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Dining & drinks

Food alerts

The cookbook genre has long been mired in sameness, but in 2024, the best cookbooks are trying something new.

They approach a well-trod topic with a new angle, for example, or they take a unique approach to teaching. They experiment with design, photography and concept. They cover cuisines that have never been covered in English before, or depict the evolution of more familiar cuisines in the 21st century. They inject humor and joy into what is often a staid category.

Writer Paula Forbes started with more than 1,500 titles, culled from digital book catalog database <a href="https://www.edelweiss.plus/" target=_blank>Edelweiss+</a>; these comprised the bulk of the cookbooks released in the U.S. in 2024. Of these, she narrowed the list to 136 titles, which included many highly anticipated books by renowned authors but also smaller books, concepts she’d never seen before or ideas she found interesting. From there she skimmed, looking for recipes that called out to her, begging to be cooked. The list narrowed to 40. These she read, cover to cover, flagging dishes as she went.

Finally, she took about 25 books into the kitchen. She judged recipes based on whether, when followed as written, they produce a dish similar to what the author promises. She has cooked from every book on this list, and while she can’t vouch for every single recipe in each, she can confirm that all the recipes she tried worked.

The 14 books that I deem the year’s best include options for professionals and absolute beginners; single-subject books, baking books, international books; books by chefs and scientists and journalists and bloggers. Some are deep dives, and some are fun, short kitchen helpers. Ultimately, they all make me excited to get in the kitchen, and I hope they do the same for you.

By Ashley Boyd (Chronicle Books, 152 pages, $20)

Chronicle Books

Jimmy and JaNese Graves

My partner runs marathons, and when we are not eating the results of my recipe testing, dinner is often a simple, healthy affair: chicken, usually a grain or maybe steamed sweet potatoes, and a sautéed vegetable. And thus the question that has become a refrain in my house: “This needs a saucy thing. Do we have a saucy thing?!”

Well, now we do. A mere slip of a book with an intriguing title and an even more intriguing, caramel-drizzled cover, “Saucy” offers 50 recipes for sweet and savory sauces along with a handful of recipes for things to serve them with, such as roast chicken or pancakes. That’s it. But oh, the possibilities contained in those few recipes! In chapter categories such as Creamy, Herby, Tomato-Based, and so on, each recipe is flagged with the cuisine that inspired it, serving suggestions, and occasionally a note for modifying it (a pesto plus lemon juice makes a salad dressing, for example). Lizzie Vaughan’s impactful design and Maren Caruso’s abstract, colorful photographs (of sauces! They are all photos of sauces!) make this relatively simple concept of a cookbook impossible to ignore.

It’s just the thing for when dinner (or breakfast, or dessert) needs a little something extra.

By Justine Doiron (Clarkson Potter, 288 pages, $35)

Clarkson Potter

Jim Henkens

Many food content creators — whether Substackers or TikTokers or Instagrammers or YouTubers — were born of the pandemic. And, as publishing is a slow process, this year a lot of them published cookbooks. This is my favorite. Written by the creator of <a href="https://www.instagram.com/justine_snacks/?hl=en" target=_blank>@justine_snacks</a>, it’s packed with logical advice and strategies for easy kitchen wins. It also strikes a rare balance in that it’s accessible to beginner home cooks, but will intrigue more advanced cooks with creative flavors and streamlined processes. I can’t imagine many people this book wouldn’t appeal to.

Not only that, it produced by far the most delicious recipes I tested for this list. And they’re pretty easy! And largely vegetarian! Come on. In particular, I beg you to make the Greener Zucchini Gratin on Page 143. Do not let the sub-recipes for breadcrumbs and basil oil scare you off; they are also quite simple and just happen to be located on a different page than the main recipe. Make a double batch if you have to share it with a partner or kids: Believe me, you will not want to share. Maybe serve it with the Crispy Rice in Sungold-Miso Broth. (Maybe wait for summer for all these vegetables to be in season again.) Thank me later.

By Margaret Eby (Quirk Books, 192 pages, $20)

(Cover designed by Elissa Flanigan and illustrated by María Toro

Margaret Eby

You don’t have to cook, writes Eby in this guide to “feeding yourself when cooking sounds impossible,” but you do gotta eat. Simply getting food on the table can be difficult in all kinds of circumstances: perhaps you are chronically ill, or you just had a baby, or you got a new job that sucks up all your time, or you were confronted with a sudden tragedy, or you’re remodeling your kitchen, or you’re depressed, or you got a new puppy. Eby paves the way with guides that are humorous and kind, such as “Anything’s a Sandwich if You’re Not a Coward” and “Kitchen Shears: For When Knives Are Too Hard.” She leans on microwaves for eggs, popcorn, and baked potatoes: the path is always of least resistance. The few traditional recipes in the book are more like instructions for autopiloting your way to dinner, and are prefaced with the command “Do Exactly This.”

