The Best Cookbooks of 2024
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The pandemic really threw a wrench into cookbook publishing. Things got weird for a while there, but then such a wonderful flood of books came out that we expanded our coverage to accommodate it all. This year, the momentum shows no signs of letting up.
First, congratulations to two of our 2023 favorites, The World Central Kitchen Cookbook and Sohla El-Waylly’s Start Here for picking up two of the top James Beard awards! The magic continues this year, and the range is as wide as ever. We're seeing books that help us expand on the basics, figure out what to do when we encounter a mystery vegetable, and learn pasta sauces from a dude who’s so into cooking them that he has even invented and marketed new pasta shapes. Like last year’s Made in Taiwan by Clarissa Wei, travelogue cookbooks continue to knock our socks off in 2024.
In fact, I’m hoping we’re starting to see a sort of quiet, yet profound progression in cookbooks. There’s the whole Instagram and influencer side, which sometimes lacks depth but really brings it with great photography and good vibes. We’re also seeing high-end chefs team up with skilled cookbook writers to wondrous effect. The best of the lot tell stories with words and photos and have high-quality recipes to match and they're starting to make traditional cookbooks and some cookbook publishers as a whole look fusty and staid and … I love it.
Read on to get our take on what's the freshest. We've tested every one.
Update, December 10, 2024: We added six more titles from the batch of cookbooks that were released in the fall. The newest additions to our list are at the top.
- Courtesy of Penguin Random House
Ottolenghi Comfort
By Yotam Ottolenghi, Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller, and Tara WigleyI used to like to razz the Ottolenghi books for making delicious yet impressively fussy food. Cooking from them could be enjoyable but crazymaking when he'd call for a slice of lemon to be dipped in batter and fried as a garnish when you really needed to be getting dressed because your dinner guests just pulled up out front. His more recent cookbooks are much better, but I took some of that lingering cynicism into his latest book where he's listed as an author alongside his cookbook team. Yet just a few pages in, I dog-eared a recipe—flip!—then did the same twice more a few pages after that—flip, flip—then got up a head of steam and must have folded over more than 50.
Comfort-themed cookbooks are typically pretty monotonous, full of mac and cheese, sheet-pan whatevers, roast chicken, and casseroles. Here, however, Ottolenghi and his team use a global pantry and diverse influences to make a much more interesting book. Sheet-pan cauliflower is coated with Yemeni hawaij; the spice mix with coriander, cumin, fenugreek, clove, cardamom, turmeric, and sugar is nothing you can't find in the spice aisle but it easily breaks you out of the weeknight doldrums. Also great is garlicky linguine slathered in miso butter, shiitakes and spinach—not too much of a stretch for a Tuesday night but delicious and different. One night when we had guests, I made a mushroom ragù with surprise guest ingredients like miso, preserved lemon, and celery root, all of which made for a luscious sauce to slurp up with egg noodles. Next, I'll try “Helen's bolognese,” featuring onion, carrots, celery, and pork but also Shaoxing wine, ginger, doubanjiang (chili bean paste), and Sichuan peppercorns. Yes, please!
- Courtesy of Harvest Publications
Zahav Home: Cooking for Friends & Family
By Michael Solomon and Steven CookYou could imagine a book written by a chef and his business partner during Covid lockdown turning out lovely or just being a hot mess. Philadelphia chef Michael Solomonov and his business partner, Steven Cook, hit a nice groove and stay in it in Zahav Home. The duo is known for restaurants like Zahav and Federal Donuts in Philadelphia and Laser Wolf in New York, yet this is not a restaurant cookbook. Part true effort to concentrate on home cooks and part chatty back-and-forth, where the two occasionally seem to be auditioning to be a pair of Jewish grandmothers in an off-Broadway comedy, Home has a lot of encouragement and recipes different and intriguing enough to get us to try many of them. Photography by Michael Perisco does an admirable job of educating and creating a bit of a story over the course of the whole thing.
