Becky Krystal's Reading List

"This is by Abra Berens, who is a chef I really like. She has written two other books: Ruffage , about vegetables; and Grist , about grains. This is the third in the series, and it focuses on fruit. What I love about her books is that they are cookbooks, and her recipes are very appealing and achievable, but they are also great reference books. These are the books that I keep at my desk when I want to learn about an ingredient. She has tips on how to store fruit, how to prepare fruit, and how to preserve it. If you’re just looking for that kind of practical advice, this is a great source. If you want to learn about the people who make food or who produce it, she sheds a spotlight on that. She does profiles of producers. These are the unsung heroes who help make our food possible, and they often don’t get the attention they deserve. I appreciate that she talks about them. She will let you pair different recipes together. She starts out the book with things to pair with fruit, like crackers and breads and batters and crusts, so that when you get to each individual fruit, you know what you can do with them as well. If you want to make a pie with this type of fruit, or you want to put this type of fruit over pudding—she helps you do that. Also, and I think this is common throughout all these books, she’s a very strong writer. I love the way she writes. It feels like you’re standing with her at the farmers’ market and she’s telling you what to do. She says that blueberries are “the golden retriever of the fruit world,” that they’re just all-round pleasant company—which I think is great. You know exactly what she means when she says that. Another thing I like is that she tucks variations into her recipes. If you read the introduction of the recipe, which is usually a few sentences, she will say: this also works with this fruit; if you don’t have this, use that. I appreciate that she takes fruit seriously for the valuable commodity it is. It’s not just something you have to eat out of hand. People pigeonhole fruit. They think you just eat it on its own or it’s just for desserts, and she really shows that there’s so much more to it than that."

"Yes. Similar to Pulp , it’s a great reference book. She has ideas for what to do with everything you have hanging around in your kitchen. She calls the book “a compendium of what to do with what you have.” That’s exactly what it is. You can page through and find ideas for every part of the potato or every variation on the potato—whether you have mash, whether you have this or that—and it makes you think twice before you toss the last bit of anything left in a jar. Finish a jar of pickles? There’s the brine. What do you do with the brine? It’s easy enough to just pour it down the drain, right? The juice from a can of tomatoes is great for soups; it’s great for braises. Food waste is a big topic right now, and it can feel, on a large scale, very daunting. To know that there are things you can do in your own kitchen to tackle this yourself and make a meaningful impact in your own way is really empowering. “There is so much to learn from people who learn from their parents or their grandparents, who make the most of what they have at home” I think it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole and drive yourself crazy trying to use everything. I don’t think Adler wants you to do that; I think she wants you to take even just small steps to rethink leftovers. So much cuisine around the world is based on scraps or random odds and ends, and we’ve lost that way of thinking, in some ways. We ran a recipe called Any Vegetable Minestra from this book. It is a very adaptable soup recipe: you use any liquid you have, any vegetables, any beans or starch. It’s all these disparate things that come together. You can flavor it however you want, and it’s just so smart. People need to be flexible with what they use, and I think this helps a lot. Adler has a lyrical way of writing that is also very practical. It’s a very engaging read. This is one that my colleague Ann Maloney recommended. I read her copy of the book, and it’s full of bookmarks, which is a really good sign. I think this is one you’ll keep on the shelf and pull out all the time."

"I chose this book. It is a baking book, so it’s right up my alley. It’s about biscuits, which I adore. For your readers in the UK, I just want to clarify that these are not what you would call biscuits, which are what we Americans call cookies; these are more akin to bread or rolls. They are a Southern specialty, although people eat them all over. They’re what you’d have with something else or on their own. They’re fluffy, they’re flaky. I talked to Council for a piece I did on biscuits several years ago, and I was very happy to see that she released this book. It is possibly one of my favorite single-topic books. I was so excited when I saw this book, and it didn’t disappoint. Even today, the contribution of Black cooks and Black women is seriously underappreciated and underrepresented. It’s never been given the same platform or praise as European fine cuisines. People don’t give it the respect it deserves. They think, oh, it’s just home cooking, whatever. It shouldn’t be that way. These are supremely talented cooks. What I appreciate about Council’s book is that she also takes a historical perspective. She weaves in stories from her family, and older cookbooks that were published by Black women and groundbreaking at the time. In a small way, it’s starting to do what these types of authors haven’t been able to do in the past. Again, I like that it’s a fairly narrow-topic cookbook. It lets you dive into a single type of food without feeling overwhelmed, and it makes you feel in awe of how many ways you can eat and make a biscuit. There are sweet biscuits; there are savory biscuits; there are ones that you fold almost like pastry, so you get layers; there are scoop biscuits, where you just stir and drop. At the Post, I ran a recipe called Butter Swim Biscuits from this book. It was one of our most popular recipes of the year. It’s a dough that’s simply stirred together. You melt butter in a dish in a really hot oven, and then you pour the batter over and you bake them. You get these fluffy, tall, salty, buttery, crispy-edged biscuits. I think this is my new favorite way to make biscuits. They can feel intimidating sometimes, and this recipe is not intimidating. She just has all different types of recipes and ways to make biscuits that I would never have thought of. She has options for people who are gluten-free or who prefer whole-wheat, so she’s trying to be really inclusive. I think it’s a fun book and I look forward to making all kinds of biscuits from it in the future."