Eby’s voice is assuring, indulgent and nonjudgmental, like an older sister you can call in any crisis. In a world of aspirational cookbooks (of which there are several on this list!), it is so refreshing to hear someone finally say it’s okay to just … not. It is one of the most generous cookbooks I have ever read. It’s revolutionary; it’s a relief.

By Arielle Johnson (Harvest, 320 pages, $40)

Harvest

Nicholas Coleman

Calling all nerds! Johnson, flavor scientist, is here to explain in extensive detail exactly why things taste good. It is not for the dabbler: Other books on this list will help beginners get meals on the table. “Flavorama” is for the professionals, science-minded folks and true flavor freaks out there. Thankfully, it is also funny and highly readable.

This book is about possibilities. Johnson writes that she finds “rules about what’s ‘correct’” tedious, and wants to teach cooks the science behind flavors so they can manipulate and transform them. This begins with an exploration of some science you probably learned in middle school: the five tastes, taste buds, the impact of smell on taste. Where it ends up, though, is far from basic. The 99 recipes function as lessons in things like extraction and concentration. There are also suggestions to “Try This” to guide your own explorations, charts showing how patterns of flavor repeat across different dishes and the capsaicin levels of various chiles, illustrations (by Johnson!) of flavor molecules, dad jokes (“My Glucose Brings the Amines to Maillard”) and more. It’s a ride. And it’s a great read for when you’re stuck creatively. After all, what is a new recipe but a science experiment?

By Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson (Clarkson Potter, 272 pages, $35)

Chris Bernabeo

“Kismet” feels very of-the-moment. At their extremely popular Los Angeles restaurant of the same name, the chef-authors have already shown this is how people want to eat right now. And in this collection of restaurant, family and new recipes, they show it’s how people (me, at least) want to cook right now, too.

The book opens with several guiding principles, two of which summarize the dishes you’ll find within: “Lots of vegetables, little meat” and “Simple, but make it sparkle.” It’s the kind of Mediterranean-inspired, vegetable-forward food that made Yotam Ottolenghi’s books famous, but by way of California. The kind of food you’d serve at a dinner party after having gone crazy at the farmers market. It’s colorful and cheerful, a little bit glamorous.

It’s also aspirational: A lot of the book is restaurant recipes, and they should be approached with that knowledge in hand. I highly recommend reading the recipes through before cooking them. But if you do, you’ll be rewarded with shaved cucumber salad with za’atar, cherries and labneh; marinated feta with roasted tomatoes and grapefruit; black pepper honeynut squash; kale tahini dip drizzled with pomegranate molasses; and some of the best labneh I’ve ever had (and the only labneh I’ve made myself).

By Nicola Lamb (Clarkson Potter, 352 pages, $37)

Lin Ru Pei

Many great pastry and baking books focus on the science of baking. Few, though, feel as fresh as this one by a London-based pastry chef. Fans of her newsletter, <a href="https://kitchenprojects.substack.com/" target=_blank>Kitchen Projects</a>, will recognize her meticulously researched writing style throughout the first half of the book, where pastry concepts are outlined, explained, charted and illustrated. This section is thorough and perhaps best suited for advanced bakers and even professional pastry chefs; beginners may find themselves out of their depth.

The second half is where things get really interesting. Those sciencey pastry books I mentioned? They tend to use simple, classic recipes to illustrate big pastry concepts: tarte Tatin to discuss caramelization, say, or a vanilla layer cake in a section on buttercream. And while Lamb offers plenty of classics, the majority are her own concepts: a tarte Tatin built on tomatoes and fennel instead of apples, cake layered with pistachio mousseline and swathed in salted vanilla buttercream. The book is bursting with personality in both the instruction and the pastries. Consider this a pastry textbook that’s dolled up as a gift cookbook, awash in pastels and glossy, gorgeous photos. Lamb is a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1998/11/11/the-diva-of-dough-for-rose-levy-beranbaum-no-detail-escapes-the-pursuit-of-perfection/97b37b34-ab98-406c-b252-2b28233ed658/" target=_blank>Rose Levy Beranbaum</a> for a new generation.

By Betty Liu (Voracious, 288 pages, $40)

Betty Liu

Photo by Betty Liu/Voracious Books)

Sometimes you need a cookbook that won’t just tell you what to make for dinner, but explains how to make it better, too. This is when I turn to technique-heavy books: many of which exist in cookbook subgenres (baking, barbecue), fewer in the general cookbook category, and fewer still that I’d crack open for an easy weeknight dinner. This is that rare book. And it has a lot more to teach you about cooking than how to use a wok (although it will do that, too).