Spatchcocked chicken with Hungarian seasoning (in this case just paprika) is nice, especially as it cooks in a pan with fingerlings, garlic, onion, and red bell peppers, everything steeped in the juices. The revelation for me was a fermented mango sauce with Iraqi roots called Amba that's made with fenugreek, turmeric, and chilies. I needed to special order a jar but ended up getting two because I knew I'd love it. Home suggests using it as a marinade or accoutrement, including part of what the authors call broiled eggplant à la sabich, a riff on the famous pita sandwich with broiled eggplant, tomato wedges, and hard-boiled eggs, slathered in a tahini and amba. I put their version out as an appetizer at a dinner with friends, and once they figured out how to eat it, it disappeared. In fact, amba pops up with such frequent enthusiasm in the book that they hype a recipe for it used as a roast-chicken marinade on the back cover yet appear to have forgotten to put the recipe in the book. Maybe next time? I'm guessing I'll love that book, too.
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- Courtesy of Color Books
The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes From Phú Quoc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between
By Tu David Phu and Soleil HoI've been really happy to see a cluster of books that often, but not always, combine a chef and food writer in what could be called the “travel/diaspora” category that are really raising the bar for cookbooks as a whole. Recent examples include Koreaworld, Korean American, Made in Taiwan, Asada, and now this book. Here, Oakland-born chef Tu David Phu presents his food with roots in Phú Quốc, Vietnam. Working with food writer Soleil Ho and photographers Dylan James Ho and Jenny Afuso, they tell a tale about food that's both Vietnamese and American, delivering a beautiful story and pictures with recipes that work.
Those recipes are wrapped in a smart format where the chef returns to Phú Quốc and tells his story through his relationship with his parents while also adding smart thinking on sustainability.
I started by cooking the cover, making coconut and fish sauce rice noodle salad, a sort of healthy textural bonanza with slippery rice noodles, cucumber, and thin slices of cabbage and banana flower that I found up the street from my Seattle home at Fou Lee Market. Later, I made their ginger-braised chicken, taking them up on their suggestion to substitute thighs for wings and letting them bubble away with shallot, lemongrass, makrut lime leaves, and a couple of tablespoons of coconut caramel sauce, creating a savory warmth with a bit of chili heat, a welcome bit of warmth on a damp fall night.
- Courtesy of Hardie Grant
BBQ Days BBQ Nights: Barbecue Recipes for Year-Round Feasting
By Helen GravesBarbecue cookbooks had some shameful recent years where almost all of the them were written by white dudes, almost completely ignoring women and people of color. There's still a long way to go, but we've seen some change in the right direction in the past few years. Recently, I was excited to see Hardie Grant put out Helen Graves' BBQ Days BBQ Nights, a follow up to her 2022 work, Live Fire. Instead of being a giant meat fest, this book is more along the lines of "food to grill and lots and lots of delicious stuff to eat with it." Flip through it and it's easy to pick up that she's got a high-functioning palate. Try, for example, anchovies with burnt-shallot butter which you can serve over focaccia (her suggestion) or crusty sourdough (mine). I'm eager to try her soba noodles made green with a sauce of spring onions and cilantro served with asparagus and crispy garlic. Ditto for her "secret weapon" salad dressing that includes fish sauce and an entire avocado. She's also got bomber ideas for drinks like mezcal and Maggi micheladas or fermented tomato and gochujang Bloody Marys. If you like Amy Thielen, Meera Sodha, or Alice Waters, you'll be happy here.
Over the summer, my sister and I made Graves’ charred tomato seven-layer dip, a riff on the classic where cherry tomatoes get crisped on the grill and spread over a mix of cream cheese, feta, and yogurt and sprinkled with a pickled apricot salsa. Eating it, it dawned on me that I could just write out recipe names from this book as its review, and that would likely be enough to persuade most people to buy it.
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- Courtesy of America's Test Kitchen
The Complete Beans & Grains Cookbook
By The Editors at America's Test KitchenThere's a higher-profile bean book out there this year, but this is the one to get. A fairly classic ATK book, Beans & Grains is not flashy, but it's packed with practical how-to information which is where a lot of people looking to get more beans and greens into their diet would like to be met. Some bean-focused books are a little too wishy-washy about whether beans need to be soaked, but this one is not: “We definitely recommend [overnight] brining dried beans prior to cooking.” Then they go on to explain why. It makes for tender interiors and skins, a better-seasoned final product, no beans exploding during cooking, and faster cooking. From there, it launches into scads of recipes with photography that's a bit workmanlike but with such breadth and depth that it's impossible not to dog-ear a dozen or more pages on your first pass alone.