"Yes, and they go well together. The Post ’s Food and Dining editor, Joe Yonan, picked this book, and it’s completely engrossing. When he wrote about a recipe from this book, he said he immediately started bookmarking all the different recipes he wanted to make, which, again, is the sign of a great book. The recipe he did run was Cacio e Pepe Soup with Chickpeas and Kale , which also proved incredibly popular. It’s filling, comforting, and nourishing. It’s got cheese and butter, but also kale and chickpeas. Sometimes people think vegetarian food is very limiting, that it’s not filling, and that you’re going to still be hungry. This is just like a hug in a bowl. It’s the kind of book where you look through and you think, ‘I have never seen dishes like that before.’ Bhogal’s family background is Indian, but her grandfather had migrated to Kenya, so she spent the first seven years of her life in Kenya. She pulls inspiration from there, and she pulls inspiration from her Indian heritage, and now she’s based in the UK. Some of the things that I found really interesting are where she pulls together those different influences. She has pea kofta Scotch eggs, lemon and curry leaf crumpets. It’s so fun. This is the kind of stuff where you think, wow. It’s fusion not just for the sake of fusion. It’s really creative. She also pulls inspiration from other places. She has an Aegean dip that reminds her of Greece, and a hot corn and cheese dip that she had in New York, so it’s global and it’s fun and inspiring. I love the way she writes with affection for her family, especially her grandfather and mother, and how they cooked for and nourished their families. I think she has a lot in common with Nigella Lawson, in terms of embracing the joy and sensuality of food, and that also comes across in the photos. They’re richly colored. They’re very enticing and fun. It’s a really exciting book and I’m looking forward to trying some more of these dishes, too."

"My colleague Olga Massov recommended this book. It focuses on Jewish cooking in Rome. Jews in Rome have a very long history, dating back something like two thousand years. For about three hundred of those, they were limited to a ghetto, a very small area of Rome. This gets at what I was talking about in terms of home cooking, and being smart with what you have, because they were limited to certain ingredients. There were a lot of things they couldn’t buy, they couldn’t get, they had to have the small types of fish, so these were ingenious recipes through which they made do with what they had. The cover of the book has an artichoke on it, and fried artichokes are an iconic Roman Jewish dish. People go and get them and eat them on the streets now, but back then, it was because artichokes were one of the things they could actually acquire, in addition to lots of olive oil. What Olga really liked about this book and what I also appreciated was that, in general, the recipes are short. They don’t require a lot of ingredients. They’re approachable, again, because these are homestyle recipes. It’s also part travelogue. Koenig mentions in the introduction that she wrote a lot of it when she was in Covid-19 lockdown, and we weren’t traveling anywhere. You get that feeling of love and appreciation and yearning for a place that makes you want to hop on the next plane to Rome. When she finally was able to visit, she and her photographer went, and the photos are just stunning. They give you such a sense of place. You feel like you’re there, it’s about real people, and it definitely feels like a coffee table book that’s about travel and cooking. One of my pet peeves is when there aren’t that many photos of recipes in cookbooks, because I want to know what the dishes look like. There are a lot of recipe photos in this book. Not every dish has one, but I don’t mind because there are so many great atmospheric photos of Rome that really make you feel like you’ve gone there or that you want to go. Olga said she already has given this book to people as a gift for Hanukkah and they loved it. It’s a great merging of place and food, and you can tell that this is a place Koenig is passionate about. It wasn’t just that she thought, ‘I need to write another cookbook.’ She cares deeply about these recipes and history and people."

"I am a pretty passionate baker and this book really spoke to me. Her focus is on whole grains that people want to bake with for nutritional and ecological reasons. She takes a lot of recipes that you might otherwise make with regular flour and uses different grains in them. So, you’ll see things made with barley, buckwheat, corn, rye, sorghum. She also talks about wheat, which is obviously what most of us use, but she focuses on whole grains, wholewheat and local varieties that aren’t as processed and don’t require the same kinds of resources. This is a great book for both cooking and reference. She divides it up into chapters that are headlined by each of the grains. She gives you a lot of great information: history, how to buy them, how to store them and how to use them. I didn’t actually realize until I read the book that she has a background in journalism, which really comes through—it’s very well-researched. There are sweet and savory options, everything from cakes and cookies to salads and stews. They all feature the different types of grains that she talks about. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s also got great reference material in the back, which for someone who geeks out on baking, I found extremely appealing. There are charts about weights and measurements. What’s also really awesome is she has a page that breaks out the recipes that appeal to specific diets, which is sometimes hard when you’re looking at a cookbook. If you’re someone who’s vegan, or gluten-free, you don’t have to look through all the recipes and figure out which ones you should use. She’s got a page that says, ‘these ones are vegan, these are gluten-free.’ She also offers lots of alternatives in the recipes to switch the grains and see which ones you like better. So it gives people permission to experiment with stuff a little bit."

