21 recipes from cookbooks we loved last year (Part I)

Persian Chicken Soup with Chickpea and Lamb Meatballs from Nadjieh Batmangli’s 1986 cookbook ‘Food of Life’

By Leslie Brenner

My lifelong love affair with cookbooks has been supercharged by the pandemic, and the ups and downs of 2021 offered plenty of opportunities to explore titles both old and new. We reviewed nine of them during the course of the year, including new books by Marcus Samuelsson, Roxana Jullapat, Kate Leahy, Dorie Greenspan and James Oseland, plus titles (some recent, some older) from Fuchsia Dunlop, Yotam Ottolenghi, Enrique Olvera and David Lebovitz. You can find them all here, along with stories celebrating cookbook authors in honor of Women’s History Month.

Here’s the first batch of my favorite recipes from those reviews and stories. Part II will follow in coming days, so do check back!

Persian Chicken Soup from Najmieh Batmanglij’s ‘Food of Life’

In January, we wrote about the spectacular Persian chicken soup pictured at the top of this story. Featuring tender meatballs made from lamb and chickpea flour, and garnished with dried rose petals, herbs and garlic, it’s a project to make, and one we thoroughly enjoyed. It’s probably the most exciting chicken soup in the universe, and once again, the time feels right for it. We featured Najmieh Batmanglij in a story in March.

Silken Tofu with Soy Sauce from Fuchsia Dunlop’s ‘Every Grain of Rice’

Published in 2012, Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking is one of our favorite cookbooks ever, a must for any English-speaking person wanting to dive into Chinese cooking. This beautiful tofu dish, Xiao Cong Ban Dou Fu, is a snap to put together.

Yangzhou Fried Rice from ‘Every Grain of Rice’

Another favorite from Dunlop’s book, this fried rice with shrimp, pork, shiitake mushrooms and more is infinitely customizeable is super fun to make — and will quickly turn you into a fried rice pro.

Brussels Sprouts with Browned Butter and Black Garlic from ‘Ottolenghi Simple’

Three years after it was published in the U.S., we reviewed Ottolenghi Simple, which has quickly become a classic. Four or five of its recipes turned into favorites we’ll be making for years to come.

This umami-packed Brussels Sprouts number is one of them.

Ottolenghi’s Puy Lentils and Eggplant

Also from Ottolenghi Simple, this big, delicious smush of French green lentils with eggplants and blistered cherry tomatoes is smartly set off with fresh oregano. It’s a great thing to throw together when you feel like a satisfying and soulful meatless main course.

Papa Ed’s Shrimp and Grits

If you love shrimp and grits, you must try this version from Marcus Samuelsson’s The Rise — it is literally the best shrimp and grits I’ve ever tasted. The recipe calls for fresh okra, which I’m still occasionally seeing in supermarkets, but that’ll end once okra-growing regions get a freeze. However, the recipe will work just fine with frozen okra.

We reviewed The Rise in February.

Andrea Nguyen’s Ginger Halibut Parcels

One of my favorite dishes from Andrea Nguyen’s latest cookbook, Vietnamese Food Any Day is fish baked in parchment with baby bok choy and lots of ginger and garlic; it gets lots of umami from oyster sauce and soy sauce. Super easy to put together, it’s exciting enough for a dinner party and quick enough for a weeknight. We featured Nguyen as one of our favorite cookbook authors in March, and we were thrilled to host her in a live Makers, Shakers & Mavens event in April [watch the replay!]. Halibut won’t be back in season till the spring, but this recipe works with with other fish fillets, such as the excellent farmed striped bass coming from Baja, Mexico, or with scallops.

Banana-Leaf Fish (Empapelado de Pescado)

From Enrique Olvera’s 2019 cookbook Tu Casa Mi Casa, which we reviewed in June, here’s another fish dish I loved. The ingredients are few and basic: A great fish fillet (we used that Mexican striped bass), slices of citrus, herbs, salt, olive oil and banana leaves to wrap them in, tamal-style. Much easier to make than you might think, the fish is infused with fabulous flavor from the herbs and banana leaf. The book is co-authored by Luis Arellano, Gonzalo Goût and Daniela Soto-Innes.

Tu Casa Mi Casa Chicken Tinga

Also from Tu Casa Mi Casa, this recipe for classic chicken tinga is delicious on its own, and fabulous the next day if you cook it down a bit make tostadas with it. From the headnote, I learned that chicken tinga is “the first recipe any Mexican will cook as soon as they move out of their parents’ home and live on their own.” In other words, if you love Mexican cuisine, you’ll want it in your repertoire.

Buckwheat Blini with Crab Salad

In May, we reviewed the just-published Mother Grains, by Roxana Jullapat, the renowned baker and co-owner of Friends & Family in Los Angeles. In June, Jullapat joined us on Makers, Shakers & Mavens [watch the replay!].

These crab-salad-topped blini are knockouts, and super fun to make. Crab has become insanely expensive recently; happily you can also top them with smoked salmon or other tasty treats (our adaptation’s headnote explains how).

Roxana Jullapat’s Spelt Blueberry Muffins

I’m always attracted to blueberry muffins, but usually they’re too sweet for me, and I hate the way so much white flour makes them stick to the roof of your mouth. Jullapat’s, made with spelt, solves both problems: They’re the blueberry muffins of my dreams.

Friends & Family Macadamia Brown Butter Blondies

One more from Mother Grains — the rich, buttery blondies are insanely delicious.

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Did you enjoy this story? If so, you might like:

STORY: Add these to your repertoire: Cooks Without Borders’ most popular recipes of 2021

The Brenner Report: The Year in Cooking (with Recipes Galore!)

STORY: The season’s most exciting new cookbook titles will thrill the adventurous cooks on your holiday list

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The season’s most exciting new cookbook titles will thrill the adventurous cooks on your holiday gift list

By Leslie Brenner

A highly anticipated magnum opus on pasta from one of New York’s most respected chefs! An inspired and inspiring exploration of Black foodways curated by the chef-in-residence of San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora! A gorgeous culinary tour of Vietnam and beyond, filled with the recipes of the author’s grandmother! Cookbook fans on your holiday gift list this year are in for such incredible treats.

These are the new books I’m most excited to start cooking from — and reading — this season.

The eight titles described below have been published in the last four months.

Find all our cookbook reviews here, including 9 reviewed so far this year (with recipes!).

Support independent booksellers, authors and Cooks Without Borders — all at the same time — by purchasing your cookbook gifts this year through our shop at Bookshop. (Once you log in through our shop, any purchase you make there will earn us a commission.) Or, if it’s more convenient, purchase through our Amazon links, which also may earn us a (much smaller) commission.

Black Food

The inaugural volume from Bryant Terry’s new imprint at Ten Speed Press, 4 Color Books, will enthrall anyone interested in Black foodways. Terry edited and curated the collection, which includes photographs, collages, essays, poetry and (of course) recipes. “Without being overly prescriptive,” he writes in the intro, “I asked brilliant colleagues to offer dishes that embody their approach to cooking and draw on history and memory while looking forward.” Overall, the idea is to “promote a concept of food that embraces courage, commitment and self-discovery, and ultimately moves each of us to a better place.”

It’s a gorgeous, fascinating and beautiful book, with a trove of exciting stuff to explore.

Can’t wait to cook: Betty Vandy’s Potato Leaves with Eggplant and Butter Beans; BJ Dennis’ Okra & Shrimp Purloo; Adrian Lipscombe’s Collards with Pot Likker, Cornbread Dumplings & Green Tomato Chowchow; Nina Compton’s Lentil, Okra & Coconut Stew; Hawa Hassan’s Somali Lamb Stew; Sarah Kirnon’s Bajan Fish Cakes; Jenné Claiborne’s Nana’s Sweet Potato Pie; Edna Lewis’ Fresh Peach Cobbler with Nutmeg Sauce.

Black Food: Stories, Art & Recipes from Across the African Disapora, edited by Bryant Terry, 2021, 4 Color Books, $40.

Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy’s Greatest Food, with Recipes

From James Beard Award-winning New York chef Missy Robbins (Lilia, Misi), this is the book all the Italo-phile chefs can’t wait to get their hands on. I’m afraid once I dive in, I’ll be sunk — pasta is my weakness, and the book’s pages are so mesmerizing, I can feel a fresh obsession coming on. How lovely to have such an inspiring guide!

Mouth is watering for: Mortadella and Ricotta-Filled Balanzoni with Brown Butter and Sage); Corzetti with Herbs and Pine Nuts; Pappardelle with Braised Rabbit Ragù; Stricchetti with Smashed Peas and Prosciutto, and so much more.