I went straight for comfort and classics, making pressure-cooker black beans and brown rice, a fairly hands-off dish given depth and kick with tomato paste and jalapeños. My favorite so far might be a cheesy bean and tomato bake, which they say is “perfect to cook with kids” and I say “is perfect to cook for me.” It uses canned cannellinis—they’re not above ’em—and tomatoes along with herbs, Parm and mozz, and a shower of panko for textural wonderfulness. There's also plenty of globe-trotting: Laotian, nam khao, congee, and chana masala among them. The book is so helpful that I would find interesting bean recipes elsewhere, then cross reference with similar recipes in this one, cribbing its techniques to get the best results.
(If beans are your bag, also check out the brand new The Bean Book by the folks at Rancho Gordo or 2020’s Cool Beans by Joe Yonan.)
- Courtesy of WW Norton
Amrikan: 125 Recipes From the Indian American Diaspora
By Khushbu Shah"The main ingredient in the Indian American culinary lexicon," explains food writer and journalist Ksushbu Shah, the child of Indian immigrants, is adaptation. Shah's family began coming to the United States from India in 1971. If you want the famous fried dessert gulab jamun in the US, you can't fire up the fryer and pull out the premade khoya, the key ingredient, because it's hard to find here. Instead, the waves of immigrants realized you could use Bisquick and milk powder and get surprisingly similar results.
Shah's recipes were exciting enough to motivate me to buy a waffle iron to make her moong dal waffles, where the namesake split mung beans are soaked overnight, then blitzed in the food processor with ginger, a serrano pepper, and garlic, and poured right into the waffle iron. Top this with a blenderized cilantro and mint chutney that's got roasted peanuts, more serranos, and lemon juice and you'll be sitting pretty. The savory waffles get a crispy exterior and pillowy interior thing going on and the chutney gives the whole endeavor some backbone. I also made pav bhaji—toasted bread with veggies matched with bhaji spice mix—something somehow as good on a late summer night as on a wet fall afternoon.
Shah presents her story through the lens of someone who loves both American and Indian cultures and, in that light, I'm very excited to try her Keralan fried chicken sandwiches along with her Desi egg sandwich. For our Canadian neighbors, she offers a masala poutine. Pretty cool, eh? There's a nice story to go with the fun, too. Her dad's a character in this book, a sweetheart with an impish smile who doesn't cook but loves to eat. Give Amrikan a try and you'll be smiling, too.
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- Courtesy of William Morrow
Big Dip Energy: 88 Parties in a Bowl for Snacking, Dinner, Dessert, and Beyond
by Alyse WhitneyIt's always a neat feeling for cookbook aficionados to find something truly new. Some books speak to your soul or your practicality, some drive you crazy. Still others wrap you in a warm cocoon, whether or not you ever cook a thing from them. Never, though, have I imagined an author and a group of her friends getting face-meltingly high, coming up with a bonkers idea for a concept album of a cookbook about dips, then, miraculously, selling the idea and executing at a high level.
Grab a chip, friends, it's time for some dip. You will likely be stopped cold by the art here, a tilt-shift-esque extravaganza of kitschy-fun props and dips galore, all wrangled by a team of six stylists who had to be doing it for the love. There is, for example, a two-page summer-grilling-themed photo featuring miniature figurines lounging in the outdoors around a giant ceramic hamburger, arm-in-arm squeeze bottles of ketchup and mustard, a pool with a plastic piano and “chopped cheese (burger) queso” dip in a “burger and all the fixings” themed plate/bowl combo, all on a checkerboard of white tile and possibly real grass.
Pun lovers, rejoice! Whitney goes so deep on dip vocabulary that eventually you’ll succumb and become a—brace yourself!—“dipficionado.” Her “freak-a-leek beer cheese dip” is the dipification of her friend Erin McDowell's cheddar-ale soup, which can be served hot or cold. Chez Joe, I made the chilled version, adding a bit of horseradish for kick. When you're ready to go wild, throw a head of romaine into the food processor, the first step on your way to Caesar salad dip, an extra-fun cousin of green goddess dressing.
Many of Whitney's other recipes are as over-the-top as the Caesar, but along with being a big dip person, Whitney is clearly a food person, with credits that include stints with magazines and TV shows. Her energy and skill will rub off on you. Go ahead and dare yourself. It'll be diplicious.