"Yes, this came out in the UK last year but it didn’t come out for us in the States until 2021, so I didn’t get my hands on it until this year and I’ve gone ahead and included it. I watched the Netflix show of the same name last year when I was at home, not doing anything, and it was just a breath of fresh air. A lot of the recipes that were on that series are also in this book, which certainly drew me in. But she’s such a good writer, her voice just jumps off the page. She talks a lot about her family and her kids, which is appealing to me as someone who is herself a parent. A lot of the recipes feel like they’re meant for families. They’re generous, they’re sharing. One of the things that she does a lot of, which I love, is the tear-and-share, big things that people can pull off, family-style. She describes the recipes as ‘traditional, twisted and everything in between.’ Nothing is sacred. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, she doesn’t take food too seriously. She’s willing to use store-bought ingredients and does some really clever things: she has a cupcake recipe where the frosting includes softened ice cream, which is so smart. There’s also a cookie in the bottom of the cake part. She just comes up with things that I would never have thought of. She has a layer cake, but it’s a loaf cake, and you cut the loaf cake into layers. I’ve made layer cakes, and I’ve never done that with just a regular loaf cake. And I’m like, ‘Why haven’t I done that? That makes total sense and it’s cool looking.’ “She doesn’t need any introduction, but if you were to need an introduction to Nadiya, this would be the book” The photography is really nice. She has some good process photos that show you some of the steps that might be trickier, which I always appreciate. A lot of cookbooks have the finished, glamour shot, but they don’t show you how to do stuff. I think that’s really nice. It’s just really fun. It includes sweet and savory and there are certainly some savory ones I want to try. There’s a big noodle dish where you throw dried noodles into a dish with some liquid and it cooks and no boiling is needed. She’s just really smart about shortcuts or things that you might not have thought of that save you time. Like you said, she doesn’t need any introduction, but if you were to need an introduction to Nadiya, this would be the book. It’s a great book."

"I love a good sequel. He had One Tin Bakes last year. This is One Tin Bakes Easy , which I think was inspired in part by people being at home so much. The premise is the same. Everything is made in a nine-by-13-inch tray. The recipes are a little more streamlined than the recipes last year. He has a whole chapter on five-ingredient recipes, which is great. And he has included a lot more recipes that are designed to be gluten-free and vegan in this book, which people are always interested in. This is not just swapping stuff. These are recipes specifically designed to be vegan and gluten-free. “Like he says in the intro—easy doesn’t have to be boring” Like he says in the intro—easy doesn’t have to be boring. You’re not looking at this book and going, ‘Oh, no, these are really too simple.’ You look at these and you say, ‘I want to make that’, ‘I could make that’—it’s very accessible. I made this chocolate-dipped honeycomb, which was super easy and fun. It really shows you how much you can do in that style of tin, whether it’s a cake or a bun or scones—his croissant bread pudding looks great. I think that’s also appreciated because bakers in particular feel like they have to have every type of specialty tool—I’m guilty of that myself. But seeing how much can be done in this one tin really can open your eyes. A lot of the equipment needed for these is fairly straightforward. There are some recipes for cookies or cakes that are thrown together in a food processor, which I think is also great. You don’t even need a stand mixer for some of them. And he shot his own photos and they look great. I’m definitely going to hold on to this one."

"Dorie Greenspan is one of those upper echelon cookbook authors. I love her. I’ve worked with her a bit and I never cease to learn something from her. It’s a gorgeous book, first of all, and it’s got so many different types of bakes. They just run the gamut. If you want something really simple, like a simple loaf cake, that’s in here; if you want a showstopper layered cake, that’s in here, too. She has a whole section devoted to chocolate chip cookies. You think, ‘Okay, how much can I do with those?’ She makes a compelling case that there’s a lot you can do with them, swapping in flours, using some cocoa powder. She has one recipe, which I’m really excited to try, that turns them into slice and bake cookies, and then you bake them in a muffin tin, so you get these chocolate chip cookies with really crispy, caramelized edges. It’s so smart. Again, someone who comes up with things that I would never have thought of. She does a bread pudding with scones. Of course, why not? She has a reputation for being very reader-friendly and that certainly comes through in this book. She is always offering information, like how to store things, which is missing in a lot of recipes. Or whether you can do any of the work ahead of time. Basically, any time a recipe has that option, she includes it. She also has little sections in most of the recipes called ‘playing around’ that give you ideas on how you can customize it to your own tastes, swapping out chocolate or flours or decorating them differently. And she has a very good writing style. My colleague Ann Maloney, who has baked a lot out of this book, said that she always feels like she’s standing next to you, but not in an overbearing way. She tells you what to anticipate. If something’s going to look weird, ‘don’t worry, it’ll come together’; ‘Here’s where you might run into trouble.’ It’s a very reader-friendly style. Even if there are more complicated recipes in here, I still think this is a book that a baker who’s a relative beginner could pick up and have some success with. She said this was her 14th cookbook and it’s the 30th anniversary of her very first cookbook. Dorie is here to stay. And we are lucky."