Pasta by Missy Robbins and Talia TBaiocchi; food photography by Kelly Puleio, location photography by Stephen Alessi, illustrations by Nick Hensley, 2021, Ten Speed Press, $40.

Treasures of the Mexican Table

Mexico City-born Pati Jinich traveled all throughout her native country’s 32 states to collect the recipes in this collection, subtitled “Classic Recipes, Local Secrets.” The PBS star worked on Treasures of the Mexican Table for more than a dozen years, and anyone who loves cooking Mexican food will want to give the work a permanent spot on their shelf, alongside the seminal volumes by Diana Kennedy and Enrique Olvera & Co. With enticing photos by Angie Moser, Treasures is an important, approachable and relatable trove of recipes that adds up to a rich and delicious panorama of contemporary Mexican cooking.

High on my list to cook: Potato and Poblano Sopes; Pinto Bean Soup with Masa Dumplings; Corn Soup with Queso Fresco; Vuelve a la Vida; Pescado Zarandeado; Pámpano en Salsa Verde; Chicken Mole with Mushrooms; Mole Poblano con Pollo; Tasajo; Cecina; Barbacoa de Borrego; Burnt Milk Ice Cream.

Treasures of the Mexican Table: Classic Recipes, Local Secrets, by Pati Jinich, photographs by Angie Mosier, 2021, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35.

Middle Eastern Sweets

The elegant new book from Salma Hage — with enticing photographs by Liz and Max Haarala Hamilton — follows the success of Hage’s The Lebanese Kitchen, The Middle Eastern Vegetarian Cookbook and The Mezze Cookbook. Because I adore the Lebanese cookies known as ma’moul, the cover speaks loudly to me: I own a ma’moul mold (similar to the one at the bottom of the photo, meant for walnut-filled cookies), and I haven’t yet had the occasion to try my hand at them. I’m thinking Hage will be exactly the right teacher.

Also eager to make: Syrian Sesame & Pistachio Biscuits (Barazek); Pistachio Katmer; Moroccan Snack Cake (M’hanncha); Kunafa; Persian Marzipan Sweets (Toot); Orange & Pistachio Turkish Delight; Tahini & Pistachio Halva; Cardamom Ice Cream; Persian Saffron & Rose Water Ice Cream (Bastani); Lebanese Tea Loaf; Sweet Tahini Swirls.

Middle Eastern Sweets: Desserts, Pastries, Creams & Treats by Salma Hage, Photographs by Liz and Max Haarala Hamilton, illustrations by Marwan Kaabour, 2021, Phaidon, $35.

Tasting Vietnam

I love recipe collections that set the cuisine they cover in immersive context, and that’s the idea of this engaging family-memoir-meets-cookbook from Anne-Solenne Hatte. The book collects the recipes of Hatte’s maternal grandmother, Bà Ngoại, who grew up in the rice paddies near Hanoi, married a man who was President Ngo Đinh Diệm’s right-hand man, and lived her long life on three continents. Originally published in French in 2019 as La Cuisine de Bà, the book is part of a Rizzoli series for which Alain Ducasse is Collection Director.

Hungry to try: Bánh Bèo (Steamed Rice and Shrimp Cakes); Thịt Heo Kho (Caramelized Pork Belly with Eggs); Canh Rau Cải (Mustard Greens Soup); Đồ Chua (Pickled Eggplant, Carrots, Turnips and Mustard Greens); Bán Xèo; Nộm Hoa Chuối (Banana Blossom Salad with Passion Fruit).

Tasting Vietnam: Flavors and Memories from my Grandmother’s Kitchen by Anne-Solenne Hatte, from the recipe collections of Bà Ngoại, 2021, Rizzoli, $37.50.

Liguria: The Cookbook

Author Laurel Evans, a native Texan, moved to Italy more than fifteen years ago with her then-boyfriend, now-husband, Emilio Scoti, and promptly fell in love with his native Liguria — and everything about it. Based in Milan, with Emilio’s seaside hometown Moneglia as a summer getaway and winter refuge, Evans immersed herself in the region’s cooking. Scoti’s mother and his two aunts (“le nonne”) were Evans’ kitchen mentors. All the while, she blogged in Italian about American cooking, and published a couple of cookbooks along the way, with Scoti serving as photographer. The marvelous photos in this book are his.

Recipes flagged with Post-Its: Salvia Fritta (Fried Sage Leaves); Corzetti (Ligurian Stamped Pasta — note to self: order wooden stamp!); Pesto Traditionale (yes, Genoa, birthplace of pesto, is in Liguria); Trenette al Pesto con Fagiolini e Patate; Minestrone alla Genovese; Branzino alla Ligure; Ripieni di Verdura; Fiori di Zucca Ripieni.

Liguria: the cookbook: Recipes from the italian riviera by laurel evans, photographs by Emilio Scoti, 2021, Rizzoli, $45.

Flavors of the Sun

If you’ve ever lived in Brooklyn — or visited Brooklynites who love to cook or eat — you know all about Sahadi’s. The wonderful, sprawling emporium of olives, hummus, dried fruits, nuts, spices and every Mediterranean/Levantine ingredient or prepared food you could ever want, has been there on Atlantic Avenue since time immemorial. Written by Christine Sahadi Whelan — a fourth-generation co-owner — this bright and cheerful book includes recipes for the prepared foods that are Sahadi’s best-sellers, as well as others Whelan developed to please the palates of her young adult children, “who like almost everything better with a jolt of za’atar or harissa.”

Want to make: Turmeric-Pickled Cauliflower; Pomegranate-Roasted Beets with Goat Cheese; Whipped Feta Spread; Antipasto Salad; Za’atar-Roasted Vegetables; Fiery Berbere Shrimp; Red Lentil Soup; Spicy Escarole and Beans; Berbere-Spiced Chicken Thighs; Mohammara.

Flavors of the sun: The Sahadi’s guide to Understanding, Buying, and Using Middle Eastern Ingredients by Christine Sahadi Whelan, 2021, Chronicle Books, $35.

The Italian Bakery

From the authors of The Silver Spoon — the influential, encyclopedic Italian cookbook — this comprehensive guide to Italian desserts (baked and otherwise) includes 50 basic recipes that form the building blocks of Italian pastry and sweets and 90 other recipes besides. Accompanying the building blocks are step-by-step photos. Serious bakers and anyone who loves Italian dolci will want this in their collection.

Let me at ‘em: “Zeppole” — Italian Donuts; Poppy Seed and Cardamom Cake; Citrus and Saffron Semifreddo; Frozen Sabayon with Limoncello; Chocolate Frangipane Tart with Spiced Pears; Tartlets with Pine Nuts and Chocolate Cream; Peanut, Caramel and Chocolate Squares.

THE ITALIAN BAKER by the silver spoon 2021, Phaidon, $49.95.

Find more gift ideas for cooks at Cooks Without Borders Cookbook Shop and Cooks Without Borders Cookshop.

Kate Leahy's 'Wine Style' is a delicious solo debut from a seasoned (and fascinating) cookbook pro

By Leslie Brenner

Wine Style: Discover the wines you will love through 50 simple recipes, by Kate Leahy, Photographs by Erin Scott, 2021, Ten Speed Press, $22.

Her name may not ring a bell — yet, anyway — but Kate Leahy is one of the most interesting cookbook authors around.

Leading up to the publication last week of her first solo cookbook, Wine Style, her publishing career had been one of collaboration; she’d been a co-author, working with chefs, restaurateurs and others on 10 wide-ranging titles over the past 13 years. Her first effort — A16 Food + Wine — won the IACP Cookbook of the Year award and the Julia Child First Book award following its publication in 2008. A16 is a captivating romp through the wines and foods of Southern Italy as expressed in Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren’s beloved San Fransisco restaurant of the same name.

If you could spend some time with that first book, along with Leahy’s most recent ones — Burma Superstar (2017), Lavash (2019) and La Buvette (which we reviewed last year when it was published) — you might sense a delightful sensibility running through all — Leahy’s it would seem, as she’s the common denominator. Those books all have an underlying intelligence, grace in the writing and overarching deliciousness. Each expresses a passion for deeply exploring culinary cultures, including the people who uphold the traditions, the places from which the traditions spring.

Leahy is at once an expressive, talented writer and an outstanding, accomplished cook with a great palate — an unusual combination. Dig into her background a bit and you begin to understand: She began her career as a cook, and worked on the line at James Beard Award-winning restaurants including A16 (aha!), Terra in the Napa Valley and Radius in Boston. Later, she went to journalism school — at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Author Kate Leahy / Photograph by John Lee

Her projects beautifully and compellingly capture worlds, whether it’s Armenia and its diaspora (Lavash); the cult of laphet — edible fermented Assam tea leaves as practiced in the border regions around Myanmar, China and Thailand (Burma Superstar); or a cave à manger (a wine bar where you can eat) in Paris’ branché 11th Arrondissement (La Buvette). If you want to get an idea of the sensibility at work, check out 1000 Meals, the video series Leahy produces with John Lee, a wonderful photographer and videographer who’s Leahy’s frequent collaborator.

