Yes, Chef: Here Are the Year’s Best Cookbooks
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Take a Trip
Back to Basics
Bottoms Up
Small Bites
I've noticed my taste in cookbooks change over the past few years, moving away from fancy, fussy fare, and straight toward flavor and technique. This year—good God, this year!—when we're all cooking all the time, that feeling holds fast. Our cookbooks need to help us make it through. If I am going to experiment, I want it to be worth the effort. As we head into the long winter, these six new books will help you make fantastic food. And when you're ready to mix it up, there are suggestions for making yourself a nice drink, and even getting the kids involved. I'll also begin by sharing my enthusiasm for what might be the most fun food on the planet.
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- Photograph: Clarkson Potter/Penguin Random House
Take a Trip
Chaat: Recipes From the Kitchens, Markets, and Railways of Indiaby Maneet Chauhan with Jody Eddy (Clarkson Potter)
If you're going to try your hand at a new kind of cuisine during a pandemic, it had better be chock full o’ pleasure. In all my cooking and eating as a food and travel writer, the Indian snack food known as chaat—Hindi for “to lick”—steals the show. I've been known to base whole road trips around getting my hands on some.
My favorite is bhel puri, a blast of fine-chopped fresh ingredients like herbs, onion, potato, chilis, and mango with a sprinkle of spice and a drizzling of a chutney or two. It's also got puffed rice and sev—tiny, crisp garnish made with seasoned chickpea flour. Stirred together, it's like popcorn's wildest cousin. There are countless versions of chaat, most of them sold as street and railway food in India, and Nashville chef and Chopped judge Maneet Chauhan is our enthusiastic guide.
- Photograph: Clarkson Potter/Penguin Random House
Back to Basics
How to Cook: Building Blocks and 100 Simple Recipes for a Lifetime of Mealsby Hugh Acheson (Clarkson Potter)
I wasn't planning on cooking a bunch of recipes from a new book called How to Cook, but I took it to bed one night and immediately started to dog-ear pages. Part of this came from a love of technique and nailing the basics, but most of it had to do with it being by one of my favorite chefs. Smart, funny, irreverent, and blessed with a well-trained palate, Cooking 101 with Acheson might include [sounds of flipping to a random page] fennel and white bean salad or Cuban grilled cheese.
A short opening section is followed by "25 Building Blocks"—stuff like sautéed mushrooms, rice, roasted veggies, and simple sauces, each one showing how to do it well, and what to do with it. The last two-thirds of the book is full of recipes that put your new skills and staples to work like pork and chickpea stew, sweet-potato hash, and smoky white bean and ham soup. Acheson's new book, beautifully photographed by Andrew Thomas Lee, will sharpen your skills and get you cooking well.
- Photograph: Ten Speed Press/Penguin Random House
Bottoms Up
Good Drinks: Alcohol-Free Recipes for When You're Not Drinking for Whatever Reasonby Julia Bainbridge (Ten Speed Press)
I love a good bar book. Well-written recipes and beautiful photos go a long way toward heightening the anticipation of an excellent drink. Yet nonalcoholic drinks don't often get the thought and creativity of their boozy brethren. Plus they're often given a horrible name: mocktails. Ew! Writer, editor, and podcaster Julia Bainbridge looks to elevate them by simply calling them "good drinks." In 2018 she road-tripped around the United States, stopping at her favorite bars and cafés to learn how to make some of the best-sounding drinks imaginable, often putting her own spin on them.
Try Minnesota bartender Jon Palmer's Golden Hour, a wine-like mix of verjus, honey syrup, and orange flower water. Or, try a Persian doogh, a drink with cucumber-rose yogurt, lime juice, and soda water, over crushed ice, garnished with dried rose petals. Drinks are rated by commitment level: one dot being something you could knock out fairly easily and four dots as a ”weekend project.”
- Photograph: Harper Collins
Small Bites
The Nom Wah Cookbook: Recipes and Stories From 100 Years at New York City's Iconic Dim Sum Restaurantby Wilson Tang with Joshua David Stern (Ecco)
In the early days of the Covid-19 era, the dim sum shop about a mile from my house was among the first in my city to adapt, putting a table in front of the door and plastic wrap over the top half of the frame, simultaneously shutting the interior off to guests and establishing a pickup window. For those who miss the full dim sum experience so much that they might want to try their hand at making their own pork siu mai, The Nom Wah Cookbook fits the bill, providing a primer on how dim sum works and, thanks to Alex Lau's photography at the century-old restaurant, brings us about as close as we can get to feeling like we were there.
"Dim sum is a system devised to create maximum deliciousness with minimum effort," says Nom Wah owner Wilson Tang. "Since time immemorial, dim sum kitchens have optimized their menus, building culinary mansions out of just a few basic building blocks, wisely, and repeatedly used." Pork master filling, for example, shows up in Nom Wah's siu mai, panfried dumplings, and bean curd rolls. Until we can go back to our favorite, crowded dim sum haunts, the pages of Nom Wah are a beautiful place to be.
- Photograph: Ten Speed Press/Penguin Random House
Top Seeds
Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking With the World's Most Versatile Plant-Based Proteinby Joe Yonan (Ten Speed Press)
Dried beans have a way of sitting around on your shelves, perhaps waiting for you to figure out what to do with three-quarters of a bag of lupinis. Washington Post food editor Joe Yonan subverts our expectations by giving us a whole book full of good ideas. With Cool Beans, he gives his full attention to them in recipes like a white gazpacho with chickpeas and cashews, Nigerian stewed black beans, and a ratatouille-cassoulet mashup. He might suggest using those lupinis as part of an Ecuadorean ceviche. He also talks you through all of the hang-ups; whether you need to soak them (only if they're old), how long to cook most varieties, and how to, um, deal with the gas. "We shouldn't let fear of farting get in the way of our enjoying them," he says. Darn tootin'!
- Photograph: America's Test Kitchen
Kid’s Stuff
The Complete DIY Cookbook for Young Chefsby America’s Test Kitchen Kids (America’s Test Kitchen)
My 11-year-old nephew Eli is a budding chef, taking part in his school's online cooking club where he and his pals make kebabs and flatbread one week, and rice bowls with broccoli and tamago-style egg the next. With America's Test Kitchen Kids' new DIY book, I may have found his Christmas present.
The cookbook shows kids how to cook stuff their parents might typically get at the grocery store: cheddar-flavored fish crackers, graham crackers, ranch dressing, peanut butter cups, ice cream, and even mac 'n' cheese sauce mix. Parents and kids will appreciate the symbols accompaning each recipe that explain difficulty levels and whether it requires the use of potentially hazardous items like a knife or stove top. Everyone gets to enjoy the food.
