscuits and scones—think cream biscuits spiked with salt and pepper and sage-heavy scones that I could imagine at brunch with caramelized apples alongside. Other chapters include savory quick breads, yeast breads, cookies (such as gorgonzola thumbprint cookies filled with fig jam to go on a cheese board), crackers, a catch-all listing of snacks, and puff pastry treats such as a puff pastry Danish filled with salt-and-peppered goat cheese topped with sour cherry jam and rosemary. Hand pies, main-course pies, galettes, quiches, and tarts often use her recipe for pie dough made easy with melted butter.

*Kwéyòl / Creole: Recipes, Stories, and Things from a St. Lucian Chef’s Journey, by Nina Compton with Osayi Endolyn

Tracing author Nina Compton’s path from childhood in St. Lucia through cooking in Jamaica, Miami, and New Orleans, this lovely book offers vibrant photos and illustrations to accompany a mix of easy and challenging recipes. A “Top Chef” runner-up and now the owner of Compère Lapin restaurant in New Orleans, Compton writes essays introducing each place-based chapter that bring the food to life.

The book highlights expected ingredients—jerk seasoning, adobo pork, plantains, cornmeal, cassava, ackee—in traditional recipes that often include Compton’s tweaks: soursop mousse, cassava dumplings, breadfruit balls, banana and brown butter tea sandwiches, curried goat served with sweet potato gnocchi, callaloo, corn and pumpkin soup, ham and cheese croquetas, arepas, coconut tres leches cake, guava-glazed ribs, boudin balls, shrimp ragu and creamy grits, fried okra with pickled green bean roulade, and crepes with plantain pureed in the batter. Kwéyòl gives off a rooted, knowledgeable vibe that will make diving into these recipes both calming and exciting.

*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers; one small way to support Cook These Books is by clicking through and making a purchase on any of the titles above, for which I will earn a commission. Thank you!

*Italian American Forever: Classic recipes for everything you want to eat, by Alex Guarnaschelli.

This book is warmly written and photographed…and mostly unnecessary. With an emphasis on classic recipes, it just doesn’t provide much new; this is ground well-trodden by Marcella Hazan and Lidia Bastianich, to name just two. A Food Network star and executive chef of Butter restaurant in Manhattan, Alex Guarnaschelli’s exuberance about her food comes through, and cooks who’ve never cooked the classics could find appealing recipes here. But many readers might wish for a few more twists to liven things up. Instead, these are quite standard recipes for crostini, arancini, Caesar salad, meatballs, Italian wedding soup, baked ziti, chicken marsala, chicken parm, roasted broccoli … and did we really need to kill a tree for another recipe for Caprese salad? Most ingredients are listed by volume only, not weight, which I couldn’t help but find irritating from someone whose mother was a famous, and famously exacting, cookbook editor.

*Does This Taste Funny? Recipes Our Family Loves, by Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee Colbert

Legitimate reactions to this book: Save me from another celebrity cookbook, full of too-polished photos of fabulously happy wealthy people in their fabulous homes in fabulously casual expensive clothes hosting fabulous parties; save me from another book of Charleston recipes that I’ve seen for decades; gee, I forgot about that classic recipe—I need to go make that!; Durkees and cream cheese in pimento cheese are an abomination that must be stopped.

I cycled through all of those reading the Colberts’ book (well, I got stuck on the pimento cheese, no cycling past that reaction). But the book’s conversational chatter can engage readers, and the recipes did catapult me back to happy memories of my mother discovering those ‘70s Southern Junior League cookbooks. I didn’t yet test any recipes, but why bother—I “tested” their baked artichoke dip on at least a dozen New Year’s Eves growing up. I’ve “tested” their deviled eggs countless times, though minus the onions. Ditto for the crab cakes, soft-shell crabs, tomato pie, and bourbon chocolate pecan pie (though come on, this recipe will in no way produce the pictured pie, with its rings of perfectly placed pecan halves—let’s have some truth in advertising). In the midst of a dismal and difficult January, the book brought in some rays of sunshine.

Very Good Bread: The Science of Dough and the Art of Making Bread at Home, by Melissa Weller

Reading through my cookbook tower lately keeps prompting the same question: Do we really need another cookbook of classic recipes? What’s new here? In Very Good Bread, talented baker Melissa Weller has produced a lovely book, with each chapter opening with some sort of “master class.” That’s useful in the first recipe chapter covering 12 breadmaking steps, less so when stretching the concept to a chapter on bagel platters and sandwiches—do you really need a master class telling you to put a variety of bagels on a platter with some cured fish, boiled eggs, cream cheese, and vegetables? Probably not.

But while you can find recipes for many of these breads elsewhere, Weller has laid out techniques and tips worthy of the bread-obsessed, as well as recipes that go with some of the breads.

