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We’re starting a new series today, Cookbooks We Love. One of the most often repeated pieces of writing advice is: Read! Read! Read!
It’s true, reading a lot does make you a better writer. And as a food writer, you should especially read about food and cookbooks are often a good place to start. Here are our suggestions for this month.
Cook This Book: Techniques That Teach and Recipes To Repeat: A Cookbook by Molly Baz (Clarkson Potter, $19.50). We start our list with the New York Times #1 bestseller, Cook This Book. Molly Baz, a food editor and recipe developer who has worked with Bon Appétit, both the magazine and the brand’s video platform, wrote Cook This Book as “a new kind of foundational cookbook,” aimed at helping readers become better, more efficient, and most importantly, more confident cook.
Recipes include chorizo and chickpea carbonara and pastrami roast chicken with schmaltzy onions and dill, but more than just recipes the book includes lessons on improvisation and how to balance flavors. The pages are filled with QR codes that link to short educational videos by Baz (you access the videos by scanning the codes with your smartphone).
According to Baz, Cook This Book is an in-depth look at the cooking techniques she considers crucial for home cooks. She has a formula for successful experience in the kitchen, technique x flavor = cooking.
Baz also stresses having fun in the kitchen. She says: “I guarantee you’ll come out the other end a confident, capable, creative, calm, collected, cool-as-f*** cook. So throw on that cross-back apron (or go get one immediately), bust out the kosher salt, and let’s cook this book!”
The Pepper Thai Cookbook: Family Recipes from Everyone’s Favorite Thai Mom by Pepper Teigen and Garrett Snyder (Clarkson Potter, $29.99). Chrissy Teigen’s mom gets in on the family business with her own cookbook. Born in Thailand, Teigen comes by her cooking credentials honestly; she was in third grade when she started helping her mom with her food vendor business, getting up at 2 a.m. to start peeling green papayas and chopping shallots.
She was in her early twenties when she moved to the US after she married an American. She wasn’t able to get authentic Thai ingredients in Utah and Washington state so she learned to substitute where she could and continued to cook as much Thai-ish food as she could.
The book includes 80 “stir-fry saucy, sweet-and-tangy, mostly Thai-ish recipes.” Teigen, who got her nickname Pepper because she often snacked on raw hot peppers, dials down the heat factor in the recipes but packs in loads of flavor.
We have two non-cookbooks on our list this month.
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner (Knopf, $26.95), the second New York Times bestseller on our list, is getting lots of attention. Based on a 2018 New Yorker essay of the same name, Crying in H Mart is Zauner’s story about growing up as one of only a handful of Asian kids in a mostly white school in Oregon. An indie rockstar, Zauner was 25 and living on the East Coast with few ties to her Korean heritage when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The family crisis made Zauner reconnect with the Korean language, history, and food she thought she left behind.
World Travel: An Irrevelent Guide by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever (Ecco, $35). Anthony Bourdain died in June, 2018, only a few months after he and Woolever, an assistant and collaborator, began working on World Traveler.
Bourdain and Woolever had just one hour-long interview for World Traveler. He recalled favorite stories and she took copious notes. Those notes, along with Bourdain’s writings make up the bulk of the book but there are a handful of essays by friends, family, and colleagues including Bourdain’s brother, Christopher, who recalls what it was like to grow up in New Jersy.
As the title indicates, the book covers the world from LA to South Korea, Paris, and Cuba, Borneo, and Buenos Aires and much more.
World Traveler is part literal travel guide – it details where to eat, where to stay, and insider tips on getting around – but mostly it’s an opportunity to spend some time in Anthony Bourdain’s world, one where everyone is interesting and everything deserves exploring.
Gregory Gourdet’s and JJ Goode EdD.‘s Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health features food that’s free of gluten, dairy, soy, legumes, and grains but no one will notice what’s not it because it’s all so delicious.
Rodney Scott’s World of BBQ, by Rodney Scott and Lolis Eric Elie, is a look at delicious downhome barbeque.
Cook Real Hawai’i by Sheldon Simeon and Garrett Snyder explores the multi-cultural heritage of the islands.
The Chef’s Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables–with Recipes by Farmer Lee Jones and Kristin Donnelly details recipes developed on the Jones family-owned farm near the shores of Lake Erie.
That’s it for this month. If we missed something that you think should be included or there’s a future release you’d especially like to hear about, please let us know in the comments below. Happy reading!