‘Wine Style’ Marinated Mushrooms

Because there’s such depth and expansiveness in Leahy’s work, I was eager to dive into Wine Style, her first book as a solo author.

Quickly and irrevocably, I was hooked. Wine Style is chock full of smart, enticing recipes that not only pair well with your favorite reds, whites, and oranges, but are easy and delicious enough that they’re sure to become perennial favorites — dishes you’ll constantly be tossing together when friends are unexpectedly stopping by, when you’re heading to a picnic, hosting book club, or even on harried weeknights when you want an effortless yet satisfying dinner.

The first recipe I tried, a ridiculously simple dish of garlicky marinated mushrooms that cooks in a snap, was so good I made it twice more in a matter of days.

RECIPE: ‘Wine Style’ Marinated Mushrooms

What to drink with that? Leahy suggests an earthy red — a Nebbiolo from Alto Piemonte or a mellow, traditional Rioja. Right she is; a Cune Rioja Crianza I’ve been been picking up for less than $15 was perfect.

Pretension is not part of Wine Style’s picture. “Most of the wines I seek out fall into the ‘charming and affordable’ camp,” Leahy writes in her introduction, “the kind of wines that make people smile without taking over the conversation.” These are the wines she and her friends bring when they gather every month for “Porch Time” — laid-back potluck dinners pulled together from unfussy recipes, often to be served room-temp (or backyard temp, as the case may be; none of them actually have porches).

And it’s in the spirit of Porch Time that she has created and pulled together the recipes that make up the book.

Types of wine (“wine styles”) serve as the organizing principle for those recipes: There are chapters on bubbles, whites (“crisp” or “rich”), orange wines, rosés, on through reds characteized as “picnic,” “reasonably serious” or “big” and finishing with sweet wines.

Leahy suggests pairings without getting hung up on them. The brief opening chapter, Wine Basics, is one of the best things I’ve read for beginners, or for food people who want to learn more about wine. I love that she focuses on texture and acidity — a welcome departure from the puffed-up lists of aromas that have infected wine writing for decades. Leahy provides an excellent section on natural wines, explaining the low-intervention winemaking philosophy (using sourdough as an analogy) and how it’s expressed in the glass.

Kate Leahy’s Harissa Deviled Eggs, from ‘Wine Style’

And so, for Harissa Deviled Eggs — an idea I couldn’t resist — eggs’ propensity to coat the tongue propensity has Leahy reaching for scrubbing bubbles. Bingo! Prosecco was just the thing. And again, super simple; you don’t even really need a recipe if you can remember a third-cup of mayo, a tablespoon of harissa, a splash of lemon juice and half a dozen eggs. OK, here’s the recipe anyway:

RECIPE: Harissa Deviled Eggs

Another winning pairing: Poached salmon set on a charmingly disheveled fennel-celery salad, with caper mayo — sipped with Provençal rosé. I love the play of the fennel and celery, so similar in texture and different in flavor; I’d never thought of putting them together before, and it totally worked. Next time I’ll try it with Leahy’s other pairing idea: unoaked Chardonnay.

RECIPE: Poached Salmon with Fennel-Celery Salad and Caper Mayo

Freestyling with the recipes

I haven’t always managed to conjure Leahy’s suggested pairings; sometimes a dish sounded good, and I just went for it, wine or no.

Roasted edamame spoke to me: It’s something you can whip out on demand if you keep bags of it in the freezer and own a jar of furikake, the nori-and-sesame seasoning mix. Slightly defrost a bag of frozen shelled edamame, toss with olive oil and soy sauce, roast for 20 or 30 minutes, then toss with the furikake. For this, I pulled out a bottle of sake (which I had on hand) rather than orange wine (which I didn’t). Really good. (It’s also fabulous made with edamame still in their pods.)

Recently I was in Massachussetts visiting Cooks Without Borders’ design director, Juliet Jacobson, who put together Wine Style’s Beet and Potato Salad with Tarragon — another winner. We both loved the unlikely combo of the tarragon with dill pickles, though maybe if a reprint is ever in the works Leahy might consider adding a weight measurement for the pickles; “2 large or 3 small dill pickles” led to confusion. Were the pickles in our jar large? Medium? Who’s to say? We probably guessed wrong, as we wished it were a wee bit more pickle-y.

Juliet had also made Leahy’s Chocolate Olive Cake — which we’ll both be making again (and soon!). Made with almond flour, it gets moistness and fruitiness from the inclusion of prunes — and the combo of nuts and dried fruit certainly sounds fabulous with the Banyuls rouge or port Leahy suggests.

Wine or no wine, all those recipes are keepers — and Erin Scott’s engaging photos capture the dishes deliciously.

And there’s so much else that entices. Green Olive Tapenade and Baked Feta with Olives and Lemon both sound fabulous to smear on crusty bread. Ginger Chicken Salad, inspired by the Burmese salads Leahy fell in love with writing Burmese Superstar, looks enticing, as does oil-packed Tuna with Potatoes, Olives and Lemons. Leahy calls A Really Good Pasta Salad “handy for lunch, picnics, and dinners on hot nights.” It’s a match, she writes, for richer orange wines, “though no one would complain if you poured them a glass of lightly chilled Gamay instead.” Baked Peaches with Coconut and Sliced Almonds, which sounds terrific on its own or with its suggested Moscato d’Asti or dry or demi-sec Prosecco.

Italian Sausages with Roasted Cauliflower and Greens, from ‘Wine Style’ by Kate Leahy

Because autumn will be here before we know it, I thought I’d leave you with a recipe I’ll certainly be making again as the weather cools: Italian Sausages with Roasted Cauliflower and Greens. Made on a sheet pan, it’s just the kind of effortless yet delicious one-dish dinner I’m always looking for. Red onion and capers roasted with the cauliflower and sausages, along with a squeeze of lemon at the end, give it just the right zing.

And the wine? Leahy assures us there’s no short of reds that go with it, “but those with sunny dispositions, like Argentine Malbec or the Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre blends of the southern Rhône Valley, have a juicy quality that matches well with the sweetness of the caramelized cauliflower and sausages.” Indeed they do! And those sunny dispositions are always welcome — any time of year.

Wine Style: Discover the wines you will love through 50 simple recipes, by Kate Leahy, Photographs by Erin Scott, 2021, Ten Speed Press, $22.

RECIPE: Italian Sausages with Roasted Cauliflower and Greens

RECIPE: Poached Salmon with Fennel-Celery Salad and Caper Mayo

RECIPE: Harissa Deviled Eggs

RECIPE: ‘Wine Style’ Marinated Mushrooms

Cookbook gifts that will thrill all the cooks on your list *and* support independent bookstores

The most impactful, exciting holiday gift of 2020 might just be . . . the cookbook!

Fledgling cooks on your list will thrill over classics to kickstart their libraries and cool new titles to stoke their excitement. Experienced, passionate cooks will love the season’s great deep dives, and important evergreen volumes to fill out their collections.

Expanding cultural understanding is important to all kinds of folks this year, and there’s no more delicious way to do that than sautéing, stir-frying or baking your way through a new cookbook.

Meanwhile, Bookshop — the online bookseller that supports independent bookstores — is offering free shipping through Monday, Nov. 30. Purchasing through it is a great way to support small businesses.

Here, listed alphabetically, are 17 recently published titles that are tops for giving this season, for every kind of cook on your list:

Amá: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen

L.A. superstar chef Josef Centeno takes us to his hometown, San Antonio, liberating Tex-Mex on the way. Co-written with his partner, Betty Hallock, former deputy Food editor at the Los Angeles Times.

Read our review of Amà.

Buy ‘Ama’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘Ama’ at Amazon.

American Sfoglino: A Master Class in Handmade Pasta

Those who want to roll up their sleeves and totally geek out on making pasta by hand — and then settling in to simmer a 7-hour ragù bolognese — will love Los Angeles superstar chef Evan Funke’s manifesto. So will lovers of coffee-table aspirational cookbooks: Eric Wolfinger's gorgeous images won the book an IACP award this year for food photography.

Buy ‘American Sfoglino’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘American Sfloglino’ at Amazon.

Chaat: Recipes from the Kitchen, Markets, and Railways of India
Besides India's famous street snacks, Maneet Chauhan and Jody Eddy's book also has an amazing recipe for homemade paneer (Indian cheese), a splendid-looking chicken biryani that’s high on our list of dishes to try, and lots more.