Tempting recipes include salt and pepper bagels, m’smen (Moroccan laminated flatbread), brioche feuilleté, buckwheat baguettes, and spelt ciabatta. I didn’t love the heavy yellow grits porridge Pullman loaf, but it’s one I would consider testing again. Recipes typically run at least three pages. A useful addition to the headnotes would have been an indication of how long recipes would take, versus requiring readers to go through multiple pages of instructions to add it up—no matter what, read through these very detailed recipes before beginning!

*Sweet Tooth: 100 Desserts to Save Room For, by Sarah Fennel

Sarah Fennel, who created the Broma Bakery blog, has published a cozy book of recipes that slant toward the standard but include a few less-common creations, such as a nine-layer buttermilk cake with Nutella frosting, a pistachio layer cake, espresso martini cake, baklava cheesecake, and crème brulee cheesecake bars. She offers multiple, more standard variations on brownies and blondies, other bar cookies, chocolate cakes, a few muffins, pies, and breads, several “dessert for one” recipes, and a lot of cookies.

It would be hard to live up to the self-hyping going on here—“stunning”! “modern-day baking bible”! “jaw-dropping pics”! “hilarious!” “genius!” But this seems like a solid collection. And yet my usual complaint applies here, too: Fennel opens with 40-some pages of guidance on baking equipment, ingredients, and rules to bake by before she gets to any recipes. Annoyingly, she includes two pages on “measure like a scientist,” with a full-page chart showing teaspoons/cups to grams for 12 common ingredients…and then completely skips listing ingredients by weight in the recipes.

*Soups, Salads, Sandwiches, by Matty Matheson

This book from “The Bear” actor Matty Matheson has the feel of a love it or hate it cookbook. Matheson says his goal was “just at-home recipes that are easy and fun”; recipes run the gamut from “lightest broth of garden herbs with one chile” to over-the-top rich—think pumpernickel, beer, and cheese curd soup, or caramelized maple parsnip soup with sunchoke chips and ricotta that clocks in with a cup of maple syrup, a cup of brandy, a cup of cream, and a cup of ricotta to serve four. Or corn maple parmesan soup, with 2 cups of wine, 2 cups of cream, a cup of Parmesan, and an ounce of bourbon for good measure—plus more parm, sour cream, and mayonnaise for a topping.

In general, recipes are heavy on meat, but even when not they pack a lot of flavors and richness in, such as a recipe for roasted and raw shaved Brussels sprouts with bacon, mint, lime, pistachios, fish sauce, and pickled pepper caramel (not a typo—you fold pureed bell, jalapeno, scotch bonnet, Thai, and serrano peppers mixed with fish sauce and vinegar into a simple caramel). Too often they just pack a lot in, period—like the waffle breakfast sandwich, with waffles surrounding a mascarpone filling of 1 and a half cups cream, 3 cups sugar, and a cup of mascarpone, plus bacon and fried eggs…and oh, did I mention these are frozen waffles that you fry in 2 cups of oil? And then slather them with strawberry freezer jam as well.

It goes on in that vein. I’m not cherry-picking over-the-top recipes—you can find something similar with a few random page flips throughout. Though most recipes fit on a page, the point size is pretty restrained—so don’t let that fool you into thinking they are all quick despite his “easy” goal. Also, there’s a whole lotta cussing going on in this book—fine, but I got tired of thinking about shit while reading about food. (I had to laugh when he starts the intro to his lasagna submarine sandwich with “I don’t want to be crude, but…”.) To that, though, I’m pretty sure Matheson would tell me to f off.

Not Too Sweet: 100 Dessert Recipes for Those Who Want More with Just a Little Less, by Jessica Seinfeld with Sara Quessenberry

I’m always on the lookout for baking books that aim to lower the sugar or use alternative flours not with the goal of going gluten-free, but for a wider range of flavor and, potentially, lower glycemic loads. So the cover of Jessica Seinfeld’s book caught my eye with beautiful photos of lower-sugar desserts. But it made no mention of nearly all recipes being gluten-free, and unfortunately, that didn’t generally mean using alternative flours that offer some health benefits, such as buckwheat flour; it just meant using a standard, nutritionally wan gluten-free flour blend. Still, for bakers who need GF recipes, this book may be a godsend, and some of its sugar-lowering tricks can be useful. Yet I didn’t come away from a few recipe tests wanting to try more.

Seinfeld follows in the footsteps of others who have tried to lower refined sugar through replacements such as pureed dates, date or maple syrup, or coconut sugar. I tried a baked custard sweetened with a dried apricot puree. The flavor was fine though muted, but the texture hinted at something curdled, given that it’s near-impossible to get the puree as smooth as the rest of the custard. A recipe for caramel made from cooking down oat milk and honey, which Seinfeld describes as a “breakthrough moment,” works well enough only if you don’t think of it as caramel, since the flavor is decidedly different and too honey-heavy.

*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers; one small way to support Cook These Books is by clicking through and making a purchase on any of the titles above, for which I will earn a commission. Thank you!