"Vallery’s is a great story. She used to be an attorney. But then she turned to baking full time. She was on the Great American Baking Show , which is the US version of the UK’s Bake Off. And she won. But her season was cancelled after an episode or two, because of allegations of impropriety by one of the judges, so we never got to see it. When your only prize is exposure and not money or deals or anything like that, that was a huge blow. So she decided to bounce back and people tried to help her out. She has this great metaphor in here about bread, that it rises, it gets punched down, and it rises again. That comes through in this book a lot. She talks about her experience, how she’s trying to make the most of this opportunity, which was also a limited opportunity. So this is a little bit like one of the books I was talking about earlier in relation to representation. There hasn’t been a lot of representation of people of color writing baking books. Vallery has learned a lot from her grandmothers and her great-grandmothers and aunts, all these women who played an important role in her life. For many years—and probably even now, to some extent—that type of home cooking and baking was not given the respect it deserves. She goes into the history of her family. These were people cooking in their homes, women of color, who were often working for white women. There are a lot of Southern recipes that her family makes. But it’s a great mix because she also spent a lot of time in France, so you get cannelés and crepe cakes and all these French pastries—she even had a macaron business at one point. Mixed with that are a lot of recipes that draw on her Louisiana heritage: crawfish pie, fruit cobblers and stuff like that. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She also has a very accessible way of writing, interspersing anecdotes with tips on everything from making biscuits to flaky pie crust. One thing which I think is really cool and innovative—I don’t know how many people have done this—but at various points throughout the book, she offers you an online option, either ‘scan the QR code’ or ‘go to my website and I’ll show you how to do this’ which I think is great. It’s not just a static book. My colleague Aaron Hutcherson, who has cooked some from here, was raving about this pecan Bundt cake, which looks very unassuming, but it’s packed with pineapples and raisins and uses brown sugar instead of regular white sugar. He loved it and his book club went crazy for it. But I think this is also a good beginner-friendly book, too. I hope it’s just one of many we’ll see that give more representation to people who maybe wouldn’t have been given a deal in the past."

"This worked perfectly for me because I was one of those people who picked up sourdough baking in 2020 when we were locked down. People were just finding something new to do, but this is not a flash in the pan for Tara. She’s a longtime bread-baker and baking instructor, and that really comes out in this book. She is an excellent teacher. She teaches lots of in-person workshops, and this book is really written like she is teaching you how to bake bread—specifically sourdough. “We’re still riding that 2020 wave, when a lot of people got into bread baking” This is the book I wish I had when I started trying to make sourdough, which did not go well at first. It’s a great book because you can come at it as a beginner and you can come at it if you’re more experienced. If you’re a beginner, you learn how to make your sourdough starter, feed it and care for it, and do some easy loaves. If you’re a more experienced baker she has different types of starters that you can play with, not just with regular white flour. She has a rye starter and she has this other one called ‘desem,’ which you start cultivating in dry flour, before bringing it to life. She teaches you to use a lot of different grains, especially whole grains. She has a lot of reference charts. As someone who writes and reads a lot of recipes, I think she does a very good job with those. She gives you that kit of information at the top, which isn’t always easy to find in bread recipes—a brief overview of the advanced prep, how long it’s going to take, and the loaf you’re going to get. Being able to quickly flip through the book and see that is really helpful. There are also recipes for sourdough discard, for when you have extra stuff. You can make cookies, crackers, other things with it. I think anyone who’s into bread should check this one out."

"This is the first book that has been devoted to the Juneteenth holiday, which in the United States marks the time, several months after the Civil War , when enslaved people in Texas were informed that they were free following the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued a couple of years before. It was first officially celebrated in 1866. And since then, it’s really become an important holiday for Black Americans. A lot of food is consumed; it’s a time when people do lots of grills and cookouts. This is just a really great book. The author talks about how she wants to celebrate Black joy, and that really comes across. The recipes are as you would expect for a holiday where you’re celebrating and entertaining and sharing with people. They’re festive, they’re colorful, and she also talks about wanting to move beyond soul food and Southern food, which is how a lot of food associated with Black culture is pigeonholed. Obviously it’s so much more than that. People make so many more things than that. She has really creative recipes. One thing that jumped out to me was what she calls an ‘afro egg cream’. In New York delis, an egg cream is a drink made of chocolate syrup, milk, and seltzer water. Her interpretation includes hibiscus tea, which makes it bright red. On Juneteeth, a lot of people will drink what they call ‘red drink.’ It can vary, but it’s often some kind of red beverage. She’s just a really smart recipe developer. You pick up things like adding grilled poblano peppers to your coleslaw. She has this lovely salad I can’t wait to make next summer which is melon—cantaloupe and honeydew—with feta and lime zest. And although she calls it a Juneteenth book, and it absolutely is, I wouldn’t want people to think it’s only for that. It’s just a great book for any kind of entertaining, where you can pick up fresh and interesting recipes. And it’s a really beautifully shot book, in terms of the photographs, too. I really enjoyed this one."

"This is a book that feels very much of its time, but also timeless. She talks a lot about her struggles with trying to get food on the table due to depression and anxiety. Of course, a lot of these things for many people were exacerbated in the last two years by the pandemic. She talks about the connection between food and what’s going on internally, how sometimes it can help to be cooking—and sometimes it can make you spiral out even more. She’s very honest about all these things that she and other people go through. Sometimes you can read a cookbook and feel it’s unrealistic. You’re not always going to be happy in the kitchen. I’m probably as guilty of this as much as anyone else; sometimes cooking is a real struggle. And she acknowledges that. She emphasizes that ‘good enough’ is not necessarily settling for less; it’s your best at any given moment, whether that’s putting cheese on crackers or cooking up a feast for people you love. One thing I like that she says is: cooking is an essential skill, but it amplifies the feelings we bring to it. Each chapter starts with an essay and then she shares recipes. The recipes are all very approachable, they’re things that you can riff on. It’s stuff you would make every day at home: pasta, soups, salads, cookies. Some are what you would call comfort foods, some are brighter. So it gives you this whole spectrum of things you can make, depending on how you’re feeling. She also gives you permission to take it easy and eat chips and dip, or whatever you feel like at any given moment. It’s like a pep talk, but a realistic one: ‘Take care of yourself, it’s okay to feel like you’re struggling—but feed yourself and take care of yourself.’ It’s really refreshing, without overly glossing over things."