Read Cooks Without Borders’ review of Chaat.

Buy ‘Chaat’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘Chaat’ at Amazon.

The Chicken Soup Manifesto: Recipes from Around the World

Portland chef Jenn Louis satisfies wanderlust and comfort craving deliciously in her new book, just published in September.

Read our recent story about The Chicken Soup Manifesto. Read about The Chicken Soup Manifesto in the Dallas Morning News.

Buy ‘The Chicken Soup Manifesto’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘The Chicken Soup Manifesto’ at Amazon.

Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of the Texas Mexican Cooking

Chef Adán Medrano, whom we wrote about in August, brings the foodways of the indigenous people who created the true Texas Mexican cuisine to life in his second book.

Buy ‘Don’t Count the Tortillas’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘Don’t Count the Tortillas’ at Amazon.

Falastin

Exuberantly delicious recipes that work brilliantly fill the pages of Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley's book, while illuminating the culture of Palestine. It’s on of our all-time favorite cookbooks.

Read Cooks Without Borders’ review of Falastin.

Buy ‘Falastin’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘Falastin’ at Amazon.

Feast: Food of the Islamic World

Anissa Helou's magnificent volume is a treasure trove of cultural deliciousness. Its recipes are geared toward more advanced cooks, who will find it to be a prized source of everlasting inspiration.

Read Cooks Without Borders’ review of Feast.

Buy ‘Feast’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘Feast’ at Amazon.

The Food of Sichuan

An updated version of Fuchsia Dunlop's seminal title. We have yet to cook from it, but her recipes always work, her taste is impeccable and her authority undisputed.

Buy ‘The Food of Sichuan’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘The Food of Sichuan’ at Amazon.

Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors

Sonoko Sakai's book is another one of our favorite cookbooks ever — absolutely perfect for anyone (beginner or experienced cook) wanting to dive into Japanese cooking.

Read Cooks Without Borders’ review of Japanese Home Cooking.

Buy ‘Japanese Home Cooking’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘Japanese Home Cooking’ at Amazon.

Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking

Toni Tipton-Martin's incredible work is a must for everyone who knows that Black Food Matters. Recipes are very approachable. Named Book of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals.

Read Cooks Without Borders’ review of Jubilee.

Buy ‘Jubilee’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘Jubilee’ at Amazon.

La Buvette: Recipes & Wine Notes from Paris
A charming little volume, Camille Fourmont's book, co-written by Kate Leahy, brings the life of wine in Paris to life. Her recipe for Rose and Cumin Sablés is one of our favorite cookie recipes ever.

Read Cooks Without Borders’ review of La Buvette.

Buy ‘La Buvette’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘La Buvette’ at Amazon.

The Mexican Home Kitchen: Traditional Home-Style Recipes that Capture the Flavors and Memories of Mexico

Popular blogger Mely Martínez's first book is filled with super-approachable recipes that reflect the way home cooks really cook all over Mexico. Excellent for beginners, as well as more advanced cooks and chefs seeking context for Mexican dishes.

Read Cooks Without Borders’ review of The Mexican Home Kitchen.

Buy ‘The Mexican Home Kitchen’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘The Mexican Home Kitchen’ at Amazon.

My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes

We've only had the chance to test-drive one recipe from Michelin-starred chef Hooni Kim's inviting new book — marinated spicy cucumbers, and it was wonderful. We are eager to dive in soon, as it appears to be the authoritative Korean book we've long been waiting for.

Buy ‘My Korea’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘My Korea’ at Amazon.

Ottolenghi Flavor

Just when you thought Yotam Ottolenghi must be fresh out of great ideas, he's, um, not. The recipes are vividly delicious.

We’re in process of testing recipes for an upcoming review, coming soon.

Buy ‘Ottolenghi Flavor’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘Ottolenghi Flavor’ at Amazon.

The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food

Chef Marcus Samuelsson is always awesome, and this book — honoring Black chefs and their contributions to American cooking — is fabulous. Another Black Food Matters must-have — and the flavors are out-of-this-world.

We are in process of testing recipes for a review of The Rise, which will be coming soon. In the meantime, here is a story about The Rise’s smashing recipe for shrimp and grits.

Buy ‘The Rise’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘The Rise’ at Amazon.

Vegetables Unleashed: A Cookbook

Superhero chef José Andrés unleashes his powers on the vegetable kingdom, and the results are delectable. This one's great for experienced cooks, who will appreciate Andrés' technique-driven approach and should be able to spot the recipes that might need a tweak or two.

Buy ‘Vegetables Unleashed’ at Bookshop.

Buy ‘Vegetables Unleashed’ at Amazon.

Vietnamese Food Any Day: Simple Recipes for True Fresh Flavors

Andrea Nguyen is the undisputed queen of Vietnamese home cooking in America, from experienced cooks who grew up in Vietnam to those just diving in. Her latest book is filled with dishes that can be made from ingredients you can get in any good supermarket. Highly recommend.

Read a story about a rice noodle salad bowl we love from Vietnamese Food Every Day.

Buy ‘Vietnamese Food Any Day’ from Bookshop.

Buy ‘Vietnamese Food Any Day’ from Amazon.

Would you like more suggestions? Visit our Holiday Pop-Up Bookshop or our Cookbooks We Love Shop at Bookshop.

'Jubilee,' 'Japanese Home Cooking' and 'American Sfoglino' are among the 2020 IACP Cookbook Award winners

The International Association of Culinary Professionals announced the winners of its 2020 Book Awards on Saturday, including its prestigious Cookbook Awards.

Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking (Clarkson Potter) won the top prize, Book of the Year, as well as the award for best cookbook in the American category. Francis Lam was the editor.

In our June review, we called Jubilee “deliciously inspiring,” discussing and including recipes for Tipton-Martin’s Layered Garden Salad, Sautéed Greens and Country-Style Potato Salad. In an earlier story, we raved about her recipe for Pickled Shrimp — which is one of our favorite recipes of the year to date.

Pickled Shrimp from Toni Tipton-Martin’s ‘Jubilee’ is one of our favorite recipes published in 2020.

Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors (Roost Books) won the prize for best new cookbook in the International category. Sara Berchholz was the editor.

“If you are looking to dive (or tip-toe) into Japanese cooking and seeking one great book to guide you, you can do no better than this delightful volume,” we wrote in our review (also in June). We offered up Sakai’s recipes for Okonomiyaki, Cucumber Sunomono and Koji-Marinated Salmon as evidence.

Okonomiyaki from ‘Japanese Home Cooking’ by Sonoko Sakai

While we haven’t gotten around to reviewing American Sfoglino yet, we do have a story about it in the works, and taking a deep dive into Funke’s pasta-making technique has forever changed the way we’ll approach making pasta by hand. The book won in the Chefs & Restaurants category. A mini-review will be coming soon.

Other titles winning IACP top honors include Pastry Love: A Baker’s Journal of Favorite Recipes by Joanne Chang (Baking category); The Complete Baking Book for Young Chefs by the Editors at America’s Test Kitchen (Children, Youth & Family category); On the Hummus Route by Ariel Rosenthal, Orly Peli-Bronshtein and Dan Alexander (Culinary Travel category) and Milk Street: The New Rules: Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook by Christopher Kimball (General category). Find a complete list of winners and finalists here.

Congratulations to all the IACP winners and finalists!

Food-lit revival: Cookbooks are suddenly the coolest, most relevant things in the universe

A few of our favorite cookbooks, old and new, with the Cooks Without Borders kitchen wall of cookbooks in the background

[EDITOR’S NOTE: A slightly different version of this story was originally published at The Brenner Report.]

Six months ago, if you had asked me to assess how important cookbooks are in our culture, I would have slotted them somewhere between skee-ball and beetle fighting. I had been lamenting the fact that millennials and gen-Zers are more likely to click on a Food Wishes video in order to learn chicken-roasting skills or hummus technique than they are to reach for Judy Rodgers or Sami Tamimi. Cookbooks just seemed hopelessly old fart, boringly low-tech, increasingly irrelevant — never mind that many of the best recipes and techniques have always lived in them, and continue to be expressed in their pages.

Complicating things was the fact that what with all those free recipes on the internet and all, publishers were under pressure more than ever before to publish titles they felt sure would take off — and that wasn’t always great for quality. About five years ago I was told by my agent (of twenty years) that all the cookbook deals were going to cute young bloggers with powerful Instagram followings, so the odds of my publishing anything new were slim (even though I had six published books under my belt). I bought a few of the popular bloggy books and tried to cook from them. Generally speaking, the recipes didn’t work and the food sucked. Also young people tend to gravitate toward chefs, and chef recipes are often ridiculous in terms of what they demand of the cook. No wonder young people didn’t take cookbooks seriously.