- Courtesy of William Morrow
Anything’s Pastable
by Dan PashmanSpeaking of puns, here’s one right on the cover right above author Dan Pashman’s name and the words “pasta shape inventor.” Who knew that this was still a thing? This became even more impressive when I found boxes of his pasta at my local grocery store. “Cascatelli” is Italian for waterfalls, and these pasta inventions resemble giant ruffly commas. Pashman, the host of The Sporkful podcast, says the idea came from combining two of his favorite existing shapes, mafalde and bucatini, which make the cascatelli particularly good at holding onto slurpable sauces.
Instead of packing Pastable with his favorite versions of classic sauces like ragu and bolognese, he and a team of recipe developers came up with new and notably non-Italian sauces to serve with your choice of pasta styles. My wife Elisabeth and I latched onto cavatelli with roasted artichokes and preserved lemon, a sort of earthy-acidic flavor bonanza with an air of sophistication brought from lemon, capers, parsley, pecorino Romano, and garlic. Pappardelle with arugula is a dish with what Pashman refers to as a "high chunk factor" and is a nice way to get some greens in with your gluten. Simplicity reigns supreme here and we zhuzhed ours up with some chili crisp, though something funky, like guanciale or feta would be welcome to the party.
Speaking of chili crisp, I am excited to try the cover dish, "cacio e Pepe e chili crisp," which also features Sichuan peppercorns and pecorino Romano on frilly ribbons of mafalde pasta. After that, I'm trying the linguine with miso clam sauce. Pashman and his well-credited (yay!) team have deftly taken what could have been a book full of weird ideas and made something wonderful. Grab your spork and get ready to twirl.
- Courtesy of National Geographic
Big Moe’s Big Book of BBQ
by Moe CasonThere is a latent sweetness, humility, and sense of humor in competition barbecue pitmaster Moe Cason's book that you don't usually get from barbecue cookbooks. He opens by praising his family, particularly the support of his wife and grandmother, and recounts boyhood efforts at cooking, coming up with "concoctions" as he slowly learned to cook, emphasis on the slow, saying "you gotta burn some crap before you get it right."
Flash forward and he eventually swaps from a Navy career to working as a water treatment operator in Des Moines, Iowa, then to, starting in 2006, a national barbecue competition competitor. In 2023, he hosted the National Geographic television series World of Flavor With Big Moe Cason. In the Big Book, the sides quickly grabbed my attention, a nice mix of inventiveness and classics that are often re-creations of dishes from his wife and grandmother. I made his smoked ham and butter beans, a dish with little hands-on time and lots of flavor. I also pulled together a black-eyed peas and sausage dish that was like a tomato-free chili cousin.
Big Moe, who was born in Iowa and describes his barbecue style as "between Kansas City and Texas," is known for wrapping his brisket in pink (untreated) butcher paper for the last half of smoking, which allows it to breathe enough to keep the bark on the exterior from getting “mushy.” I also like his attention to texture on bone-in chicken thighs: brined in brown sugar and salt, then cooked in a mesh basket in a 300 degree Fahrenheit smoker until they hit an internal temperature of 185 degrees, which, as he points out, is more than breasts can take, but it makes for an excellent texture for thighs. I do wish the book gave workarounds for the Cason-branded sauces that occasionally pop up on the ingredient lists, but those instances aren't frequent, and the upside is too good.
- Courtesy of Voracious
The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen: Recipes From a Native Chef
by Yevhen KlopotenkoI had a series of wonderful revelations when I began cooking and learning about Ukrainian food. One of them was that folks like Midwesterners, the Pennsylvania Dutch, and most of the rest of us will find lots to love here. Another was to seek out unrefined sunflower oil, which pops up often in Ukrainian recipes and is packed with enough nutty flavor that it is often used as a one-ingredient salad dressing.