Liu starts each chapter with the basic theories of a Chinese technique — steam, fry, boil, braise, sauce, infuse, pickle, wrap — plus any necessary equipment explanations, and perhaps a few extremely basic recipes. (The steam chapter begins with a chart on steam time for a variety of vegetables, for example.) There follow a few “foundation recipes,” which illustrate how the technique is traditionally used in China, and finally we get to Liu’s own creations, inspired by how she cooks at home today. “It’s not traditional, but it is Chinese,” she writes. This book allows you to practice a technique across several recipes, and it’s a brilliant way to reinforce concepts that require repetition to truly master.

By Dina Macki (DK, 256 pages, $30)

DK Publishing

Patricia Niven

I did not know anything about Omani food until I read this book, apparently the first English-language cookbook on Omani food written by an Omani chef. Dina Macki is a U.K.-based Omani-Zanzibari chef who grew up in the coastal city of Portsmouth, home to one of the few Omani communities outside of Oman. (I don’t have room for a whole history of Oman’s relationship with Zanzibar and immigration to the U.K. here, but Macki provides an overview in the book.) For “Bahari,” which means “ocean” in Swahili, she traveled throughout Oman and to Zanzibar for a collection of recipes that is both deeply researched and intensely personal. If you’re the type who likes to travel through gorgeously photographed cookbooks packed with personal stories and history, this is my pick for you this year.

So what is Omani food? It is many things, drawing on historic cultural influences from across the Middle East, India, Pakistan, the Eastern coast of Africa, and Zanzibar. It is flavored with spices, coconut and dried lime — a signature Omani flavor — and packed with fish, rice and fruit. Macki offers street food from Muscat, her aunt’s spiced prawn and turmeric dumplings, a rice dish called Qabooli because it is rumored to have originated in Kabul, a Zanzibari “curry in a hurry” called Chuku Chuku, her grandmother’s sambusas (samosas). And ice cream, lots and lots of ice cream.

By Ben Mims (Phaidon Press, 432 pages, $50)

Phaidon

Taylor Miller

In the introduction to this book, Ben Mims calls himself “the biggest, and proudest, cookie nerd in history.” You’d have to be to produce a volume this thorough, this heavily researched. An epic collection of 300 recipes from around the world, “Crumbs” begins in the former Persian empire, where cookies are said to have originated. (Thank you, Persia!) From there, it’s time to head around the world: to Syria for sesame- and pistachio-crusted barazek, to Italy for the chocolate-stuffed sandwich cookies baci di dama, to Scotland for shortbread, the U.S. for oatmeal raisin cookies and snickerdoodles, Argentina for alfajores, Vietnam for the buttery almond cookies called bánh hạnh nhân.

When I say this book is thorough, I mean it is completionist. And why not? It’s about time the humble cookie got its due. And with all due respect to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/interactive/2023/cookie-recipes-holiday/" target=_blank>the legendary cookies produced by The Post recipes team</a>, it does arrive just in time for the winter baking season. This year, go global!

By Jim Meehan and Bart Sasso, with Emma Janzen (Ten Speed Press, 384 pages, $35)

Ten Speed Press

Jordan Hughes

The future of cocktails lies not in the liquor cabinet, but in the pantry, argue the trio of cocktail-world dynamos behind this book. Anyone can buy a bottle of decent gin or tequila, but custom tinctures, shrubs, infusions and syrups offer bartenders a chance to put their signature on a cocktail: It’s a way of saying the customer cannot get the drink anywhere else.

Except, well, the writers got dozens of bartenders to share their recipes, along with the stories behind them. The result is a book full of creative, delicious and, occasionally, time-intensive recipes that will seriously improve the drinks of the passionate home bartender. (And would be a great read for anyone trying to come up with a signature cocktail for a nuptials happy hour.) Recipes include a “Baja Grenadine” (made from hibiscus and prickly pear), homemade ginger beer laced with Szechuan peppercorns, and a spruce tips-infused mint syrup — along with recipes for the cocktails that use them. And, despite Meehan’s insistence in the introduction that this book aims to “place more cache on the virtues of being a generalist” and is thus a handbook and not “an exhaustive manual,” it really is quite thorough, with illustrated technique instruction, tons of information on sourcing, and plenty of cultural and historical context.

By Khushbu Shah (W.W. Norton and Co., 320 pages, $35)

WW Norton

Alex Lau

Indian food is ever-changing and expanding — as is American food. In her first book, Shah considers the space where the two overlap, the substitutions and adaptations that U.S.-based cooks of Indian heritage make to dishes from both cuisines, born of necessity and ingenuity.