A noodle salad from Andrea Nguyen’s excellent Vietnamese Food Any Day. Its publisher, Ten Speed Press, consistently publishes worthwhile books from the best authors.

Still, there continued to be a few excellent editors publishing great titles filled with cookable, inspired recipes — by authors like Toni Tipton-Martin and Samin Nosrat and Andrea Nguyen and Yotam Ottolenghi (and many more). In the best cases, the authors take recipe testing seriously and their recipes work. Or at least the dishes are exciting and recipe errors are fixable.

Shining a light on those exceptional cookbooks (and fixing those booboos for our cooking readers) is something we spend a lot of time doing at Cooks Without Borders. But because it is so hard to get young people interested in cookbooks (again, for reasons that are easy to understand), it has felt like a somewhat weird and probably futile pursuit, and one worried about the future of cookbooks.

COVID-19 has changed all that. Now, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, it feels like cookbooks are everything, and everywhere. After a drawn-out, near-death experience, they are suddenly the coolest, most relevant things in the universe.

Of course it is because we all now have to cook; restaurant culture has been sucked out of our lives with the force that an airline meal gets pulled off the tray table and disappears into the wild blue when a there’s a puncture in the plane. Now, after decades of gleefully forgetting how to scramble an egg, cooking is the thing that saves us from hunger. But as those of us who have been practicing the craft for any length of time know, it can do so much more. And it is that so much more that cookbooks invite us to enjoy. Which is why the cookbook — or more properly cookbook appreciation — is enjoying a renaissance.

Two weeks ago Vittles — a cool and forward-looking cooperative food newsletter out of England via Substack — published a beautiful essay, “The live-changing magic of cookbooks,” by Gemma Croffie. In her debut as a food writer, the “writer, mum and foodie based in Kent” ties together the terror of living as a Black person during the time of Covid with losing herself — and finding herself — through cooking and cookbooks.

One of the books Croffie admires immensely is Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton-Martin (which we reviewed in June 2020):

I am in awe of Ms Tipton-Martin’s scholarship; I learn something new on almost every page. Recipes shouting my name range from gingerbread waffles and cream to salmon croquettes to curried meat pies. There is such promise in cookbooks yet to be used, a palpable excitement to see if they live up to expectation. 

Wrapping things up, Croffie answering the question of why she loves cookbooks so much.

Anti-blackness is all too real in this time and fighting racism is life-draining. Very little sparks joy in my life, but some cookbooks ignite such a big spark that they practically light a bonfire. Black joy is fleeting; I’ll take mine where I can.

Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee, discussed in Gemma Croffie’s essay, was reviewed on Cooks Without Borders in June 2020.

At the opposite end of the nuance spectrum, cookbook worship is splashed across the pages of “People” magazine. “I am a cookbook fanatic and collector!” proclaimed Drew Barrymore yesterday. “Chefs are my heroes. I must read 3 cookbooks a week...cover to cover!"

There’s a Substack newsletter, Stained Page News, devoted to cookbooks. Its author, Paula Forbes — a cookbook critic who has reviewed for Eater, Food 52 and Epicurious and Lucky Peach — is turning out missives on warp speed at the moment, as we are heading into the fall cookbook publishing season. To paying subscribers she has been sending every weekday (it’ll last two weeks) covering every upcoming books genre by genre. (Forbes offers a free weekly version as well.)

What enticing titles do publishers have in store for us this autumn — besides four witch-related cookbooks, five books with “flavor” in the title (Flavorbomb, The Flavor Equation, Chasing Flavor, Flavor for All, and — of course — Ottolenghi Flavor) and eight pie books?

Mely Martinez’s The Mexican Home Kitchen is one of the fall season’s highly anticipated new titles.

It’s actually an exciting crop. I’m keen to cook from, eat from and read (among others):

• Marcus Samuelsson’s The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food

• Alex Guarnaschelli’s Cook With Me: 150 Recipes for the Home Cook

• Maneet Chauhan and Jody Eddy’s Chaat: Recipes from the Kitchens, Markets and Railways of India

• Mely Martinez’s The Mexican Home Kitchen (I love Martinez’ blog, Mexico in My Kitchen. Her recipes reflect the way people cook at home in Mexico.)

• Nuit Regular’s Kiin: Recipes and Stories from Northern Thailand

• Jason Wang’s Xi’an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop

• Nancy Silverton’s Chi Spacca: A New Approach to American Cooking

• Donna Lennard’s Il Bucco: Stories and Recipes

• Wilson Tang’s The Nom Wah Cookbook: Recipes from 100 Years at New York City’s Iconic Dim Sum Restaurant (because dumplings!)

• Hawa Hassan’s In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean

• Jonathan Waxman’s The Barbuto Cookbook: California-Italian Cooking from the Beloved West Village Restaurant

We’ll be reviewing as many of them as we can manage here at Cooks Without Borders — where by the way, and not unrelated, we just launched a new column of mini-reviews: “Cookbooks We Love.” (Here are the first three installments.)

Find our collected cookbook reviews here.

🐞

Classic cookbook review reprised: ‘Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine’

EDITOR’S NOTE: We reviewed this book shortly after it was published, on February 28, 2016. We have come back to it again and again since then; it has very much shaped up to be a classic. Here’s our 2016 review.

"Everything you need to know to be a great Italian cook." That's the subtitle of Lidia Bastianich's Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine. Hard to resist, right? 

Here's the short review: Bastianich's book is a new classic – something you'll want on your shelf as a reference, a manual and (perhaps to a lesser degree) a source of inspiration. Want to hear more? Read on.

The book is particularly strong on technique, and on offering thoughtful variations on basic recipes, like ragù alla Bolognese. And it's comprehensive: I found every classic recipe I sought, including saltimbocca. The recipes work, and they're generally delicious – as wonderful as they look in the photos.

You may know Lidia Bastianich from her PBS show, Lidia's Italy, or from one of her New York restaurants, Felidia, or Esca, Becco or Del Posto (which she co-owns with her son Joseph Bastianich and Mario Batali).  She's also one of the forces behind the Eataly empire.

If you're an American home cook who has been in the game a long while, Lidia's Mastering may remind you of another classic: Marcella Hazan's The Classic Italian Cookbook, or her the Essentials of Italian Cooking (The Classic Italian Cookbook and More Classic Italian Cookbook together in one volume). 

Both are encyclopedic works that take a no-nonsense approach. Both do without photography, relying instead on black-and-white drawings as illustration. I have to admit I'm a wee bit disappointed in the antipasti offerings in Lidia's Mastering, just as I've always been with Hazan's book. I do want to make Bastianich's chicken liver crostini sometime soon, though, and once summer rolls around, I'll definitely turn to her zucchini blossoms filled with fresh ricotta perfumed with lemon zest (doesn't that sound good?).

I've tested six recipes from the book, and loved five of them.

One of my favorites is rabbit in gremolata. A few weeks before I made it, I'd noticed some nice-looking frozen rabbits at Whole Foods, so I picked one up. I had no idea what I'd do with it, so I was happy to find, when this cookbook landed in my mailbox at work, not one but three recipes for rabbit. Besides the gremolata, there's also rabbit with sage and rabbit stew with mushrooms and pine nuts (both sound delicious, too). 

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It's easy to put together: Brown the rabbit, braise the legs in white wine and lemon juice, then add the rest of the rabbit plus some potatoes, cook some more, add parsley and serve. I had one small issue with the recipe: not quite enough liquid; I added half a cup of chicken broth about halfway through the cooking.

Friends came to dinner that night, and we all loved it. My friend Habib loved it so much he bought the book the very next day. 

Want to try it? Here's the recipe:

Dinner started with a salad, then we had Bastianich's spaghetti alla carbonara as a middle course. No foolin' around when I'm testing recipes: You must come hungry!

Spaghetti carbonara, the pasta coated in a silky sauce of eggs, bacon and cheese, is a great dish to make at home, because when made right, it's so wonderful, and it's so often botched in restaurants. (Dudes – there is no cream in carbonara!) You want the egg yolks to cook just slightly, and very evenly; you don't want to end up with spaghetti and scrambled eggs. Bastianich has a good way to achieve a wonderful, silky sauce: she has you whisk a little hot water into the egg yolks, which ensures even, slight cooking. Her technique is easy, and the recipe – which includes sliced scallions (unconventional!) – turned out perfect. It's killer comfort food.