Ukrainian chef and restaurateur Yevhen Klopotenko uses this book to introduce us to his war-torn country's food, giving us a surprising amount of weeknight-friendly meals that are still transporting. I followed my gut to cucumber, green onion, egg, and radish salad, which is all of those ingredients under a generous drizzle of sunflower oil, perfect for when you want to quickly make up for a vegetable deficiency in your diet. On the skillet side of things, Elisabeth and I had an unspoken competition about how fast we could demolish both zucchini fritters with a yogurt-mint sauce and deruny, aka potato pancakes. Even better were "lazy holubtsi," or deconstructed cabbage rolls with a sour cream and tomato sauce, where the cabbage is sautéed with onion and carrot and folded in with ground beef and rice, making it easier to get all of the flavors we love without all the painstaking work of making regular cabbage rolls.
The publisher should have done some tighter editing here, but buy the book anyway. You'll figure it out and support Klopotenko and his country.
(For more Ukrainian deliciousness, check out our 2022 favorite, Budmo! from Anna Voloshyna, and the 2023 update of Caroline Eden's beautiful Black Sea, a travelogue cookbook that gives a feel for the Ukrainian city of Odesa.)
- Courtesy of Clarkson Potter
Koreaworld: A Cookbook
by Deuki Hong and Matt RodbardYou've gotta love a cookbook that could take a cuisine—Korean in this case—that's been having a moment for about 20 years and make it feel as exciting and important as ever. A follow-up of Koreatown from 2016, Koreaworld is a cookbook, a stock taking, and a philosophical jag all wrapped in a "two guys on a road trip with a crackerjack photographer" vibe.
On that trip, chef-author Deuki Hong, food writer Matt Rodbard, and photographer Alex Lau analyze and decrypt recipes in Seoul, then swing through Koreatowns across the United States. In Seoul, they check out the third-wave coffee scene and stop in to see Mingoo Kang, a chef they liken to a mashup between chef René Redzepi of Noma and restaurateur Danny Meyer of Shake Shack. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, they connect with chef Ji Hue Kim, who makes a pesto from perilla leaves (Korea's shiso cousin), garlic, pine nuts, and fish sauce, then suggest spreading a layer onto avocado toast. Yes, please!
I made what they called "extremely addicting soy sauce–marinated eggs," whose Korean name, they explain, can be "loosely translated as ‘drug eggs’” thanks to a marinating bath in nori, sesame, garlic, and ginger. I happily ate them over rice for several days in a row. I did something similar with sesame oil pickles pleasantly heavy on rice wine vinegar and fennel from chef and recipe developer Susan Kim.
Next up to try is chef Mingoo's spicy fried chicken—thighs, of course—with gochujang spicy sauce, wagon wheels of lotus root, and fried baby anchovies. If you're ready for an exciting jolt of a book, start here.
- Courtesy of Countryman Press
Misunderstood Vegetables: How to Fall in Love With Sunchokes, Rutabaga, Eggplant, and More
by Becky SelengutMonths ago, I caught a talk with Seattle chef Becky Selengut, who was interviewed by Seattle Times food writer Bethany Jean Clement. They were naturals up there and cheered on by a big crowd of supportive fans. Watching Selengut with their mix of wit, ease, and humor felt like witnessing the birth of a new weekend NPR star.
Selengut has written many cookbooks, and this one coaxes us into cooking what they call "misunderstood vegetables," those perceived produce-aisle weirdos that you might hold up and wonder aloud what to do with them. They sometimes start by putting googly eyes on the veggies (really), then getting out the cutting board. Celery root, which looks like something pulled out from under the bed in a Guillermo del Toro movie, gets a shave and the mashed potato treatment, soaking up horseradish, rosemary brown butter, lemon, and gobs of cream. Tomatillos are cooked like fried green tomatoes and served with a high-powered yogurt and chipotle sauce. Selengut counsels that a "hot fry keeps them from softening and getting all mushy" and likes 375 degrees Fahrenheit for the shallow-fry oil, flipping them as soon as their buttermilk, panko, and cornmeal batter turns golden brown and crispy.
A savory cousin of Kate Lebo's Book of Difficult Fruit, Misunderstood introduces us to radicchio by putting it on sourdough toast, taming the bitter leaves by searing them and hitting them with sweetness in the form of balsamic vinegar and brown sugar, before draping them over a cloud of ricotta and a walnut-mint pesto. Never would I ever have thought to pair mint with radicchio, and it makes for a very cheffy appetizer if you're looking to impress some guests or just yourself.
You might as well have fun while you learn about some "weird" new veggies, and Selengut, ever charming, gracious, and funny, is the perfect guide.