"I was looking through this book yesterday, and my mouth was actually watering. Which does not always happen. I just love Chinese takeouts so much, and I think a lot of people do. We normally think of this as takeout food, right? It’s cheap, it’s fast, someone in a restaurant is making it. We don’t give it the respect it deserves. I mean, these are incredibly talented people and this book is based on a lot of recipes from the family’s restaurants. And it makes you appreciate what you might eat in a restaurant, but it also shows you how you can make these dishes at home. And it’s not that hard. “‘Good enough’ is not necessarily settling for less; it’s your best at any given moment, whether that’s putting cheese on crackers or cooking up a feast for people you love” Normally people wouldn’t make this food at home. But here recipes are concise, they’re clear. It uses ingredients that are appropriate for the cuisine. You’ll need to go to the Asian supermarket sometimes to get the ingredients. There are a lot of familiar dishes in here—like your wonton soup, sticky BBQ ribs, and sweet and sour pork, which was a recipe from the book we ran recently . And then there’s also just really fun things that you can tell that he worked on himself, fun mash-ups. like steamed hotdog buns, Nutella mochi, Chinese-style buffalo wings. So you get a lot of the things you expect. And then a few bonuses that feel new. It’s just a fun book. People often complain about long recipe introductions, but here they’re brief, they’re funny, and they get right to the point. And I think it’s great. I think it will help you appreciate the art of what people are doing in restaurants, as well as helping you to bring it home to your own kitchen."

"This is also a really fun, quirky book. I actually talked to them for an article on pasta shapes I wrote earlier this year. And these people are so into noodles—almost to the point where you think it’s gone a little bit too far, but they’re so smart about it. And they’re so passionate about it. That really comes through in this book. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter At the beginning of the book, they have a visual guide to noodles, and descriptions are in haiku form. It’s so funny. You could easily read over it and not realize it, or miss where they say it’s a haiku. And it’s like, wow, you’re writing poetry for noodles. The front of the book has lots of great tips on buying noodles, cooking noodles, and how you should drain and sauce them. That’s a good intro. They tackle a lot of classic dishes from both Italian and Asian traditions because noodles play prominent roles in many cuisines, but especially those two. So they have Cacio e Pepe , and they teach you how to make homemade pasta, then they have a ton of Asian dishes, you know—soup dishes or chow—fun stuff like that. The recipes also encourage lots of suggestions on how to riff on things, things that noodle dishes take especially well to—toppings or sauce, even the shapes of pasta that you use. They’re really creative. There’s a recipe in here for ‘French Onion Mac and Cheese’: it’s macaroni and cheese but with caramelized onions—damn, how have I not had that before? There’s another for ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Noodles,’ which are with green onion oil and chow mein. So you can tell they have a lot of fun with it. They have one pasta with kale that they call ‘Kaling Me Softly’… It doesn’t take itself too seriously. Sometimes pasta people put their work on a pedestal. It has to be very pure. You know, the classic dishes. But, while they pay a lot of homage to that, they just free you to have fun and get creative. They also set aside a couple of pages where they do deep dives on more specific topics—like all the different brands of instant noodles you might find when you go to the store, or how to build a noodle bowl. There are a lot of recipes that you can throw together on a weeknight, and there are ones you can do that take longer. If you like noodles, I think you’re gonna want to get this one for sure."

"I actually got to meet Adeena when she came to the Post and we did an Instagram story with her, so I was familiar with the book and the food and one of my colleagues has picked it as her favourite cookbook of the year . Israeli food and Middle Eastern food is really having a moment here in the US. It’s such a sunny, bright cuisine and, when I read the book, I can really feel Adeena’s zest for this cuisine. She’s this joyful, giving, warm person and that really comes over. As for the food, it’s a mix of stuff, some traditional and some of which is a little bit more of a mash-up. “I read a lot of cookbooks. You can learn a lot that way” She has a recipe for Israeli ‘everything spice’, which is a really fun idea. She starts adding in things you find in Israel and she also has some other really clever fusion dishes. She has a ‘pitaquiles’ dish which uses pita breads in place of the tortilla chips. Chilaquiles are kind of a traditional Mexican dish where you have a sauce and you have tortilla chips, but here you use pitas. A few more things I liked about it: aesthetically, it’s really nice. You really feel like you’re in Israel. There’s a lot of bright colours. It feels like you could be standing in front of a window in Tel Aviv on a beautiful sunny day. She introduces you to a lot of ingredients that, even if you don’t end up making any of the dishes, maybe you just end up using elsewhere. For instance, she also introduces some clever swaps, like using date syrup instead of honey. And she has this tahini magic shell, which is brilliant. It’s just really fun stuff like that. And I’ve had a couple of the dishes out of the book and they’re delicious."