The Indian diaspora in the United States is not a monolith, and, while there are recipes here from all over the country, Shah largely veers autobiographical, inspired by what she ate growing up in Michigan with Gujarati immigrant parents. Dishes are mostly vegetarian and range from simple and traditional (these keep immigrants “connected to home and keep them whole”) to complex and wildly creative. The culinary borrowing goes in both directions: Bisquick is used in the syrup-soaked doughnuts gulab jamun (her mom’s recipe), while jaggery and fennel candy doll up the humble Rice Krispie treat. Most intriguing are the recipes in which both cuisines are represented in equal measure, as in an entire chapter of Indian pizza offerings, a mango pie with a graham cracker crust, or Keralan fried chicken sandwiches.

As has often been said, delicious things happen where cultures mingle, and with this book Shah confirms “America, with a desi accent” is a crave-worthy mix.

By Ashleigh Shanti (Union Square &amp; Co., 320 pages, $40)

Union Square & Co.

Johnny Autry

An Appalachian book, a soul food book, a Southern book, a chef book: This is all those things. “Above all,” writes Shanti, “this book exists to amplify your understanding of the complexities of Black food.” It’s also a deeply personal book. Shanti starts in Georgia, where she was born, and works her way through Appalachia, chapter by chapter, offering recipes and stories inspired by relatives, classic Black-authored cookbooks, chefs she’s worked with along the way and her wife’s Mexican heritage. She also shares her journey as a chef, one that led her to open Good Hot Fish in Asheville, N.C. (and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/goodhotfish/?hl=en" target=_blank>reopen it in mid-November</a>, after the historic flooding due to Hurricane Helene).

The recipes range from simple classics (kilt lettuce, cornbread) to more complex fare (I am dying to try my hand at her okra mole once okra’s back in season), but none of it is out of reach for the home cook. There is beautiful photography of landscapes throughout the region by Johnny Autry. It is a book for reading cover to cover; fans of food memoirs will like this one. “I am a Black, queer woman chef who found her identity in cooking,” Shanti writes. We are lucky that, in “Our South,” she shares that identity with us all.

By Julia Turshen (Flatiron Books, 320 pages, $35)

Julia Turshen and Natalie Chitwood

Natalie Chitwood

This is a book for beginners. It’s also one of the only books for beginners I’ve ever seen that isn’t just a collection of recipes but also a guide to how to think about food. Turshen is known for books that give people footholds, places to begin; this book also gives them a road map.

Here’s how it works: A section will focus on a particular type of dish, say, brothy soups, and offers five versions of that dish. Turshen breaks each dish type into steps, in this case “Sauté in Olive Oil,” “Add Liquid,” “Add This &amp; Simmer,” “Top With.” The brilliant bit is that she uses these steps to build a chart with the steps along the top and the variations along the side. The Frozen Fish Chowder starts with sautéing diced onion and celery, while the Fastest Chicken Noodle Soup starts with chicken, carrots, garlic powder, and paprika. The Italian Wedding Soup is topped with pecorino; the Any-Bean Soup is topped with fresh herbs and olive oil. Traditionally written recipes are offered for each, but it’s the chart that shows the reader how to recognize patterns in cooking, which is the key to improvisation in the kitchen. Absolutely genius.

By Paola Velez (Union Square &amp; Co., 288 pages, $35)

Hector Velez

I don’t know when cookbooks got so serious. I don’t think I even realized they had until confronted with the many things in which Velez takes deep, unending delight: the neighborhood where she grew up in the Bronx, her Dominican heritage, the children in her life who call her “the cookie lady” (make her lemon cookies, and you’ll know why they do) and, yes, the eclectic combination of bodega-sourced ingredients that inspire her pastries. Joy oozes from the photos, the colors, the recipes, the language and the ideas in this book.

Besides her background and childhood, the recipes draw on whatever part of someone’s brain comes up with something like a burnt tahini and Concord grape jelly cake (pictured on the cover). They provide rock-solid instruction while eschewing the goofy formal, codified language that plagues most recipes (including my own, I’m afraid). For example, Velez asks you to “pulse the mixer on and off, almost like you’re trying to jump-start a car, so the flour gets gradually incorporated without flying all over your kitchen.” There are recipes for most skill levels, although some do lean complex. It’s a book to help you out of any baking rut — Velez’s joy is contagious.

A previous version of this article misspelled Lizzie Vaughan's last name. The article has been corrected.

Paula Forbes writes the <a href="https://stainedpagenews.beehiiv.com/" target=_blank>“Stained Page News” newsletter on Beehiiv</a>.

Paula Forbes

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