I haven't yet tried any of Bastianich's appetizers, but there are quite a few wonderful-sounding salads, like one with dandelion greens, almond vinaigrette and ricotta salata (I'll definitely be making that soon – maybe even tonight!). Roasted beets with beet greens, apples and goat cheese sounds nice; I love the idea of using the beet greens. A shrimp and mixed bean salad sounds wonderful, and so does lobster salad with fresh tomatoes – something to make us wish for summer.

I didn't, alas, love the one I wound up making: radicchio salad with orange, radishes and oil-cured black olives. It struck me as so perfect for a wintry day. 

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It was OK, but the radicchio was unrelenting; there was just too much of it.

But that was the only dish I didn't flip for. I loved that Bastianich offers three versions of Bolognese sauce – including one with milk (I'll try that next!) – plus an Italian-American meat sauce. I went for one she called, simply, meat sauce Bolognese (sugo alla Bolognese). It calls for half pork and half beef and two to three hours of simmering time – "the longer you cook it," she writes, "the better it will become."

I cooked mine about two hours and twenty minutes, and it was superb. This, too, I served with spaghetti. Not the same night! This one I made for Wylie and his friend Michael, who's half-Italian. Michael gave it the stamp of approval.

Feeling like I had hit the basics pretty well, I thought I'd stop there and write the review.

But then I thought I should try cooking something that really required technique. I've made fresh pasta a jillion times; while it's labor-intensive, there's nothing tricky about it. But what about gnocchi? I attempted potato gnocchi once or twice a hundred years ago, but definitely didn't master it. If Bastianich could teach me to make great gnocchi, that would be something. 

My friend Shaun was coming over for dinner. She loves to cook, so I thought she'd enjoy helping me make them. We had a great time: The dough – basically boiled potatoes you put through a ricer then combine with eggs and flour – came together quickly and beautifully. We rolled it into half-inch ropes, cut them into half-inch pieces, rolled them over the tines of a fork (though we also tried using a little wooden gnocchi paddle I had in my drawer – we liked the fork better). They were beautiful, as you can see. They seemed to be perfect! How exciting! And then how disappointing when they nearly dissolved in the boiling water. I dropped them into butter-sage sauce. Great flavor, but they were soft as mush. 

 Hm. What was the problem?

Aha. It was sort of my fault, and sort of the book's fault. The recipe called for six large Idaho or russet potatoes, "about 2 1/4 pounds." I had six, but I hadn't weighed them – my bad. The proportion was way off: I had far too much potato for the amount of flour called for, three cups.

A few nights later, I rolled up my sleeves and attempted the gnocchi again: This time going by the potatoes' weight rather than the number of potatoes. Six large russets weighed a whopping five pounds! That was the problem. I used 2 1/4 pounds, as Bastianich called for – which was a little less than three large russets. (And these were the smallest ones I could find, not whoppers by any stretch!). Once again, the dough came together beautifully, but this time, they held together. 

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In fact, they were wonderful, light yet firm. Tossed in the butter and sage sauce with plenty of grated parm, oh, man — that's comfort food. It involved some work, for sure, but rolling out those puppies was soothing, even therapeutic. Definitely fun to make with a friend. Or a child learning to cook.

RECIPE: Rabbit in Gremolata

RECIPE: Spaghetti alla Carbonara

RECIPE: Meat Sauce Bolognese

RECIPE: Potato Gnocchi with Butter and Sage Sauce

Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manuali, Knopf, $40.

Cookbooks We Love: José Andrés' 'Vegetables Unleashed' is a summer cooking bonanza, with great ideas for all seasons

NOTE: This is the first in a new and ongoing series of mini-reviews of cookbooks both new and old.

Vegetables Unleashed: A Cookbook, by José Andrés and Matt Goulding; photography by Peter Frank Edwards, Ecco, 2019, $39.99

Backgrounder: This is the third cookbook from superhero chef José Andrés, founder and chairman of World Central Kitchen and co-founder of ThinkFoodGroup, which owns and operates some of the best and most forward-looking restaurants in the United States. The book is not strictly vegan or vegetarian (recipes might include a garnish of bonito flakes or optional anchovies, for instance), but it is certainly vegetable-driven and completely vegetable-centric.

Sangria made with watermelon, peaches, cherries, blackberries, basil, thyme, rosé and brandy.

Why we love it: It’s filled with delicious, expansive ideas that are so inspired you can’t wait to try them, elucidated with fun, colorful photo-driven graphics. Often the concepts extend the reach of a familiar technique.

For instance, Andrés provides a framework for building a sangria from a variety of fruits, wines and spirits. Put one pound of chopped fruit in a pitcher with 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar, any herbs, spices or citrus you’d like and macerate that in the fridge for 1 to 4 hours. Pour in a bottle of wine plus a few ounces of an optional accent spirit. Pour in to large glasses filled with “massive amounts of ice” and garnish with citrus peel and/or herbs.

I riffed on it using the seasonal fruits at hand — watermelon, peaches, blackberries, cherries, rosé, basil, thyme and brandy — it was delicious. (And gorgeous.) As Andrés suggested, I served the fruit leftover on the bottom on ice as a boozy-fruity dessert.

You’ve gotta try this: A bunch of our favorite recipes and ideas in the book happen to feature summer produce that’s now in its peak.

Zap whole ears of corn, husks and all, in the microwave and the kernels come out perfectly sweet and tender, ready to be slathered with one of four topping/sprinkle combos. We went crazy for one inspired by elotes and another with miso-butter and a combo of Japanese seasonings.

Elote Loco (aka Crazy Corn): This is one of the most delicious things we made from José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed

Another microwave trick (and more slathering!) is used for a dish Andrés calls Dancing Eggplant. Japanese eggplants get zapped till tender, sliced open, slathered with a sweet, salty, umami-happy glaze inspired by the Japanese eggplant dish nasu dengaku, then topped with bonito flakes (katsuobushi). The bonito flakes, light as air and activited by the eggplants’ heat, dance around on top. Although we had to tweak the technique a bit, the dish is insanely rich, savory and delicious — something I’ll be excited to make often.

Dancing Eggplant from Vegetables Unleashed

It’s not all microwave tricks; another favorite is Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs — which you don’t even really need a recipe for. Cut zucchini into 1/2-inch-thick planks, brush or toss with olive oil and salt, grilled on both sides till lightly charred, sprinkle liberally with za’atar (the Mediterranean herb mixture) and top with a big handful of herbs — dill, thyme, basil, mint, parsley, tarragon, and/or fennel fronds in any combination.

A few little complaints: Not everything works so beautifully. A recipe for zucchini fritters gave us a batter that was too runny for the fritters to hold together; smashed cucumbers were inedibly salty and oily. A recipe that promised perfect cacio e pepe in the microwave was a giant flop that left us with a pile of crunchy pasta and a blob of melted cheese.

Normally with so many busts (along with a few recipes that were just duds), I wouldn’t recommend buying a book. But honestly, there is so much of value in these pages — and the ideas and approaches are so inspiring — that I’m very happy to own it, and would probably buy it as a gift for certain vegetable-loving friends. There are still a bunch of recipes I want to try, such as a riff on steak tartare made from tomatoes (the dish was born at El Bullí) and a luscious-looking cauliflower with béchamel that will be delicious when the weather cools down.

RECIPE: Corn on the Cob with Elote Slather

RECIPE: Miso Butter Corn

RECIPE: Dancing Eggplant

RECIPE: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs

Cookbook gifts galore: The season's greatest titles for culinary adventurers

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If there has ever been a more exciting year for cookbooks, I can’t remember it. That’s splendid news for anyone looking for holiday gifts, and particularly, this year, for globally-minded cooks.

I’ve culled through hundreds of review copies that came across my desk, seeking the most exciting, approachable, workable cookbooks for culinary adventurers.

None of the seven I’ve chosen as the gotta-have gifts for this holiday season are glitzy chef books, though a few were written by chefs, and none are gorgeous coffee table books, though they’re all quite beautiful. What they have in common is that they’re all books that can transport us deliciously, and they're all geared to real home cooks.

 To be honest, not all were published in 2016: Two were published last year – Michael Solomonov’s Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking and Anissa Helou’s Sweet Middle East. With those, I’m playing catch up. And while I’ve cooked from Zahav extensively (I meant to do a full-on review, but kept telling myself I just needed to try one more recipe, then another, then another . . . ), and from Diana Henry’s Simple, I haven’t yet cooked from the other five.  I'm suggesting them because they've the books I want to cook from. I have reason to trust each of the authors, whether because I’ve cooked from their books in the past, or I’ve given their recipes a close, critical look.

What’s remarkable is the trip around the world they offer as a group, taking us from Iran and Turkey and Azerbaijan to Italy, France and Britain, from Shanghai to Okinawa to England and Israel and back.

