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Reading through these cookbooks is enough to make your mouth water, or at least — for anyone who enjoys thinking about, preparing and eating fantastic food — inspire you to break from your go-to recipe list and try some tasty new dishes. These 10 are some of the year’s best, including the quirky (Andy Murray’s), the classic (Marcella Hazan’s) and the fun (Sammy Hagar’s).
Dinner in One: Exceptional & Easy One-Pan Meals by Melissa Clark
Clark, author of Dinner in French and a New York Times food columnist, has another bestseller on her hands with this collection of 100 low-effort recipes. To pare them down, she said, she asked herself, “Is there a way I could make this recipe easier, faster and tastier?” Among them are one-bowl cakes (Ricotta-Olive Oil Pound Cake), quick sheet-pan dinners (Miso-Glazed Salmon With Roasted Sugar Snap Peas) and one-pot comfort meals (Gingery Coconut Noodles With Shrimp and Greens) — all perfect for when you want something delicious and easy. For most of us, that’s pretty much every night.
Ten Speed Press
Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook by Illyana Maisonet
Food writer Maisonet offers an homage to the food from her homeland, cuisine that is complicated and hard to define, she writes, having “a lot in common with the cuisines of Hawai’i, Guam and the Philippines” — places that, like Puerto Rico, were colonized by Spain and the United States. Now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the author celebrates that complex heritage with recipes for dishes such as arepas, flan de queso, a roasted whole hog, and sofrito — a puree of tomatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, culantro and cilantro that’s central to Puerto Rican food.
Clarkson Potter Publishers
Go to Dinners: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook by Ina Garten
At the end of a long day, it’s wonderful to have a trove of recipes for easy, tasty dishes, which is what Garten — the home cook, entertaining expert and TV host known as the Barefoot Contessa — had in mind when she created this cookbook featuring yummy and unfussy dishes like vegetables with jammy eggs, one-pot oven risotto, and blueberry ricotta breakfast cake, plus “two-fers” (recipes that can be made into two different dishes). But just because they’re easy doesn’t mean many of these gems aren’t good enough for guests (hot dogs wrapped in mustard-swiped puff pastry, for one). Find our interview with Garten and three recipes from the book on Members Only Access (MOA).
Clarkson Potter Publishers
Nadiya’s Everyday Baking by Nadiya Hussain
The 2019 winner of The Great British Baking Show offers “simple and achievable recipes,” from pizza topped with a traditional English breakfast to eggplant brioche burgers, butterscotch cheesecake coconut bars and poppy seed cake with pistachio praline. “There’s a recipe here for every kind of day,” she writes, including when you’re craving sweets, need on-the-go food or want healthier options. Bon Appetit named it one of the 27 best cookbooks of 2022. Fans of the show might also want to pick up cookbooks from the two judges: Paul Hollywood’s latest, Bake: My Best Ever Recipes for the Classics, which includes Victoria Sandwiches, sausage rolls, sourdough bread and more; and Bliss on Toast: 75 Simple Recipes, from Hollywood’s milder counterpart, Prue Leith. (Find recipes from Hollywood and Leith on MOA.)
