Preview: The Ultimate Cookbook Gift Guide
New titles and tried-and-true classics (27 of 'em!) make exciting gifts for learning or mastering cooking from cultures around the world.
This year, I’m mixing it up with the Cooks Without Borders cookbooks gift guide by including my all-time favorites along with new titles and outstanding volumes from recent years. A longer, more fully explicated list will be published soon at the big CWB website; in the meantime, help yourself to this preview — which includes a selection of titles.
Note: The links to Bookshop and Amazon in this post are affiliate links. Cooks Without Borders may earn a small commission if you purchase through these links — earnings from commissions support our purchase of ingredients and equipment for recipe testing for our cookbook reviews.
Excellent and/or promising new books
Last year many of my favorite new cookbooks came from bloggers; this year, many are from chefs. Happily, publishers’ loss of interest in restaurant-focused books in recent years seems to have encouraged some chefs to fill books with recipes that are more approachable and practical, and less restauranty; when chefs focus on true home cooking, magic sometimes happen. (A lesson learned from Ottolenghi, perhaps?) Three of the nine authors have restaurants in Brooklyn (how crazy is that?!) and their titles are nicely home-focused.
Selection for the final list is still in process; I’m scrambling to test recipes for some; I’ve indicated on the entries any books for which I haven’t yet tested any. Some titles may drop off the list once that process is complete. Hope you enjoy the peek at the work-in-progress.