"Yes. She’s a first generation American and it feels like a timely book, not just thinking about the food itself. Obviously, there’s a big immigration debate going on in America and she gives a sense of what it’s like straddling two worlds. I think that will really appeal to a lot of people . There’s a little bit of a memoir, but it’s really about the food. I’m really passionate about baking and desserts, and I think Indian desserts are totally under-appreciated in the US. Americans aren’t really familiar with them. I love them. They tend to be a little bit on the sweet side, but I’m okay with that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I remember flipping through this book when it first came out and I wanted to make almost everything, which is always a good sign. She has this nice mix of traditional Indian desserts and then dishes that are more of a mash-up or ‘inspired by’. So the recipe I’m going to be featuring in our package is a gulab jamun Bundt cake . Gulab jamun are basically doughnuts that are first of all fried dough balls, which are then soaked in a syrup. They’re a pain to make and you have to fry them and so she gets those flavours and applies them to a bundt cake, which you soak in a syrup. So you’ve got that flavour and texture of gulab jamun but in a much easier-to-execute format. And, like Adeena, she also had a little bit about introducing you to ingredients that you can incorporate into your cooking."

"Yes. Everything is made with whole foods. Everything is made from scratch. It’s vegetarian and it is also gluten-free. There are some recipes with eggs, but you also have a lot of vegan options for baked goods. She gives a lot of master recipes that you can then craft yourself. There’s a master nut butter recipe and there are different ways to combine the nuts or to combine them with different herbs and spices. There’s a master non-dairy milk recipe and then you can start adding in your flavourings. It’s also not preachy, which can be a pitfall for these kinds of books. She’s very relaxed. We’ve run one recipe from the book already, which was a pine nut sauce with pasta and it was one of our best performing recipes. The readers just loved it. It’s another recipe where she gives you different variations for the seasons. There’s no refined sugar in there, which is appealing to a lot of people these days. And she makes use of a lot of interesting grains and the flavours are really clear and simple but delicious."

"I love Andrea. She’s a great teacher and that really comes across in this book. Vietnamese food is not something that has made a lot of headway into home cooking in America. We go out to Vietnamese restaurants, but it’s not a cuisine that a lot of people make at home. And I think that alone makes this book worth paying attention to. Like Hetal Vasavada, Andrea is a first generation American. Her family fled Vietnam and moved to California. She grew up without much access to the ingredients that her family had had in Vietnam and sometimes they would travel several hours to get what they needed, shopping at a lot of the local grocery stores. A major premise of the book is that these are all ingredients that can be found at mainstream supermarkets today. Thankfully, mainstream supermarkets are now a lot better than when Andrea was young. So it’s easy to find fish sauce and sesame oil and even rice paper and rice noodles. There’s a lot of fried shallots in Vietnamese cuisine, but she uses French’s fried onions , which is a perfect stand-in. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She talks about trying to make recipes that are streamlined but not dumbed down and she redoes classic dishes with some non-traditional ingredients. So the recipes are things that you feel like you could probably accomplish on a weeknight. She has advice on everything from how to boil rice, to how to roll rice paper, or bruise-versus-smash ingredients. For someone who’s lacking a bit of confidence in the kitchen, she can really teach you a lot."

"It really is different from any other cookbook that I’ve seen, even down to the look of it. It looks almost like a novel by its shape and the paper used. It’s a combination of cookbook and memoir. You could read the whole book cover-to-cover and be satisfied, even if you didn’t make a dish from it. Obviously the writing is beautiful. She has just edited a poetry anthology , which makes total sense. Just flip through it and on every page there’s great writing. There’s this passage about making bread, where she talks about the sound of your knuckles rapping on the base of the baked bread, the morning sun in the window and the dust motes. I mean, you just want to read on. But she’s very conversational and the recipes are not written in a complicated way. It’s very straightforward recipe writing. It’s done with these short sentences: do this, do that—it reminds me a bit of William Carlos Williams . It’s really refreshing in that way. There’s not a lot of flouncy language. It feels like she’s talking to you, but it’s not so casual that it’s cutesy. No, no. The name comes from this particularly bad night she had. She describes how she was in despair just lying on the floor in her apartment and just looking at this chicken hanging in a bag on the chair. She’s with her boyfriend and she got off the floor and they cook the chicken and eat it at night with bread and garlic. Even that’s just a beautiful passage. So it’s worth the read, even if you’re not going to cook. All the recipes are good. We ran one, a broccoli toast , which was simple and delicious—not at all intimidating. The Washington Post’s 2019 cookbook roundup—featuring 11 books—can be found here ."

"This is someone you all are probably especially familiar with in the UK, since he was the first winner ever of The Great British Bake Off. This was my pick. I am an extremely passionate baker. I love looking at baking books . And I thought this was such a well done book. It ‘only’ has 70 recipes. Of course, that’s a lot, but you get a lot of cookbooks these days that are just absolutely massive and there are so many recipes, you’re never conceivably going to make your way through them. And sometimes you wonder whether there are too many recipes. Are they all going to be good? But with this book, as soon as I got it, I wanted to make everything in here and I felt like I actually could. There are 70 recipes and I’ve already made about a half-dozen. Everything in here is made in a 9-by-13 inch pan. There’s a lot of simple stuff. There are traybakes, there are cakes and bars. It just shows you the diverse things you can do with this one pan. It’s a workhorse. And it’s kind of homely. It’s just a rectangle, but you can do cakes, cheesecakes, bars. You can do no-bakes, which is one recipe I’m featuring in our holiday cookie issue. The flavors are really good. “I love looking at baking books” I have a lot of admiration for people who write well written recipes and these recipes are extremely well written. They’re descriptive, but not over the top. There’s an economy of language, but one that says everything that you need to know. Kimber is based in London, so he uses the metric weights, which is the baking standard really, even for people here now, but he also includes imperial weights, which is still what a lot of people in America use—pounds and ounces. He does the same for volume. This is a book that I think almost anyone could pick up and make something out of, even if you’re not a really confident baker. Everything I’ve tried has turned out extremely well. There’s a range. Some of them are just one-bowl things. One of the recipes I featured from here is a ‘Dutch baby’, which is a baked pancake. It is so easy. It’s really just flour and eggs and, basically, dump it in a pan and bake it. But then he has things I wouldn’t even have thought you could make using a 9-by-13 inch pan. He has cakes that you can turn into a roll, or where the cake layers are standing vertically in the cake. So, that’s what’s really nice. There’s this whole spectrum, from super-simple to things that are a little more involved, but still achievable."