 Does the peripatetic cook on your holiday gift list happen to share your own initials? Don’t worry – your secret is safe with us.

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Land of Fish and Rice

Ever wonder how best to cook baby bok choy, or wish you knew the secret to Shanghai-style soup dumplings? Maybe you've wandered through an Asian grocery, admired those beautiful bunches of tong hao – chrysanthemum leaves – or giant bunches of flowering chives and wished you knew what to do with them. If that sounds like someone on your gift list Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China is your go-to gift. Author Fuchsia Dunlop has all the answers. With the chrysanthemum leaves, for instance, you’ll want to blanch them, chop them finely, toss them with chopped tofu and sesame oil and top them with toasted pine nuts. Sounds lovely, doesn't it?

Her 368-page book explores China’s Lower Yangtze (Jiangnan) region, of which Shanghai is the gateway.  Dunlop explains in the thoughtful introduction that the region is known as “the land of fish and rice,” and she offers plenty in that regard: recipes for stir-fried shrimp with green tea leaves; a gingery Zhoushan fish chowder with tomatoes and potatoes; Shanghai fried rice with salt pork and bok choy. But it's not all fish and rice: There are cabbage-wrapped “lion’s head” meatballs, a gorgeous-looking dish of slivered pork with flowering chives (yay!), drunken chicken and wow – Nanjing New Year’s salad, an enticing vegetarian recipe, and just in time! 

 Dunlop even offers a recipe for soup dumplings, known outside of the region as “xiao long bao” (and in Jiangnan as “xiao long man tou”). “Be warned that these are a little fiddly,” Dunlop writes – “Chinese people don’t normally make xiao long bao at home.” Duly warned – or duly dared, depending on your point of view. Sounds to me like a delicious project for a wintry day.

Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China by Fuchsia Dunlop, W.W. Norton & Company, $35.

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Taste of Persia

“When you assemble all the greens and herbs called for in this recipe, it’s hard to believe that the eggs with hold them.” Sold! The Persian Greens Frittata in Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran and Kurdistan is definitely something I want to make. Author Naomi Duguid's beautifully photographed book expresses perfectly what I love most about Persian food: so many fresh herbs.

I can’t think of a better guide to the cuisine than Duguid, an IACP Cookbook Award and James Beard Award-winning cookbook author with a passion for culinary travel.

In Taste of Persia's pages, I found many of the dishes I fell in love with in the Iranian restaurants of Los Angeles (a.k.a. “Tehrangeles,” with its huge Iranian population), such as classic Pomegranate-Walnut Chicken Stew. And I yearn to make others that are unfamiliar but that look incredible, like Easter Stew with Tarragon – a gorgeous braise of lamb (or beef) and lots of green herbs and spices. Duguid suggests easy-to-find tomatillos as a substitute for the stew’s sour plums, which sounds smart. 

Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan by Naomi Duguid, Artisan, $35

Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavors

I have a bunch of Diana Henry’s beautiful books, including A Bird in the Hand, for which the British author won a James Beard Award. But for some weird reason, I’ve only recently started cooking from them. From her newest book, Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavors, I’ve only made one recipe – Summer Fruit and Almond Cake – and it was not just spectacular, but incredibly easy and gorgeous. (I adapted an autumn version for the blog.)

There are a grillion great ideas in these pages: Toasts with crab and cilantro-chile mayo. Pappardelle with cavolo nero (Tuscan kale), chiles and hazelnuts. Baked sausages with apples, raisins and hard cider. Her tone is easy and warm, her recipes super approachable.

I particularly love her dessert sensibility; I can hardly wait for summer to come around so I can try her hot cherries with grappa and ice cream. Meanwhile, how do lemon-ricotta cake or cardamom-scented Turkish mocha pots sound?

Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavors by Diana Henry, Mitchell Beazley $32.99

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Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking

Michael Solomonov's cookbook – inspired from his Philadelphia restaurant Zahav – has been written about so much it seems silly to review it at this point, so I'll keep it short and sweet. His much-touted hummus recipe, as printed in the book, is a little glitchy; that's probably why you find it tweaked when adapted in food magazines and on blogs. But so many of the recipes in the exhilarating 368-page book are superb, and the photos and writing are so compelling one is inspired to cook anything and everything.

Some of the smashing recipes: charred eggplant salad; Moroccan carrots; quinoa, pea and mint tabbouleh; pargiyot (chicken skewers) three ways; twice-cooked eggplant; Malabi custard with mango; and marzipan. Meanwhile, Solomonov's recipe for tehina, the "secret sauce" around which the whole cookbook revolves, is so good I had to resist shooting it into my veins.

Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook, Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt $35

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Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking

If I could have an endless supply of Japanese pickles, I’d be a happy girl. With Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking by Masaharu Morimoto, my dream may soon be a tangy-salty-umami-rich reality. The chef-owner of Philadelphia’s Morimoto (and other restaurants in the U.S., Mexico and India) gives us a whole section called “Tsukeru” – to pickle. (So glad to learn a useful Japanese verb!) The book also supplies the basics of how to make the ever-important stock known as dashi, how to make hand-made udon, and plenty of great-looking homey dishes like takikomi gohan (dashi-simmered rice with vegetables); tonjiru (hearty miso soup with pork and vegetables) and oyako don (chicken and egg rice bowl).

If you’re dubious about how approachable a chef book might be for a humble home cook, this may relieve the anxiety: The book is peppered with boxed nuggets of “Japanese grandmother wisdom.” Things like “When you grate daikon, keep in mind that the fatter top portion of the radish tends to be significantly sweeter and less bitter than the narrower bottom portion.” Who knew? If you’re shopping for someone into food trends, take note: There’s no okonomiyaki in Morimoto’s book, but there is a recipe for uber-trendy Hawaiian-style poke rice bowl.

Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking by Masaharu Morimoto, Ecco, $45.

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Mozza at Home

Nancy Silverton, one of my favorite chefs, has always understood what we really, really want to eat right now. Consider this inspiring headnote to her recipe for Bean Salad with Celery Leaf Pasta: “I love celery, and the leaves, combined with parsley leaves, make a refreshing alternative to the more common basil pesto. You might not use all the pesto for this salad. Serve leftover pesto with fresh burrata, or spoon it over grilled chicken or fish.”

Is that inspiring, or what? If there’s a cook on your list who loves Italian food, this is the gift to get. Not convinced? Try this: Saturday Night Chicken Thighs with Italian Sausage and Spicy Pickled Peppers. She had me at “Saturday Night Chicken Thighs.”

Mozza at Home, by Nancy Silverton with Carolynn Carreño, Knopf, $35

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SWEET MIDDLE EAST

 I was first drawn in by Lebanese-born Annisa Helou’s enchanting Instagram feed, which takes us from London to Sicily to France to Dubai and back. And so when a review copy of her latest book, Sweet Middle East, appeared in my inbox, I cheered: Now I get to try her recipes. Turkish macaroons (acibadem kurabiyesi), Moroccan aniseed biscotti (feqqas), Persian saffron ice cream (bastani sa’labi), Syrian semolina and nut cake (h’risseh) – it all sounds and looks so good!

Sweet Middle East: Classic Recipes from Baklava to Fig Ice Cream by Anissa Helou, Chronicle Books, $24.95.

A new cookbook, 'Soup for Syria,' aims to help food relief efforts for Syrian refugees

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Yesterday I was thrilled to find a review copy of a new cookbook, one that will appeal to just about every border-free cook I know, in my mailbox.  Soup for Syria: Recipes to Celebrate our Shared Humanity collects recipes by Alice Waters, Yotam Ottlenghi and Sami Tamini, Paula Wolfert, Claudia Roden, Mark Bittman, Greg Malouf, Anthony Bourdain and many more. All of them are for soup, and proceeds of the book go to the Soup for Syria project, a humanitarian campaign that aims to ease the suffering of 3.8 million refugees by delivering food and foodstuffs to refugee camps. 

A photograph of a girl in a refugee camp faces a recipe for gondi by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

Barbara Abdeni Massaad, a Beirut-based food writer and photographer, collected the recipes for the collection and photographed the people who are living in the camps. The project started when she was visiting a camp just 45 minutes from her home in the Bekaa Valley "where Syrian families crowd into plastic tents and children die of cold and hunger," as she writes in her introduction. "I try to sleep and ignore this reality, but it's impossible. I am not immune to the suffering of others."

The photos are beautiful; the people in them – particularly the children – are gorgeous. 

