Yet
somehow cookbooks stuck around. In fact, as the rest of the book
industry found itself in a post-millennial free fall, cookbooks were
selling better than ever. This is because, coinciding with the rise of
the Internet, cookbooks reinvented themselves. What once were primarily
vehicles for recipes became anything but: the recipes still mattered,
but now they existed in service of something more - a mood, a place, a
technique, a voice.
Cookbooks of the pre-Internet age remain essential,
of course. What would any kitchen be without the guiding voices of
Madhur Jaffrey, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Harold McGee, and a hundred
others? But, to my mind, the best cookbooks of the twenty-first century
are among the very best ever written.
What follows is a list of
my personal favorites from the beginning of the new millennium to the
present. It’s a list that’s shaped by the particulars of how I eat, how I
cook, and how I read, and its ten volumes - which include a
profanity-filled restaurant scrapbook, a historiological cookbook of
cookbooks, and a multi-thousand-page set of culinary lab notes - may not
be the same that populate the Top Ten of any other cook.
But what
compels and delights me about my particular catalogue is that each book
is, at heart, a text that teaches rather than dictates, that emphasizes
cooking as a practice rather than as merely a means to a meal. They’re
books that not only have great recipes and gorgeous images but take
exuberant advantage of their form - subverting, reconsidering, and
reframing the rules and limits of cookbook writing.
If I’m stuck on what
to make for dinner, I have only to Google some variation of "the national dish of Norway." For proof of what an extraordinary object a
cookbook can be, I turn again and again to these.
The River Cottage Cookbook - by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (2001)
Changing
one’s relationship with food "involves no sacrifice, no hardship or
discomfort," Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writes, in his poetic ode to
the hands-on, homestead-ish life. His prescription is simple: get in
there and do it yourself - grow your own food, meet your meat, learn the
colors and patterns of the landscape around you through all its seasons.
Years before "farm to table" was a buzzword and Michael Pollan a
household name, Fearnley-Whittingstall was urging readers to move away
from industrial food systems and reacquaint themselves with lo-fi
self-sufficiency: he will teach you how to cultivate your own berry
brambles, trap your own eels (this is a very British book), and
raise (and slaughter) your own pigs.
The idea that pastoral practices
can be pleasurable instead of burdensome is old news for the many home
cooks today who know how to spot ramps in the wild and whip up D.I.Y.
ricotta. But "The River Cottage Cookbook" ’s ideas (and straightforward,
elegant recipes) remain striking reminders that what we eat isn’t just
food on a plate but part of a thrilling natural cycle, our human lives
brushing up against countless others, plant and animal alike.
The Zuni Café Cookbook - by Judy Rodgers (2002)
Since
its introduction, in the late nineteen-eighties, the roast chicken
served at San Francisco’s Zuni Café has earned a reputation as the best
roast chicken in the world - crisp-skinned, impossibly juicy, served atop a
salad of torn bread and bitter greens whose tart vinaigrette blends
with the rich, golden drippings. That recipe alone would land this book
on any list of the great and essential, but the rest of the volume has a
magic, as well.
Judy Rodgers got her culinary footing in France, living
for a year with the family of the chef Jean Troisgros, and in Berkeley,
where she cooked at Chez Panisse,
and this five-hundred-page manifesto draws on those threads of
experience (and others). The result is a remarkable collection of
emphatic culinary opinions, several hundred of which are disguised as
recipes: the merits of some soft cheeses over others, the precise way to
dress a salad, the nonnegotiable importance of salting raw beef and
fowl a day or more before it’s cooked.
The book’s magnificent opening
chapter, "What to Think About Before You Start, & While You Are
Cooking," lays out the philosophical blueprint for every New American
and California-casual cookbook that followed.
Baking: From My Home to Yours - by Dorie Greenspan (2006)
It’s
true, unfortunately, that the art of baking is more rigid and exacting
than that of stovetop cooking. The whims of a search-engine algorithm
won’t cut it if you want your biscuits perfectly fluffy, your cakes
precisely lofty yet moist, and your cookies angelic; a baker, more than
any other cook, needs a recipe writer she can truly trust.