Cho grew up in a Chinese family in Cleveland, but went to school with mostly white students, leaving her feeling not Chinese enough with her extended family—lacking fluency in Cantonese and dressing like an American—while not American enough at school. But over time, she shifted an ongoing love of cooking to include more Chinese foods, and career-shifted from architectural design to become a James Beard Award-winning food writer (for her first book, Mooncakes & Milk Bread). Alongside a move to San Francisco, her acceptance of all the facets of herself grew.

In Chinese Enough, Cho intersperses short essays about aspects of cooking and family life throughout the recipes, all coming at the “You are/I am enough” idea. While talking about straddling two cultures and feeling like never being enough in either isn’t new, the essays add weight and texture to her theme.

After including a helpful section on needed tools and knife cuts for her recipes, Cho turns to chapters organized by how she likes to serve a meal, such as recipes for cookouts, for preparing as a group (such as a strong section on dumplings and spring rolls), for banquets, or for dishes best served with rice. So the rice chapter includes orange pepper popcorn chicken, sticky maple tofu sticks, green steamed egg, and miso pork meatballs. Noodle recipes include creamy tomato udon, mushroom chow mein, peanut butter and cheung fun, and Spam and mac soup. Each chapter opens with a recipe list—helpful given this less-than-intuitive organization.

Recipes seem especially appealing to cooks with a multicultural heritage along the lines of Cho’s, seeing how she melds her Chinese, midwestern, and Californian influences, as well as to non-Chinese cooks open to the mix of comfort-food recipes such as “mom’s spaghetti,” which incorporates oyster sauce and ketchup into its ground beef topping, and less-familiar ingredients such as salted egg yolks, used in a batter for fried squash rings.

Red-braised lamb, tea-brined duck breast, wood ear mushroom salad, saucy sesame long beans, and steamed bitter melon stuffed with black bean and garlic pork have a more traditional feel. Other recipes incorporate more influences, such as a white and black bean dip mixing fermented black beans, garlic, and rice vinegar into a white bean puree; hot honey mayo shrimp; curried surimi salad; smashed ranch cucumbers; soy caramel apple cake; malty banana cream pie; and Cleveland-ish cassata cake.

These culture-bridging recipes still require many traditional ingredients; Cho includes a chapter on stocking the pantry, including some brands she prefers. The recommendations seem worth heeding; a recipe test of eggplant scented with a lime and basil sauce would have been better with a less overpoweringly funky fish sauce. She says her recommended brands include a little sweetness, which could have helped.

Typhoon deviled eggs top a sriracha-kissed yolk filling with typhoon breadcrumbs, a popular Hong Kong mixture sprinkled over seafood, Cho says, and Chinese pork floss. Tested minus the pork floss, these eggs were still a hit, with the crunchy mix of panko, scallion, garlic, and ginger offering powerful flavor and pleasing textural contrast to the smooth egg.

And flavorful miso pork meatballs come together quickly, with ground pork spiked with miso, ginger, and scallions. These made a light but flavorful simple entrée served over rice (without, she says, any sauce, though her suggestion of sriracha and Kewpie mayo is a good one for people who really want sauce), or a good addition to a multilayered rice bowl.

Small shrimp patties, despite looking like standard fish cakes in the photo, add a step of boiling the patties before frying, creating, Cho says, a cloudlike interior. These were only half-successful in a recipe test. The shrimp mixture, which includes baking powder, comes together quickly in a food processor, then gets portioned with a small cookie scoop into boiling water. That means each scoop goes into the water in a ball, not a flatter patty, dramatically puffing up and out in an explosion of shrimp paste. From there, it’s to be pan-fried until crisp, but the puffed exteriors were too irregular to make great contact with the hot oil for consistent crispness, though the interior was cloudlike as promised.

Whitefish Rangoon, though, was another hit, mixing smoked mackerel and cream cheese for a fried wonton filling. Reasonably quick to prep (especially with two cooks working together) and served with Cho’s pineapple sweet-and-sour sauce, these sucessfully blended cultures (her husband is Jewish) without feeling forced or gimmicky. The uncooked wontons also froze well, making it useful to prep a full batch or two to have some on hand for last-minute frying once you’ve started the work of filling and shaping these.

Cho closes with a dozen helpful menu suggestions, to serve two, four, six, or eight guests—a nice touch for the many good cooks who nevertheless may feel they are never enough when it comes to putting a menu together.

Quick takes:

Chinese Enough, by Kristina Cho. 367 pages. Published by Hachette Book Group, 2024.

Organization: Organized by how Cho likes to serve a meal.

Ingredients measurement methods: Ingredients are listed by both weight and volume, with Cho encouraging cooking by weight.

Photos: Photos accompany every recipe, and Cho sprinkles in useful photos illustrating techniques such as how to pleat dumplings or form spring rolls.

Index: Reasonably comprehensive.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Don’t let anyone box you in; Pepper doesn’t, and she believes you, too, are enough.