Cookbooks come in as many shapes and sizes as cooks do. They also come in profusion. This year, we waded through hundreds of them to find 10 volumes that will appeal to everyone on your holiday gift list. Whether the intended recipient is a meat lover or a vegetarian, a beginning baker or an advanced canner, or even someone whose “cooking” is limited to brewing coffee, there’s a book for that. Here are my picks:
Cookbooks come in as many shapes and sizes as cooks do. They also come in profusion. This year, we waded through hundreds of them to find 10 volumes that will appeal to everyone on your holiday gift list. Whether the intended recipient is a meat lover or a vegetarian, a beginning baker or an advanced canner, or even someone whose “cooking” is limited to brewing coffee, there’s a book for that. Here are my picks:
FOR THE ITALOPHILE
“Di Palo’s Guide to the Essential Foods of Italy: 100 Years of Wisdom and Stories from Behind the Counter” by Lou Di Palo with Rachel Wharton (Ballantine Books, $28).
Scion of one of Little Italy’s best markets, Di Palo is also one of the country’s foremost authorities on Italian culinary culture. In this beguiling book, he introduces a dozen of the country’s signature products — including balsamic vinegar, prosciutto and olive oil — and offers history, buying advice, recipes and stories from his 60-year (and counting) career. It’s evident how much joy these items have given to Di Palo and, after decades of evangelizing to his customers, this book gives him an even wider audience to spread the gospel of Italian gastronomy.
FOR THE CANNER
2014 may go down in food history as the year preserving hit the mainstream. What was once the exclusive province of grandmothers and 4-H clubs is now the hippest of culinary trends. If you want to test the preserving water, there’s no better guide than Cathy Barrow, founder of food blog mrswheelbarrow.com. In her authoritative “Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Practical Pantry: Recipes and Techniques for Year-Round Preserving” (Norton, $35), she holds your hand through water-bath canning (jams, sauces and pickles); pressure canning (stocks, soups and beans); curing meats and fish with salt, brine and smoke (yes, you can can your own tuna); and even making your own cheese. With beautiful photography by Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton.
FOR THE KOSHER COOK
“Wherever Jews settled in the Diaspora,” writes Janna Gur, “they created cuisines.” In “Jewish Soul Food: From Minsk to Marrakesh, More than 100 Unforgettable Dishes Updated for Today’s Kitchen” (Schocken, $35), Gur, a leading Israeli food writer and editor, seeks to preserve the Jewish culinary heritage in the only way she knows how: “to cook the food and make people want to eat it.” Her carefully chosen recipes manage to be both comforting and exotic, whether from Morocco (beet salad with cumin and cinnamon) or Iraq (chicken with almonds and raisins over red rice) or Eastern Europe (babka) or barbecued brisket (America). Of course you don’t have to be kosher — or Jewish — to appreciate this book, or to want to cook the tempting recipes.
FOR THE NOVICE BAKER
Veteran cookbook author and director of the baking program at New York’s Institute of Culinary Education, Nick Malgieri is one of the best baking teachers out there. In Nick Malgieri’s “Pastry: Foolproof Recipes for the Home Cook” (Kyle, $29.95), he turns his attention to beginners. “If you have a bad case of pastry-phobia or a fear of rolling,” he writes, “I can promise that if you follow the simple instructions here, you’ll be able to tackle any pastry project you like.” Read Malgieri’s lucid discussions of ingredients, equipment and basic doughs, and then it’s on to pies, tarts, cobblers, strudels, quiches, pizza, empanadas, puff pastry, brioche, cream puffs and more.
FOR THE ADVANCED BAKER
It’s another doorstop of a cookbook from Rose Levy Beran baum. She’s made a career of publishing game-changing tomes such as “The Cake Bible,” “The Pie and Pastry Bible” and “The Bread Bible,” but it seems that she simply cannot stop coming up with seductive new recipes and, occasionally, improving on old ones. “The Baking Bible” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40) contains more than 100 recipes, each written in Beranbaum’s exacting style (ingredient quantities listed in both volume and weight, American and metric). The recipe for decadent chocolate “Posh pie” (which includes five sub-recipes including one for the chocolate wafers used to make the crust) is only eight pages long.
FOR THE VEGETARIAN
London restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi hit big on this side of the pond in 2011 with his first vegetarian cookbook, “Plenty.” On the basis of his newest, “Plenty More: Vibrant Vegetable Cooking from London’s Ottolenghi” (Ten Speed, $35), the man isn’t even close to running out of ideas. With a focus on the “cooking techniques and methods that best utilize [favorite ingredients’] potential,” he presents recipes in chapters titled as tossed, steamed, blanched, simmered, braised, grilled, roasted, fried, mashed, cracked, baked and sweetened. Once again, lavish photography captures his signature superabundance of herbs and juxtapositions of heretofore unknown but felicitous bedfellows such as beets and rhubarb, mangoes and chickpeas, onions and walnuts.
FOR THE ARMCHAIR TRAVELER
“My Paris Kitchen: Recipes and Stories” (Ten Speed Press, $35) is a delicious third act from David Lebovitz. After 12 years cooking at farm-to-table icon Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, he wrote a string of excellent baking books. Ten years ago, he decamped for Paris and started a blog, davidlebovitz.com, chronicling his life and meals. The blog has now been distilled into this beautiful book. In addition to 100 recipes ranging from French classics such as coq au vin and pissaladière to dishes that reflect Paris’ burgeoning international community and Lebovitz’s creative mind, there are terrific stories about living, shopping and cooking in one of the world’s culinary epicenters.
FOR THE RESTAURANT AFICIONADO
It’s an idiosyncratic cookbook, for sure. A collection of recipes served at her East Village restaurant of the same name, Gabrielle Hamilton’s “Prune” (Random House, $45) makes few concessions to the home cook. Recipes tend toward the complex and only serve one; there’s no index. The book is, in effect, a facsimile edition of the binder full of recipes (complete with profane handwritten addenda and grease stains) that enables Hamilton’s cooks to function in her absence. A captivating window into the soul of a singular restaurateur.
FOR THE COFFEE GEEK
If you don’t know the difference between the coffee varieties arabica and robusta, if you’re wondering how coffee cultivation in Ethiopia differs from that in Costa Rica, if you’re confused about the myriad methods of brewing coffee, you won’t find a better resource than “The World Atlas of Coffee: From Beans to Brewing — Coffees Explored, Explained and Enjoyed” by James Hoffmann (Firefly Books, $35). Even confirmed coffee geeks will benefit from this volume, at once encyclopedic and approachable.
FOR THE CARNIVORE
This year brought numerous nose-to-tail meat cookbooks authored by tattooed chefs of farm-to-table restaurants. “Cook’s Illustrated Meat Book: The Game-Changing Guide That Teaches You How to Cook Meat and Poultry With 425 Bulletproof Recipes” (America’s Test Kitchen, $40) is as unhip as it is in dis — pens able. Here is everything you need to know about buying, storing, freezing, thawing, aging, brining, cooking, carving and serving meat — and that’s before you get to 450 pages worth of recipe-laden chapters on beef, pork, lamb and veal and poultry.