To my mind,
there is none more reliable than Dorie Greenspan, a lapsed academic who
found her calling in cakes and pastries and built a career writing
uncommonly precise road maps for replicating her success. With her as a
guide, there is no room for self-destructive improvisation: her stylish,
rigorous, cheerful recipes work because she tells her reader exactly
how to make them work, anticipating our errors and our questions,
building contingencies, alternatives, and solutions right into the text,
and evincing a soothing flexibility.
If the ganache at the bottom of a
layered pudding spills up the sides of the cup, it’s pretty; if it
doesn't, the chocolate will be a surprise. And if you only have one
Greenspan book, it should be this one, a masterwork spanning breakfast
to midnight snacks - not to mention her famous World Peace Cookies.
Momofuku - by David Chang and Peter Meehan (2009)
For
many accomplished restaurant chefs, authoring a cookbook is just
another checkbox on the to-do list of culinary celebrity, something to
fit in after headlining a charity auction but before doing a stint on
reality TV.
Accordingly, countless celebrity-chef cookbooks consist of
little more than dinner-party recipes sprinkled with pleasantly
superficial biography. David Chang,
whose Momofuku restaurants blew up American restaurant culture and then
rebuilt it again in a decidedly hipper, more global, more postmodern
form, did something similarly upending with his Momofuku book.
Co-written with Peter Meehan, who later became Chang’s collaborator on
the now-defunct food magazine Lucky Peach, the book is
sometimes brilliantly cookable - see the dazzlingly effective method for
cast-iron ribeye, or the near-instant ginger-scallion sauce, which
tastes good on almost anything. Other times, by design, it is absolutely
impossible, outlining finicky and complex recipes that are best suited
for a brigade of swaggering line cooks.
I love the headline for the
frozen foie-gras torchon, which advises you not to make the
dish. Throughout the volume, Chang spends time grappling with what was,
at the time, the central drama of his career: initially the proud
outsider, devoted to rejecting the restaurant world’s stodgy
establishment, Momofuku’s culinary subversion was so forceful (and so
appealing) that it became an establishment of its own.
Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking - by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet (2011)
The
molecular-gastronomy movement was in full swing in 2011 - you could
hardly snap a napkin in a top-tier restaurant without hitting a
spherified cocktail and disrupting a stabilized emulsion or two. Into
the haze of edible smoke thudded Nathan Myhrvold’s five-volume,
2,438-page, several-hundred-dollar magnum opus, the result of three
years of testing in a full-time, fully staffed research kitchen.
Myhrvold, a technologist and former Microsoft C.T.O., has a habit
of professionalizing his extracurricular interests. Modernist
Cuisine strapped turbo boosters to the slow, iterative experiments that
had been happening in restaurant kitchens, delivering hundreds of
ideas, models, and scientific answers on a scale that had been
previously unthinkable.
For those of more modest culinary means,
there’s also the companion volume Modernist Cuisine at Home.
Curiously, almost as soon as the book landed, high-end chefs’
attentions moved elsewhere - the mad-scientist era of gels and foams gave
way to the more anthropological, emotional sense-of-place cooking
spearheaded by chefs like René Redzepi,
of Noma. Modernist Cuisine, it seems, had explored its subject so
comprehensively that there was little ground left to cover.
Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking - by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook (2015)
This
book isn’t responsible for the new trendiness of Middle Eastern
food - that honor belongs, arguably, to the collected works of Yotam
Ottolenghi, and his artful deployment of pomegranate seeds and tahini.
But, in my mind, Ottolenghi’s books make better sources of inspiration
than instruction or learning. For the latter, there’s Michael Solomonov. Zahav (like Momofuku) is a restaurant cookbook that avoids the
clichés of restaurant cookbooks - it’s based on the menu of Solomonov’s
Philadelphia restaurant of the same name, where the kitchen specializes
in what he calls modern Israeli cuisine, a patchwork of Levantine,
Maghrebi, Persian, Egyptian, Yemeni, and Eastern European influences.
The book goes both deep (into Solomonov’s own life story, which is
marked by great loss) and broad (addressing the cultural and political
complexities of considering Israel as a culinary entity). It’s also a
patient and encouraging guide to Solomonov’s dazzling recipes, worth the
price of entry for almost any single chapter alone, especially those
covering Solomonov’s magnificent salatim (dips, salads, and other small vegetable plates) and his approach to open-fire grilling.
Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto - by Aaron Franklin and Jordan Mackay (2015)
There
are a handful of conventional recipes in this book - a few sauces, a
coleslaw, some beef ribs, your usual barbecue accoutrements. But the big
one in Franklin Barbecue, the singular one this book exists to
document, is the one for the Austin pitmaster’s legendary smoked
brisket.
The actual brisket recipe fills eight pages late in the book,
but the two hundred or so pages that come before are, arguably, as
essential to the process. With the reverent intensity of the true
believer, Aaron Franklin delivers an almost comically sweeping exercise
in obsession and precision: if you want to make Franklin
Barbecue–quality barbecue, you can’t just buy a hunk of meat and light a
fire. You need to build a smoker and learn how to make it purr, you
need a wood guy, you need to learn how to manipulate flames and air.
The
great lie of most restaurant cookbooks is the promise that you and I
can do it at home. Like Chang’s frozen foie-gras torchon, Franklin’s
barbecue comes with a hard truth: you probably can’t. But if you wanted
to - if you really wanted to - he’s here to show you every single thing you need to know to pull it off.
The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African-American Cookbooks - by Toni Tipton-Martin (2015)
Early
in her career, the food writer and editor Toni Tipton-Martin noticed
that virtually none of the cookbooks she encountered in professional
kitchens were written by black cooks. Over decades, she read and
researched hundreds of rare and often forgotten works of the
African-American culinary record.
The Jemima Code is a chronicle of
her learning, an annotated catalogue of some hundred and sixty volumes,
many from Tipton-Martin’s own library, spanning from the days of slavery
to just a few years ago. Whether writing about a brief recipe pamphlet
or a dense guide to household management, Tipton-Martin gives each book a
generous page or more of comment, limning the biographies of the
authors and celebrating their accomplishments. It’s a beautiful and
essential corrective to the ongoing erasure of generations of black
American culinaria and its indelible influence on American cuisine writ
large. Jubilee, Tipton-Martin’s more conventional cookbook, compiling recipes from the books in this collection, is publishing this fall.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking - by Samin Nosrat (2017)
Reference
books, almost by definition, aren’t meant to be read straight through;
they’re index-driven, drily instructive knowledge-delivery mechanisms.
They’re certainly not supposed to do what "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" does:
just flat-out teach you, from the ground up, how to be a good cook.
The
title’s four words refer to the central pillars of cooking; the book
explains how mastering them will transform everyday cooking from rote
recipe-following to something more intuitive, jazz-like. The lush, four-episode Netflix series
inspired by this book might be the trebuchet that launched Samin Nosrat
to household-name status, but it’s her book that we’ll still be
reaching for decades from now, as a guide for beginners in need of
essential egg-scrambling techniques or for experienced cooks looking to
burnish their confidence and bolster their skills.
I always thought I
knew how to use salt, for example; after applying Nosrat’s
lessons - layering different varieties, seasoning at various stages of the
cooking process, exploring the mineral’s different guises and effects,
bold and subtle - I feel like I’ve levelled up from journeyman to master.
Feast: Food of the Islamic World - by Anissa Helou (2018)
Anissa
Helou, who grew up in Beirut, made her name with lyrical Mediterranean
cookbooks that make ideal celebratory dinners. Feast maintains her
crisp, evocative prose and approachable recipe writing, but shifts its
boundaries from the geographic to the religious, chronicling Muslim
culinary traditions across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
The book’s
three hundred recipes trace the path of Islam from its seventh-century
origins in present-day Saudi Arabia to the vibrant Muslim communities of
Senegal, India, Indonesia, China’s Xinjiang province, and more. The
food itself is phenomenal - breads, salads, stews, curries, sticky-sweet
desserts - but even more illuminating is Helou’s decision to include
blocks of different recipes for a single dish.
At first, they seem
redundant: half a dozen simple flatbreads, or innumerable variations on
ground spiced meat formed into kebabs. In fact, in outlining their
minute differences side by side, Helou reveals the habits, rituals, and
histories that make up a vast and heterogeneous religious culture and
cuisine.