"This is a really good book. It’s Nik Sharma’s second. He also has a pretty popular blog called A Brown Table . For people who are familiar with Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat and The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt , this is like a natural extension of that. It gets into food science and why things work the way they do and why things taste the way they do. Nik has a science background, so he’s very comfortable talking about everything from the temperatures at which egg protein sets, to the different chemicals that cause certain aromas or pigments. He has all these charts throughout the book that look a lot like things you might find in a science book , which I enjoy. Maybe that’s not for everyone, but I think anyone who wants to understand why food tastes and feels the way it does is really going to like this. It gets into those details in an approachable way. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s certainly something in here for everyone. If you feel your eyes starting to glaze over because you don’t feel you need to know the name of the chemicals that cause food to smell the way it does, that’s fine. You can take as much or as little from it as you want. Even if you do nothing but look at the recipes and the introductory notes, it’s enough. For each recipe he has a section called ‘the flavor approach’ that explains why certain ingredients are in there and what they do. So, if you want to know why a recipe is in there, it tells you. One of my colleagues said this book is especially great during the pandemic, when we’re all grocery shopping less because if you don’t have one ingredient, by understanding the concept behind it, you can substitute it with something else. She was making a collard green and chickpea stew which calls for tamarind, which she didn’t have and wasn’t going to run out and buy specially. But she had pomegranate molasses, which she knew from reading this book provides acid and brightness and was a good swap. So, it definitely helps you understand ingredients in ways that you can then swap them in easier. Obviously, if you make a recipe exactly the way Nik says, it’s going to be delicious. But it also helps you understand how to start taking things in your own direction. Yes. He breaks the book into chapters that address particular flavors, but also how food feels and its aromas. There’s a ‘bitterness’ chapter. There’s a ‘sweetness’ chapter. There’s lots of connections between what you read in the front material and what’s in the recipes. The introductory part of each chapter goes more in-depth into the different types of tastes and, at the end of each introductory part of the chapter, he has quick tips about using things in the kitchen—for instance, if you don’t want your apples to brown, use lemon juice. There are a lot of practical kitchen tips in there."

"This is Bryant Terry’s fourth solo cookbook. He is really great and he’s plant-based. Bryant is extremely good with flavors. They’re really punchy. We ran a recipe for spinach salad with blackened chickpeas. You use this Cajun blackening spice that is amazing. He’s doing things you wouldn’t think to do with vegetables. He’s not someone who wants a vegetable to replicate the experience of meat. He does these dried, dehydrated mushrooms, which a lot of people would call ‘mushroom bacon’ but he refuses to call it mushroom bacon. For him, it is what it is. He’s African American and his wife is Chinese American. There’s this great eclecticism, pulling from different parts of both of their cultures. He talks about using recipes inspired by the African diaspora and there’s a lot of Asian flavors in there, too. They are not necessarily really delicate little recipes. These are vegetable dishes that you can eat with a knife and a fork that will be satisfying for what they are. They’re not pretending to be anything. He doesn’t like those tropes where you cook ‘cauliflower rice’—his attitude is, that’s not rice, just get over it! There’s a sweet way he breaks out the book. He said it was inspired by his daughter in her gardening class at school. It’s divided into seeds, bulbs, stems, flowers, fruits, leaves, fungi, tubers and roots. Those are the categories and each chapter starts out with an easier recipe to get you comfortable with a technique like tempura frying, or something like that, and then he has a bunch of other ones. “He’s doing things you wouldn’t think to do with vegetables” Each chapter, as with some of his previous books, includes recommendations for music to listen to while you’re making it, or that he was listening to when he made it. He cites Dr Jessica B. Harris , another cookbook author, as his inspiration for doing that. It’s fun and really clever stuff. He did this recipe with yard-long beans, which are a pretty popular Asian food. And one of the garnishes in there was just grated roasted peanuts. You take the peanuts and you grate them on a microplane zester. And I thought, ‘why have I never done that?’ That’s a great way to add flavor to the top, if you don’t want crunchy pieces of peanuts. He also has a lot of practical tips embedded in a lot of the recipes, things like how to make vegetable purées or tips on canning and pickling. And at the end he has this cupboard section of a lot of kind of pantry staples that you could just keep around to add flavour, or vegan staples like cashew cream, which is used a lot for dairy, plus flavored oils and vinegars. There’s definitely a lot in there and I kept on thinking, ‘Oh, I want to make that’. Yes. We have made dishes out of all these things, so I can tell you that there’s a lot to like. He actually addresses this in the introduction to the book. There are lots of dishes—sides and lighter things—which he says you can make in 30 minutes. Then there are also the more in-depth recipes that maybe you’d want to do on a weekend. There are standard things like a squash soup, where you just cook some aromatics and throw in some squash and simmer it and puree it. And then there are more involved ones, like jerk tofu in collard wraps, which involves marinating and frying the tofu. Wherever you are, you can hop in here and find something to make."