And the recipes, many of them simple, look wonderful. I've already put Post-its on a bunch I want to make (of course I'll share them with you once I do!). I have my eye on a recipe from Ottolenghi and Tamimi for Gondi, a Persian chicken soup with dumplings made from ground chicken and chickpea flour. Greg Malouf's recipe for fennel soup with lemon and cinnamon looks great, too. As does Paula Wolfert's recipe for lentil and Swiss chard soup (it's vegan!). Soup seems just the thing to cook for such a cause, as it's nourishing and nurturing.

Of course I'll share the soups with you once I make them, but thought you'd want to know about the project right away so you can help. The $30 book can be ordered through the Soup for Syria website.  The site also offers other ways to get involved in the cause, such as hosting a soup party where you can sell the book or take orders for it.

Fried Rice SMACKDOWN! Lucky Peach vs. Mission Chinese Food - Round One (Lucky Peach)

It's the event of the season, the match-up we've all been waiting for: enticing fried rice recipes from two hot new Asian cookbooks. On the left is the Chinese Sausage Fried Rice from Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes by Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach. On the right is Salt Cod Fried Rice from The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook by Danny Bowien and Chris Ying. 

The Mission Chinese Food fried rice has a cult following and takes more than 24 hours of advance preparation – after a dedicated hunt for ingredients. You'll be required to soak salt cod in several changes of water for 24 hours, make mackerel confit in advance and fry-up the salt cod till it's hard as jerky, then shred it in a food processor. before you start. Are you up to it?

Meehan's recipe is the underdog, with no restaurant pedigree – though Lucky Peach magazine certainly has a cult following. You can put the whole thing together in a half hour, though unlike its opponent, it prefers (though doesn't require) that you use day-old cooked rice.

Both include Chinese sausage, scrambled eggs and scallions, and neither relies on soy sauce, which makes things interesting.

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Mission Chinese Food Cookbook's Salt Cod Fried Rice

We'll be judging the fried rice contenders in several areas:

–Taste: how delicious is it?

–Ease of preparation: Is it worth the time and effort?

–All-around awesomeness and wow factor

It's going to be a tough contest, and we have quite a bit of prep ahead of us, so let's get going!

Both require a trip to the Asian supermarket, though the Lucky Peach recipe offers substitutions if you can't come up with things like Chinese sausage (use bacon or pancetta), Shaoxing wine (dry sherry will do) and fish sauce (use soy sauce). For the purpose of this smackdown, I used the Chinese preferred ingredients. If you're thinking of making the Mission Chinese Food fried rice and you don't have access to salt cod, fresh or frozen mackerel fillets, Chinese sausage and fish sauce, just fuggedaboudit. Make the Lucky Peach recipe and call it a day.

Are you ready? 

After gathering all the ingredients, I started two days in advance, cooking jasmine rice beforehand for the Lucky Peach recipe. For the Mission Chinese Food recipe, I submerged the salt cod in cold water.  

A little background on the Mission Chinese Food recipe. "The spirit animal of this dish is the fried rice with salt fish and chicken at R&G Lounge in San Francisco," writes Danny Bowien, the Mission Chinese Food chef. (Wow – that was the site of one of my greatest food memories ever – a Chinese banquet ordered by Melanie Wong, one of the first friends I ever "met" online.) Bowien then riffs on the umami wonderfulness of salt cod: "I love the way it seasons and perfumes rice with a funky, fermented flavor. But I don't particularly love biting into a gnarly chunk of it. The aim of our Salt Cod Fried Rice was to capture that pleasant fishiness without the stank." His solution for his restaurant was to shred salt cod, then fry it. But customers complained there was no visible fish, "so we gilded the lily with chunks of rich mackerel confit."

OK, then – I went to work preparing the mackerel confit, which involved first filleting the mackerel I found in the Asian market. It seemed a little ridiculous to me, but it was really easy and actually quite wonderful.

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Mackerel confit

All you do is cover mackerel in vegetable or peanut oil in a saucepan and put it in a 300-degree oven for 25 minutes. Let it cool in the oil, then flake the fish into small chunks and either use it right away or cover it with the oil in a jar and store it in the fridge up to a week. It has a wonderful soft texture and lovely, lightly salty (though no salt was added), delicately fishy flavor, like a cheffy version of canned tuna. The fillet I had yielded more than the 4 ounces the recipe called for, so I'd have to think of a use for the rest of it (an amped-up mackerel-salad sandwich, maybe?). Anyway, it made me feel like confiting every oily fish I can get my hands on.

OK, first up: The Lucky Peach Chinese Sausage Fried Rice. 

As in all Chinese cooking, you definitely want to prep all your ingredients in advance, have them ready and all measured out – your mise en place. The book actually uses a master fried rice recipe, which is great, as it teaches you the technique.

To prep, I sliced Chinese sausage, measured out some frozen peas, whisked together a sauce (Shaoxing wine, fish sauce, sugar and sesame oil), beat two eggs, chopped garlic and ginger and sliced scallions. That was pretty much it – 20 minutes max. 

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The recipe calls for 3 cups of cooked long-grain rice, which you can get by cooking about 1 1/4 cups of raw rice. You put the rice in a bowl, break up the clumps with your fingers and make sure your mise is next to the stove. 

First you get your wok very hot, cook the eggs very quickly in a little oil and get them out of the pan. Add more oil, then add garlic, ginger and scallion whites (we kept white and green parts separate), cook just a few seconds, add the peas and sausage, and cook just till heated through. 

Now's the fun part. Dump the rice into the wok, toss it to mix, and use a spatula to spread the rice up against the sides and bottom of the wok, maximizing contact.

"Stir and fold once a minute" for 3 minutes, till the rice is hot and "a little charred in spots." Now pour on the sauce, toss it and continue the spreading, searing, tossing routine "until the rice is evenly colored and looks pleasantly dry." Now add the eggs back in, chopping them up and toss in the scallion greens. 

Ding-ding-ding! Finished!

Oh, man . . . heavenly! The egg is tender, and the dish is perfectly balanced, absolutely satisfying and fun. And it's big fun to make – I can't wait to do it again. Here's the recipe:

Next it'll be Mission Chinese Food's turn. Stay tuned for Fried Rice SMACKDOWN Round Two!

Cookbook review: A delicious passage with Madhur Jaffrey to Vegetarian India

It has been quite a rich publishing season for cookbooks that appeal to border-busting food-lovers, and when a review copy of Madhur Jaffrey's Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking landed in my mailbox, I could hardly wait to get cooking.  Jaffrey has legions of fans and admirers – seven of her books have won James Beard Awards. As soon as I started cooking from this one, I remembered why I'm such a fan: Her recipes are simple, they're delicious and they work. There wasn't a single problem in the three recipes I tested. The only tweaks I've made is calling for a medium-sized roasting pan or baking dish for the cauliflower, which would have gotten lost in the larger pan the book called for, and adding a note to adjust the seasoning in the recipe for spinach with dill, which wanted a little more salt.

If you buy Vegetarian India, take the time to read Jaffrey's introduction, which takes you on a mini-tour of vegetarian India: She traveled all around the vast country collecting recipes – from Uttar Pradesh and Benghal to Bombay and Hyderabad and back – for vegetarian dishes "that are both delicious and easy to make." So many things to discover here: dishes, regions, styles, ingredients. I'm particularly curious about poha, flattened and dried rice that's pre-cooked. Jaffrey raves about it, providing a number of recipes for it, including one with ginger-flavored green beans that sounds wonderful.

I love the way she wraps things up: "In India's ancient Ayurvedic system of medicine," she writes, "it is believed that the simple acts of cutting and chopping and stirring are graces that can bring you peace and calm. That is what I wish for you."

For me, Jaffrey's wish came true: I spent a glorious afternoon toasting and grinding and grating spices, which filled my kitchen with wonderful exotic aromas – ginger and coriander and cumin. "Whatever you're doing," said my husband, led by his nose to the kitchen, "it's going to be delicious." Thanks to Jaffrey, he was right.

Flipping through the book, which includes more than 200 recipes and beautiful photos by Jonathan Gregson, it wasn't hard to find three dishes I wanted to jump into: Everything looked and sounded so delicious. I chose Roasted Cauliflower with Punjabi Seasonings (Oven Ki Gobi), Peas and Potatoes Cooked in a Bihari Style (Matar Ki Ghugni) and Spinach with Dill (Dakhini Saag). All were terrific, definitely going into my repertoire.

Next time I cook from it, I'll heed Jaffrey's advice about menu planning: "Indian meals are always put together so they are nutritionally balanced: a grain is always served with a vegetable and a dairy product, not only because they taste good together but also because together they are nutritionally complete." This time around I hadn't chosen anything involving dairy. The ingredients were easy to find in my regular supermarket, the instructions were clear and the amounts and times were spot-on.

Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey, Alfred A. Knopf, 416 pages, $35.