"This is such a lovely book and it’s definitely different from any of the other ones that we have on our list this year. Bibi is the Swahili word for grandmother and the authors have interviewed and got recipes from grandmothers, so it’s not really the type of cookbook we’re used to. It’s not chef-y, it’s not from a blogger. These are everyday home cooks. Some of them have immigrated to the US or other places. Some of them are still in Africa . Some of them have immigrated within Africa. It’s just a beautiful book and it feels very relevant to today in terms of the political climate, especially in the United States (and elsewhere), with the current focus on Black Lives Matter and the immigrant experience. In food media there’s been this movement in the right direction to make sure that people discuss the origins of ingredients and give credit to cultures where it’s due. These are the people who are at the origin-level of recipes, the people cooking in their home kitchens. Each chapter is dedicated to one of the countries in the book and starts out with interviews with a couple of the bibis. And it just lets them speak for themselves. This isn’t about a cookbook author swooping in and speaking for someone else. It’s literally a transcript of their view and it’s very approachable. These are women who are cooking for their families every day, or almost every day. For the people who are still in Africa, or who had these recipes from their family, these are people who don’t have access to sophisticated, fancy equipment or expensive ingredients. So again, especially important now, it’s very pantry-friendly. You get a lot of flavor without a huge investment in ingredients. One of the recipes that we’re running is this chicken with ginger and garlic. There are five ingredients and it just blew one of my colleagues away. She made it for her family and everyone was like, ‘Wow!’ It’s so packed with flavour. The book has these simple dumplings with cardamom—one of my personal favorite spices. It’s very accessible. There are not a lot of Africa-oriented cookbooks out there, and even fewer that treat each country as a unique culinary culture, as this one does. Africa tends to get lumped together. It’s a bit of a blind spot for a lot of people in food media and by having each chapter feature a specific country, with an introduction to the country’s history, its economy and resources, the language and religion, this book really is making a very concerted effort to explain the very wide breadth of food culture in Africa. It shouldn’t be treated in a uniform way. It’s a continent—people don’t talk about ‘European food’! Exactly. Right. It’s Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar and Comoros. One of the things that’s mentioned in the book is that a lot of these places were integral to the spice route. So, spices play a big role in a good number of the recipes. They’re a really nice way to add flavor to otherwise humble ingredients. Yes. One of the things the women talk about is that meat, for a lot of people in Africa, is a luxury. It’s expensive and maybe they get it once a week, if they have access to it at all. So there are a lot of vegetarian and even vegan dishes—a lot of greens."

"We probably should have talked about this one and The Flavor Equation back-to-back because not only are they similarly named, but they are somewhat similar in concept. Yotam Ottolenghi is known for flavors and he wrote this book with a co-author from his test kitchen named Ixta Belfrage. Like The Flavor Equation, it talks about the different types of tastes. Characteristically of Ottolenghi, they pull out a lot of specific ingredients that they use throughout the book. They have a 20-ingredient pantry. They don’t say you have to go out and buy everything, but that these are some of the things they think are worth having in your pantry. Some overlap with things that have been in his previous books; some are new. Ixta, his co-author, is a significant influence here and she has a really global background, with a lot of roots in Mexico . So, there’s a lot of Mexican influence in here. Chilis pop up a lot. Ottolenghi has always been global, but with a Middle Eastern bias. In this book you get a lot more Mexican and Indian food. And there’s Thai stuff. I found that personally really exciting, too, because Indian is my favorite cuisine. They are unabashed about fusion, which has become a dirty word in food and food media, as if it’s just diluting or just throwing stuff together. They point out that there are lots of cross-cultural hybrids and that this is what happens when food travels around the world. If you’re combining things while having respect for different cuisines, it’s totally OK. Don’t feel bad about it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . And it tastes great! There’s a recipe that I would really like to make which they call ‘fusion caponata with silken tofu’. It’s a combination of Sicilian caponata, which is a sweet and sour eggplant dish, and mapo tofu, which is a classic Sichuan dish. It looks great. There are a lot of fun-sounding recipes. There’s eggplant parmigiana meatballs, which I think is so great. One of the things people loathe about eggplant parm is the slicing and the breading and the frying before you do everything. Here you turn everything into meatballs, which you brown a little bit and then cook with the sauce. “They are unabashed about fusion… it’s totally OK. Don’t feel bad about it” This one definitely also has a range of recipes from beginner to more advanced. One of the things that’s thrown at Ottolenghi sometimes—and he’s poked fun at himself about this—is the length of some of his recipes and the amount of ingredients. His book before this was Simple , which was full of 10-ingredient recipes. Here you get a range. You have ones that are really straightforward and then you have ones with three or four sub-recipes. Those are probably the weekend ones, although some of them have components you can make in advance. But if you’re looking for some project cooking while you’re stuck at home during holidays, or in quarantine—go for it! There’s a lot playful stuff in here. There are corn ribs, which were inspired by Momofuku Ssam in New York, which is one of the David Chang restaurants. You basically quarter corn cobs and fry them and they curl up into these little things that you can eat. They’re kind of like ribs. And they group things. They have aged ingredients, acidic ingredients, heat (which is spice). It helps you to start thinking about ingredients and categories. Part of our best books of 2020 series."